Short Dimension Quotes

I have a friend who's an artist and has sometimes taken a view which I don't agree with very well. He'll hold up a flower and say "look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. Then he says "I as an artist can see how beautiful this is but you as a scientist take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing," and I think that he's kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me too, I believe. Although I may not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is ... I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it's not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there's also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.

There is no dignity when the human dimension is eliminated from the person. In short, the problem with pornography is not that it shows too much of the person, but that it shows far too little.

As for my needs, they had dwindled as it were to my dimensions and become, if I may say so, of so exquisite a quality as to exclude all thought of succour.

The idealized market was supposed to deliver ‘friction free’ exchanges, in which the desires of consumers would be met directly, without the need for intervention or mediation by regulatory agencies. Yet the drive to assess the performance of workers and to measure forms of labor which, by their nature, are resistant to quantification, has inevitably required additional layers of management and bureaucracy. What we have is not a direct comparison of workers’ performance or output, but a comparison between the audited representation of that performance and output. Inevitably, a short-circuiting occurs, and work becomes geared towards the generation and massaging of representations rather than to the official goals of the work itself. Indeed, an anthropological study of local government in Britain argues that ‘More effort goes into ensuring that a local authority’s services are represented correctly than goes into actually improving those services’. This reversal of priorities is one of the hallmarks of a system which can be characterized without hyperbole as ‘market Stalinism’. What late capitalism repeats from Stalinism is just this valuing of symbols of achievement over actual achievement. […] It would be a mistake to regard this market Stalinism as some deviation from the ‘true spirit’ of capitalism. On the contrary, it would be better to say that an essential dimension of Stalinism was inhibited by its association with a social project like socialism and can only emerge in a late capitalist culture in which images acquire an autonomous force. The way value is generated on the stock exchange depends of course less on what a company ‘really does’, and more on perceptions of, and beliefs about, its (future) performance. In capitalism, that is to say, all that is solid melts into PR, and late capitalism is defined at least as much by this ubiquitous tendency towards PR-production as it is by the imposition of market mechanisms.

I sit up and stare with eyes closed, perceiving the infinity of this dimension, so grateful to experience this, comfortable with the idea of this journey either ending shortly or continuing forever.

In short: the space of color information is infinite-dimensional, but we perceive, as color, only a three-dimensional surface, onto which those infinite dimensions project.

Mercury Dawn Walker stepped out of the green mist that floated around her body. She was perfecting the art of walking from dimension to dimension

Margaret Geller, a professor at Harvard University, said, “I guess my view of life is that you live your life and it’s short. The thing is to have as rich an experience as you possibly can. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do something creative. I try to educate people.

On the weak and aged, and especially on delicate Females, the force of attraction tells much more heavily than on the robust of the Male Sex, so that it is a point of breeding, if you meet a Lady on the street, always to give her the North side of the way—by no means an easy thing to do always at short notice when you are in rude health and in a climate where it is difficult to tell your North from your South.

scientific study and reflection had taught us that the known universe of three dimensions embraces the merest fraction of the whole cosmos of substance and energy.

But he is not the Square he once was. Years of imprisonment, and the still heavier burden of general incredulity and mockery, have combined with the natural decay of old age to erase from his mind many of the thoughts and notions, and much also of the terminology, which he acquired during his short stay in Spaceland.

I had travelled from Spain into Morocco and from there south to the Atlas Mountains, at the edge of the Sahara Desert…one night, in a youth hostel that was more like a stable, I woke and walked out into a snowstorm. But it wasn’t the snow I was used to in Minnesota, or anywhere else I had been. Standing bare chest to cool night, wearing flip-flops and shorts, I let a storm of stars swirl around me. I remember no light pollution, heck, I remember no lights. But I remember the light around me-the sense of being lit by starlight- and that I could see the ground to which the stars seemed to be floating down. I saw the sky that night in three dimensions- the sky had depth, some stars seemingly close and some much farther away, the Milky Way so well defined it had what astronomers call “structure”, that sense of its twisting depths. I remember stars from one horizon to another, making a night sky so plush it still seems like a dream. It was a time in my life when I was every day experiencing something new. I felt open to everything, as though I was made of clay, and the world was imprinting on me its breathtaking beauty (and terrible reality.) Standing nearly naked under that Moroccan sky, skin against the air, the dark, the stars, the night pressed its impression, and my lifelong connection was sealed.

I guess my view of life is that you live your life and it’s short. The thing is to have as rich an experience as you possibly can. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to do something creative. I try to educate people.

Like our IQ, talent is a gift from our ancestors. If we're lucky, we inherit it. In the fortunate talented few, the dark dimension of their natures will first resist the labor that creativity demands, but once they commit to the task, their talented side stirs to action and rewards them with astonishing feats. These flashes of creative genius seem to arrive from out of the blue for the obvious reason: They come from the unconscious mind. In short, if the Muse exists, she does not whisper to the untalented.

If our sides were unequal our angles might be unequal. Instead of its being sufficient to feel, or estimate by sight, a single angle in order to determine the form of an individual, it would be necessary to ascertain each angle by the experiment of Feeling. But life would be too short for such a tedious groping. The whole science and art of Sight Recognition would at once perish; Feeling, so far as it is an art, would not long survive; intercourse would become perilous or impossible; there would be an end to all confidence, all forethought; no one would be safe in making the most simple social arrangements; in a word, civilization would relapse into barbarism.

Modern physicists have accepted that all existence is fundamentally energy. But now they also acknowledge that there is something else that they have no instrument to measure. They have begun to realize that there is a dimension of energy that seems to hold everything together. They recognize its existence, but have no clue to its nature. Since they are not able to perceive it, they call it ‘dark energy’. For now they concede that it constitutes 73 per cent of the universe. (It will take time and evolution for them to see that it is, in fact, a lot more than that!) They also tell us that at the centre of our galaxy, and presumably of several others, is a ‘black hole’ which is constantly sucking creation in. At the centre of a black hole, they say, is a singularity, a place where creation and destruction happen simultaneously. In fact, scientists seem just one step short of saying: Shi-va!

Another kind of transcendence myth has been dramatization of human life in terms of conflict and vindication. This focuses upon the situation of oppression and the struggle for liberation. It is a short-circuited transcendence when the struggle against oppression becomes an end in itself, the focal point of all meaning. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea that those devoted to a cause have found their whole meaning in the struggle, so that the desired victory becomes implicitly an undesirable meaninglessness. Such a truncated vision is one of the pitfalls of theologies of the oppressed. Sometimes black theology, for example that of James Cone, resounds with a cry for vengeance and is fiercely biblical and patriarchal. It transcends religion as a crutch (the separation and return of much old-fashioned Negro spirituality) but tends to settle for being religion as a gun. Tailored to fit only the situation of racial oppression, it inspires a will to vindication but leaves unexplored other dimensions of liberation. It does not get beyond the sexist models internalized by the self and controlling society — models that are at the root of racism and that perpetuate it. The Black God and the Black Messiah apparently are merely the same patriarchs after a pigmentation operation — their behavior unaltered.

Working quickly was the trick of it. When Samuel Pepys underwent a lithotomy—the removal of a kidney stone—in 1658, the surgeon took just fifty seconds to get in and find and extract a stone about the size of a tennis ball. (That is, a seventeenth-century tennis ball, which was rather smaller than a modern one, but still a sphere of considerable dimension.)

It is not easy for students to realize that to ask, as they often do, whether God exists and is merciful, just, good, or wrathful, is simply to project anthropomorphic concepts into a sphere to which they do not pertain. As the Upaniṣads declare: 'There, words do not reach.' Such queries fall short of the question. And yet—as the student must also understand—although that mystery is regarded in the Orient as transcendent of all thought and naming, it is also to be recognized as the reality of one’s own being and mystery. That which is transcendent is also immanent. And the ultimate function of Oriental myths, philosophies, and social forms, therefore, is to guide the individual to an actual experience of his identity with that; tat tvam asi ('Thou art that') is the ultimate word in this connection. By contrast, in the Western sphere—in terms of the orthodox traditions, at any rate, in which our students have been raised—God is a person, the person who has created this world. God and his creation are not of the same substance. Ontologically, they are separate and apart. We, therefore, do not find in the religions of the West, as we do in those of the East, mythologies and cult disciplines devoted to the yielding of an experience of one’s identity with divinity. That, in fact, is heresy. Our myths and religions are concerned, rather, with establishing and maintaining an experience of relationship—and this is quite a different affair. Hence it is, that though the same mythological images can appear in a Western context and an Eastern, it will always be with a totally different sense. This point I regard as fundamental.

Interest in temperament as an individual difference dimension of importance in one's behavior leads to reanalysis of both theoretical and methodological considerations relating to the construct.

In our studies, we found that every flow activity, whether it involved competition, chance, or any other dimension of experience, had this in common: It provided a sense of discovery, a creative feeling of transporting the person into a new reality. It pushed the person to higher levels of performance, and led to previously undreamed-of states of consciousness. In short, it transformed the self by making it more complex. In

Certainly we can say that the pace of modern life, increased and supported by our technology in general and our personal electronics in particular, has resulted in a short attention span and an addiction to the influx of information. A mind so conditioned has little opportunity to think critically, and even less chance to experience life deeply by being in the present moment. A complex life with complicated activities, relationships and commitments implies a reflexive busy-ness that supplants true thinking and feeling with knee-jerk reactions. It is a life high in stress and light on substance, at least in the spiritually meaningful dimensions of being.

we as authors have been writing about people we aren't for forever. We find a way to empathise, we find a way in. Female characters are no different. All they are are characters. They are people too. Instead of asking yourself, "How do I write this female soldier?" ask yourself, "How do I write this soldier? Where is she from, how was she raised, does she have a sense of humour? Is she big and tall, is she short and petite? How does her size affect her ability to fight? What is her favourite weapon, her least favourite? Why? Is she more logical than emotional? The other way around? Was she an only child and spoiled, was she the eldest of six siblings and a surrogate mother? How does that upbringing affect how she interacts with her team? etc etc and so forth." Notice how the first question gets you some kind of broad, generalised answer, likely resulting in a stereotype, and how the second version asks lots and lots of smaller questions with the goal of creating someone well rounded. One would hope, really, that we as authors ask such detailed questions of all our characters, regardless of gender. So let me, at long last, actually answer the original question: "How do I write a female character?" Write her the way you would write any other character. Give her dimension, give her strength but please also don't forget to give her weaknesses (for a totally strong nothing can beat her kind of girl is not a person, she's again a type - the polar opposite yet exactly the same as the damsel in distress). Create a person.

In short, what Brown, Enquist, and West are saying is that evolution structured our circulatory systems as fractal networks to approximate a “fourth dimension” so as to make our metabolisms more efficient. As West, Brown, and Enquist put it, “Although living things occupy a three-dimensional space, their internal physiology and anatomy operate as if they were four-dimensional … Fractal geometry has literally given life an added dimension.

Perhaps the central paradox of the religious life is that it seeks transcendence, a dimension of existence that goes beyond our mundane lives, but that human beings can only experience this transcendent reality in earthly, physical phenomena.

The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyper-space is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself.

It is us, he says, who pass by, not time. We, the human creatures with the short-lived biological destiny, come and go. The dimension of depth eludes us. Our antennas have a very limited capacity. They only form subjective impressions that are totally irrelevant to the true and objective “Great Reality”, the Samith as he called it.

The reason that people find it so difficult to enter a healing relationship is that life in our family of origin often required a good deal of unawareness. We overlook what we don’t want to see; we keep silent about things that are too difficult to discuss; we respect boundaries even when they put someone into a box. In short, the family is where we learn to deny pain. And denied pain is just another term for suffering. Given

The reason for this is that the universe bends, in a way we can’t adequately imagine, in conformance with Einstein’s theory of relativity (which we will get to in due course). For the moment it is enough to know that we are not adrift in some large, ever-expanding bubble. Rather, space curves, in a way that allows it to be boundless but finite. Space cannot even properly be said to be expanding because, as the physicist and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg notes, “solar systems and galaxies are not expanding, and space itself is not expanding.” Rather, the galaxies are rushing apart. It is all something of a challenge to intuition. Or as the biologist J. B. S. Haldane once famously observed: “The universe is not only queerer than we suppose; it is queerer than we can suppose.” The analogy that is usually given for explaining the curvature of space is to try to imagine someone from a universe of flat surfaces, who had never seen a sphere, being brought to Earth. No matter how far he roamed across the planet’s surface, he would never find an edge. He might eventually return to the spot where he had started, and would of course be utterly confounded to explain how that had happened. Well, we are in the same position in space as our puzzled flatlander, only we are flummoxed by a higher dimension.

Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. Love was these other forces, Sol realized. The Void Which Binds, the subquantum impossibility that carried information from photon to photon, was nothing more or less than love. But could love—simple, banal love—explain the so-called anthropic principle which scientists had shaken their collective heads over for seven centuries and more—that almost infinite string of coincidences which had led to a universe that had just the proper number of dimensions, just the correct values on electron, just the precise rules for gravity, just the proper age to stars, just the right prebiologies to create just the perfect viruses to become just the proper DNAs—in short, a series of coincidences so absurd in their precision and correctness that they defied logic, defied understanding, and even defied religious interpretation. Love? For seven centuries the existence of Grand Unification Theories and hyperstring post-quantum physics and Core-given understanding of the universe as self-contained and boundless, without Big Bang singularities or corresponding endpoints, had pretty much eliminated any role of God—primitively anthropomorphic or sophisticatedly post-Einsteinian—even as a caretaker or pre-Creation former of rules. The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there.

It is recognised now that Freud never gave proper attention, even in man, to growth of the ego or self: 'the impulse to master, control or come to self-fulfilling terms with the environment'. Analysts who have freed themselves from Freud's bias and joined other behavioural scientists in studying the human need, and that interference with it, in any dimension, is the source of psychic trouble. The sexual is only one dimension of the human potential. Freud saw women only in terms of their sexual relationship with men. But in all those women in whom he saw sexual problems, there must have been very severe problems of blocked growth, growth short of full human identity -- an immature, incomplete self. Society as it was then, by explicit denial of education and independence, prevented women from realising their full potential, or from attaining those interests and ideals that might stimulated their growth. Freud reported these deficiencies, but could only explain them as the toll of 'penis envy'. He saw that women who secretly hungered to be man's equal would not enjoy being his object; and in this, he seemed to be describing a fact. But when he dismissed woman's yearning for equality as 'penis envy', was he not merely stating his own view that woman could never really be man's equal, any more than she could wear his penis?

We all rely on public confidence and trust to give the courts’ decisions their force,” Justice O’Connor said in a lecture on “public trust as a dimension of equal justice.” She explained: “We don’t have standing armies to enforce opinions, we rely on the confidence of the public in the correctness of those decisions. That’s why we have to be aware of public opinions and of attitudes toward our system of justice, and it is why we must try to keep and build that trust.

Your bed alone, if it is averagely clean, averagely old, averagely dimensioned, and turned averagely often (which is to say almost never) is likely to be home to some two million tiny bed mites, too small to be seen with the naked eye but unquestionably there. It has been calculated that if your pillow is six years old (which is the average age for a pillow), one-tenth of its weight will be made up of sloughed skin, living and dead mites, and mite dung—or frass, as it is known to entomologists.

So, by the late eighteenth century scientists knew very precisely the shape and dimensions of the Earth and its distance from the Sun and planets; and now Cavendish, without even leaving home, had given them its weight. So you might think that determining the age of the Earth would be relatively straightforward. After all, the necessary materials were literally at their feet. But no. Human beings would split the atom and invent television, nylon, and instant coffee before they could figure out the age of their own planet.

Climate change poses threats that are probabilistic, multiple, indirect, often invisible, and unbounded in space and time. Fully grasping these threats requires scientific understanding and technical skills that are often in short supply. Moreover, climate change can be seen as presenting us with the largest collective action problem that humanity has ever faced, one that has both intra- and inter-generational dimensions. Evolution did not design us to deal with such problems, and we have not designed political institutions that are conducive to solving them.

The transitive shift from observer to participant, from gaze to encounter, requires both active engagement and a passive willingness to allow the phenomenon to reveal itself in its own terms. This visionary leap opens a dimension of experience, of ontological possibility, that is simultaneously a kind of abyss. In finding a “Thou” where before there was an “it”—as Martin Buber would describe it—the psychonaut suddenly faces all manner of risks: terror, madness, delusion, or what Terence ironically called “death by astonishment.” But to not take the chance, for some anyway, falls short of the mark.

Maybe we can use this Shakespearean triad of lunacy, lover and poet as a tool to propose a classification of events based on the Lacanian train of imaginary, Symbolic and Real: a lunatic dwells in the imaginary dimension, confusing reality and imagination; a lover identifies the beloved person with the absolute Thing in a symbolic short-circuit between signifier and signified which nonetheless maintains the gap that for ever separates them (the lover knows very well that, in reality, his or her beloved is an ordinary person with all his or her failures and weaknesses); a poet makes a phenomenon emerge against the background of the void of the Real.

Inequality of wealth grounded in unequal abilities is different. For most of us, the luck of the draw cuts several ways: one person is not handsome, but is smart; another is not as smart, but is industrious; and still another is not as industrious, but is charming. This kind of inequality of human capital is enriching, making life more interesting for everyone. But some portion of the population gets the short end of the stick on several dimensions. As the number of dimensions grows, so does the punishment for being unlucky. When a society tries to redistribute the goods of life to compensate the most unlucky, its heart is in the right place, however badly the thing has worked out in practice.

In Europe, the dimensions of physical space seemed compressed. The looming vertical presence of mountains cut me off from the horizon. I'd not lived with that kind of spatial curtailment before. Even a city of skyscrapers is more porous than a snowcapped range. Alps form a solid barrier, an obstacle every bit as conceptual as visual and physical. Alpine bluffs and crags just don't rear up, they lean outwards, projecting their mass, and their solidity does not relent. For a West Australian like me, whose default setting is in diametric opposition, and for whom space is the impinging force, the effect is claustrophobic. I think I was constantly and instinctively searching for distances that were unavailable, measuring space and coming up short.

The color is yet another variant in another dimension of variation, that of its relations with the surroundings: this red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attracts it, that it repels or that repel it. In short, it is a certain node in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive. It is a concretion of visibility, it is not an atom. The red dress a fortiori holds with all its fibers onto the fabric of the visible, and thereby onto a fabric of invisible being. A punctuation in the field of red things, which includes the tiles of roof tops, the flags of gatekeepers and of the Revolution, certain terrains near Aix or in Madagascar, it is also a punctuation in the field of red garments, which includes, along with the dresses of women, robes of professors, bishops, and advocate generals, and also in the field of adornments and that of uniforms. And its red literally is not the same as it appears in one constellation or in the other, as the pure essence of the Revolution of 1917 precipitates in it, or that of the eternal feminine, or that of the public prosecutor, or that of the gypsies dressed like hussars who reigned twenty-five years ago over an inn on the Champs-Elysées. A certain red is also a fossil drawn up from the depths of imaginary worlds. If we took all these participations into account, we would recognize that a naked color, and in general a visible, is not a chunk of absolutely hard, indivisible being, offered all naked to a vision which could be only total or null, but is rather a sort of straits between exterior horizons and interior horizons ever gaping open, something that comes to touch lightly and makes diverse regions of the colored or visible world resound at the distances, a certain differentiation, an ephemeral modulation of this world—less a color or a thing, therefore, than a difference between things and colors, a momentary crystallization of colored being or of visibility. Between the alleged colors and visibles, we would find anew the tissue that lines them, sustains them, nourishes them, and which for its part is not a thing, but a possibility, a latency, and a flesh of things.

Recall that the collapse of complexity that accompanies 5 percent [i.e. intractable] conflicts happens along many dimensions: - A very complication situation becomes very simple. - A focus on concrete details in the conflict shifts to matters of general abstract principle. - Concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding substantive issues transform into concerns over defending one's identity, ideology, and values. - The out-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all alike. - The in-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all similar. - Whereas I once held many contradictions within myself in terms of what I valued, thought, and did; now I am always consistent in this conflict. - Whereas I used to feel different things about this conflict - good, bad, and ambivalent; now I feel only an overwhelming sense of enmity and hate. - I've shifted from long-term thinking and planning toward short-term reactions and concerns. - Where I once had many action options available to me, I now have one: attack. This is the bad news about the 5 percent, but it's also the good news. The collapse of complexity occurs on so many levels, all leading to a similar state of 'us versus them' thinking, that reintroducing a sense of complexity and agency can also be achieved in a wide variety of ways. There are therefore many places to find points of leverage to rupture the certainty and oversimplification that rules in these situations. The question is how to find them.

Umar's solution, imposing the hijab/curtain that hides women instead of changing attitudes and forcing "those in whose heart is a disease" to act differently, was going to overshadow Islam's dimension as a civilization, as a body of thought on the individual and his/her role in society. This body of thought made dar al-Islam (the land of Islam) at the outset a pioneering experiment in terms of individual freedom and democracy. But the hijab fell over Medina and cut short that brief burst of freedom. Paradoxically, 15 centuries later it was colonial power that would force the Muslim states to reopen the question of the rights of the individual and of women. All debates on democracy get tied up in the woman question and that piece of cloth that opponents of human rights today claim to be the very essence of Muslim identity.

In the forest of sensible objects that surrounds me, I find my way to becoming master of the chaos of the sensations assailing me only by separating objects from others, by giving them outline, dimensions, and form; in short, by creating unity in diversity and vividly and confidently designating these objects with the stamp of my inner sense, as if this were a seal of truth. Our whole life, then, is to a certain extent poetics: we do not see images but rather create them. The Divinity has sketched them for us on a great panel of light, from which we trace their outlines and paint the images in the soul using a finer brush than that of the rays of light. For the image that is projected on the retina of your eye is not the idea that you derive from its object; it is merely a product of your inner sense, a work of art created by your soul’s faculty of perception.

The problem wasn’t that the banks were, in and of themselves, critical to the success of the U.S. economy. The problem, he felt certain, was that some gargantuan, unknown dollar amount of credit default swaps had been bought and sold on every one of them. “There’s no limit to the risk in the market,” he said. “A bank with a market capitalization of one billion dollars might have one trillion dollars’ worth of credit default swaps outstanding. No one knows how many there are! And no one knows where they are!” The failure of, say, Citigroup might be economically tolerable. It would trigger losses to Citigroup’s shareholders, bondholders, and employees—but the sums involved were known to all. Citigroup’s failure, however, would also trigger the payoff of a massive bet of unknown dimensions: from people who had sold credit default swaps on Citigroup to those who had bought them.

In fact, only six days later, with Chief Justice Marshall not participating, the Court avoided a possible constitutional confrontation. Voting 5–0 in Stuart v. Laird (1803), the justices upheld Congress’s repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, a move some historians see as reflecting the Court’s unwillingness to test the full dimensions of the power it had just claimed for itself. More than half a century would pass before the Supreme Court again declared an act of Congress unconstitutional. That was the Dred Scott decision of 1857 (Scott v. Sandford), invalidating the Missouri Compromise and holding that Congress lacked authority to abolish slavery in the territories. That notorious decision, a step on the road to the Civil War, was perhaps not the best advertisement for judicial review. But since then, the Court has lost its early reticence. It has declared acts of Congress unconstitutional more than 150 times.

The second of the dimensions that Hofstede's team added to their original four was long-term–short-term orientation, based on the Chinese Values Survey. In addition, Michael Minkov identified a similar dimension using the World Values Survey. While the precise nature of the constructs varies, African nations tend to score strongly toward the short-term end of the spectrum in all of them. For example, Ghana is the second most short-term oriented society out of 93 countries in the World Values Survey; Nigeria the fifth most and, out of the bottom 20 countries, 6 are in Sub-Saharan Africa. Using the Chinese Values Survey construct of long-term orientation, the only two Sub-Saharan countries out of 23 studied were Zimbabwe and Nigeria, which respectively scored fifth and second from bottom. Although a different construct, African societies also score very low on the Globe measure of future orientation.9 Experimental

Serafina had thought Mrs. Coulter beautiful, for a short-life; but Ruta Skadi was as lovely as Mrs. Coulter, with an extra dimension of the mysterious, the uncanny. She had trafficked with spirits, and it showed. She was vivid and passionate, with large black eyes; it was said that Lord Asriel himself had been her lover. She wore heavy gold earrings and a crown on her black curly hair ringed with the fangs of snow tigers. Serafina’s dæmon, Kaisa, had learned from Ruta Skadi’s dæmon that she had killed the tigers herself in order to punish the Tartar tribe who worshiped them, because the tribesmen had failed to do her honor when she had visited their territory. Without their tiger gods, the tribe declined into fear and melancholy and begged her to allow them to worship her instead, only to be rejected with contempt; for what good would their worship do her? she asked. It had done nothing for the tigers. Such was Ruta Skadi: beautiful, proud, and pitiless.

One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that ours is just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call “a false vacuum” or “a scalar field” or “vacuum energy”—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can. “These are very

Smith to Marx) To unravel the mystery of capital, we have to go back to the seminal meaning of the word. In medieval Latin, “capital” appears to have denoted head of cattle or other livestock, which have always been important sources of wealth beyond the basic meat they provide. Livestock are low-maintenance possessions; they are mobile and can be moved away from danger; they are also easy to count and measure. But most important, from livestock you can obtain additional wealth, or surplus value, by setting in motion other industries, including milk, hides, wool, meat, and fuel. Livestock also have the useful attribute of being able to reproduce themselves. Thus the term “capital” begins to do two jobs simultaneously, capturing the physical dimension of assets (livestock) as well as their potential to generate surplus value. From the barnyard, it was only a short step to the desks of the inventors of economics, who generally defined “capital” as that part of a country’s assets that initiates surplus production and increases productivity.

The traumatic aspect of drinking ayahuasca is that in order to heal yourself, you must first confront the wound; by forcing you to deal with your own inner garbage, ayahuasca shows you things about yourself that you might not want to see. I wish that a whole country could drink ayahuasca—not merely every individual citizen of a country, but the country itself, the spirit of the country. I wish that a flag could drink ayahuasca, that we could just fold the Stars and Stripes into the shape of a cup, pour in the tea, and transport Uncle Sam into another dimension. He’d have to fight his way out of some nightmares, but he’d be cleansed. What would he find? William S. Burroughs wrote that when you drink ayahuasca, “The blood and substance of many races, Negro, Polynesian, Mountain Mongol, Desert Nomad, Polyglot Near East, Indian—new races as yet unconceived and unborn, combinations not yet realized—pass through your body.” When Burroughs drank, he actually saw himself transformed into both a black man and a black woman. What if some freedom-hating narcoterrorists snuck into the Fox News studios and put ayahuasca in Sean Hannity’s coffee, just before he went live? What would be the day’s fair and balanced news for America? If America drank ayahuasca and then withdrew into the filthy pit of its own heart, confronting all its fears and hate and finally purging itself of that negative energy, maybe America would come out Muslim: sucked through a black hole by the Black Mind, young Latter-Day Saint crackers with smooth cheeks, short-sleeved white shirts, and name tags confront nightmarish visions of getting swallowed whole by giant grotesque “Jolly Nigger” coin banks and then find themselves vomited back up as Nubian Islamic Hebrews in turbans and robes selling incense on the subways. The “God Hates Fags” pastor, eyes wild with a new passion for Allah, boards a helicopter to drop thousands of Qur’ans upon the small towns below. I want to see ayahuasca’s vine goddess clean out America’s poison. But what would happen if a religion could drink the vine? What if I poured ayahuasca into my Qur’an?

Philotheo. I will do so. If the world is finite and if nothing lieth beyond, I ask you Where is the world? Where is the universe? Aristotle replieth, it is in itself. [1] The convex surface of the primal heaven is universal space, which being the primal container is by naught contained. For position in space is no other than the surfaces and limit of the containing body, so that he who hath no containing body hath no position in space. [2] What then dost thou mean, O Aristotle, by this phrase, that "space is within itself"? What will be thy conclusion concerning that which is beyond the world? If thou sayest, there is nothing, then the heaven [3] and the world will certainly not be anywhere. Fracastoro. The world will then be nowhere. Everything will be nowhere. Philotheo. The world is something which is past finding out. If thou sayest (and it certainly appeareth to me that thou seekest to say something in order to escape Vacuum and Nullity), if thou sayest that beyond the world is a divine intellect, so that God doth become the position in space of all things, why then thou thyself wilt be much embarrassed to explain to us how that which is incorporeal [yet] intelligible, and without dimension can be the very position in space occupied by a dimensional body; and if thou sayest that this incorporeal space containeth as it were a form, as the soul containeth the body, then thou dost not reply to the question of that which lieth beyond, nor to the enquiry concerning that which is outside the universe. And if thou wouldst excuse thyself by asserting that where naught is, and nothing existeth, there can be no question of position in space nor of beyond or outside, yet I shall in no wise be satisfied. For these are mere words and excuses, which cannot form part of our thought. For it is wholly impossible that in any sense or fantasy (even though there may be various senses and various fantasies), it is I say impossible that I can with any true meaning assert that there existeth such a surface, boundary or limit, beyond which is neither body, nor empty space, even though God be there. For divinity hath not as aim to fill space, nor therefore doth it by any means appertain to the nature of divinity that it should be the boundary of a body. For aught which can be termed a limiting body must either be the exterior shape or else a containing body. And by no description of this quality canst thou render it compatible with the dignity of divine and universal nature. [4]

Like most things that thrive in harsh environments, lichens are slow-growing. It may take a lichen more than half a century to attain the dimensions of a shirt button. Those the size of dinner plates, writes David Attenborough, are therefore "likely to be hundreds if not thousands of years old." It would be hard to imagine a less fulfilling existence. "They simply exist," Attenborough adds, "testifying to the moving fact that life even at its simplest level occurs, apparently, just for its own sake." It is easy to overlook this thought that life just is. As humans we are inclined to feel that life must have a point. We have plans and aspirations and desires. We want to take constant advantage of all the intoxicating existence we've been endowed with. But what's life to a lichen? Yet its impulse to exist, to be, is every bit as strong as ours- arguably even stronger. If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But- and here's an interesting point- for the most part it doesn't want to be much. p336

Today it is widely accepted that there is no one essence that all religions share. What they share are family resemblances—tendencies toward this belief or that behaviour. In the family of religions, kin tend to perform rituals. They tend to tell stories about how life and death began and to write down these stories in scriptures. They tend to cultivate techniques of ecstasy and devotion. They tend to organize themselves into institutions and to gather in sacred places at sacred times. They tend to instruct human beings how to act toward one another. They tend to profess this belief or that about the gods and the supernatural. They tend to invest objects and places with sacred import. Philosopher of religion Nina Smart has referred to these tendencies as the seven "dimensions" of religion: the ritual, the narrative, experiential, institutional, ethical, doctrinal, and material dimensions.¹³ These family resemblances are just tendencies, however. Just as there are tall people in short families (none of the men in Michael Jordan's family was over six feet tall), there are religions that deny the existence of God and religions that get along just fine without creeds. Something is a religion when it shares enough of this DNA to belong to the family of religions.

The 1950s and 1960s: philosophy, psychology, myth There was considerable critical interest in Woolf ’s life and work in this period, fuelled by the publication of selected extracts from her diaries, in A Writer’s Diary (1953), and in part by J. K. Johnstone’s The Bloomsbury Group (1954). The main critical impetus was to establish a sense of a unifying aesthetic mode in Woolf ’s writing, and in her works as a whole, whether through philosophy, psychoanalysis, formal aesthetics, or mythopoeisis. James Hafley identified a cosmic philosophy in his detailed analysis of her fiction, The Glass Roof: Virginia Woolf as Novelist (1954), and offered a complex account of her symbolism. Woolf featured in the influential The English Novel: A Short Critical History (1954) by Walter Allen who, with antique chauvinism, describes the Woolfian ‘moment’ in terms of ‘short, sharp female gasps of ecstasy, an impression intensified by Mrs Woolf ’s use of the semi-colon where the comma is ordinarily enough’. Psychological and Freudian interpretations were also emerging at this time, such as Joseph Blotner’s 1956 study of mythic patterns in To the Lighthouse, an essay that draws on Freud, Jung and the myth of Persephone.4 And there were studies of Bergsonian writing that made much of Woolf, such as Shiv Kumar’s Bergson and the Stream of Consciousness Novel (1962). The most important work of this period was by the French critic Jean Guiguet. His Virginia Woolf and Her Works (1962); translated by Jean Stewart, 1965) was the first full-length study ofWoolf ’s oeuvre, and it stood for a long time as the standard work of critical reference in Woolf studies. Guiguet draws on the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre to put forward a philosophical reading of Woolf; and he also introduces a psychobiographical dimension in the non-self.’ This existentialist approach did not foreground Woolf ’s feminism, either. his heavy use of extracts from A Writer’s Diary. He lays great emphasis on subjectivism in Woolf ’s writing, and draws attention to her interest in the subjective experience of ‘the moment.’ Despite his philosophical apparatus, Guiguet refuses to categorise Woolf in terms of any one school, and insists that Woolf has indeed ‘no pretensions to abstract thought: her domain is life, not ideology’. Her avoidance of conventional character makes Woolf for him a ‘purely psychological’ writer.5 Guiguet set a trend against materialist and historicist readings ofWoolf by his insistence on the primacy of the subjective and the psychological: ‘To exist, for Virginia Woolf, meant experiencing that dizziness on the ridge between two abysses of the unknown, the self and

In my experience, those who make the most theatrical display of demanding 'proof' of God are also those least willing to undertake the specific kinds of mental and spiritual discipline that all the great religious traditions say are required to find God. If one is left unsatisfied by the logical arguments for belief in God, and instead insists upon some 'experimental' or 'empirical' demonstration, then one ought to be willing to attempt the sort of investigations necessary to achieve any sort of real certainty regarding a reality that is nothing less than the infinite coincidence of absolute being, consciousness, and bliss. In short, one must pray: not fitfully, not simply in the manner of a suppliant seeking aid or of a penitent seeking absolution but also according to the disciplines of infused contemplation, with real constancy of will and a patient openness to grace, suffering states of both dereliction and ecstasy with the equanimity of faith, hoping but not presuming, so as to find whether the spiritual journey, when followed in earnest, can disclose its own truthfulness and conduct one into communion with a dimension of reality beyond the ontological indigence of the physical. No one is obliged to make such an effort; but, unless one does, any demands one might make for evidence of the reality of God can safely be dismissed as disingenuous, and any arguments against belief in God that one might have the temerity to make to others can safely be ignored as vacuous.

After a short moment to collect my thoughts I went into the vertiginous opening of Asbestos and Fibre. Then as the first movement settled into its more reflective phase, I became increasingly relaxed, so much so that I found myself playing most of the first movement with my eyes closed. As I began the second movement, I opened my eyes again and found the afternoon sunshine streaming through the window behind me, throwing my shadow sharply across the keyboard. Even the demands of the second movement, however, did nothing to alter my calm. Indeed, I realised I was in absolute control of every dimension of the composition. I recalled how worried I had allowed myself to become over the course of the day and now felt utterly foolish for having done so. Moreover, now that I was in the midst of the piece, it seemed inconceiveable that my mother would not be moved by it. The simple fact was, I had no reason whatsoever to feel anything other than utter confidence concerning the evening's performance. It was as I was entering the sublime melancholy of the third movement that I became aware of a noise in the background. At first I thought it was connected with the soft pedal, and then that it was something to do with the floor. It was a faint, rhythmic noise that would stop and start, and for some time I tried not to pay any attention to it. But it continued to return, and then, during the pianissimo passages mid-way through the movement, I realised that someone was digging outside not far away.

As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism. (...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away. Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I." Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door.

Know Your Father’s Heart Today’s Scripture Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1 JOHN 4:10 KJV Today, I want you to reread the parable of the father of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32). As you read, keep in mind that this son utterly rejected and completely humiliated and dishonored his father, then only returned home when he remembered that even his father’s hired servants had more food than he did! It was not the son’s love for his father that made him journey home; it was his stomach. In his own self-absorbed pride, he wanted to earn his own keep as a hired servant rather than to receive his father’s provision by grace or unmerited favor. God wants us to know that even when our motivations are wrong, even when we have a hidden (usually self-centered) agenda and our intentions are not completely pure, He still runs to us in our time of need and showers His unmerited, undeserved, and unearned favor upon us. Oh, how unsearchable are the depths of His love and grace toward us! It will never be about our love for God. It will always be about His magnificent love for us. The Bible makes this clear: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10 KJV). Some people think that fellowship with God can only be restored when you are perfectly contrite and have perfectly confessed all your sins. Yet we see in this parable that it was the father who was the initiator, it was the father who had missed his son, who was already looking out for him, and who had already forgiven him. Before the son could utter a single word of his rehearsed apology, the father had already run to him, embraced him, and welcomed him home. Can you see how it’s all about our Father’s heart of grace, forgiveness, and love? Our Father God swallows up all our imperfections, and true repentance comes because of His goodness. Do I say “sorry” to God and confess my sins when I have fallen short and failed? Of course I do. But I do it not to be forgiven because I know that I am already forgiven through Jesus’ finished work. The confession is out of the overflow of my heart because I have experienced His goodness and grace and because I know that as His son, I am forever righteous through Jesus’ blood. It springs from being righteousness-conscious, not sin-conscious; from being forgiveness-conscious, not judgment-conscious. There is a massive difference. If you understand this and begin practicing this, you will begin experiencing new dimensions in your love walk with the Father. You will realize that your Daddy God is all about relationship and not religious protocol. He just loves being with you. Under grace, He doesn’t demand perfection from you; He supplies perfection to you through the finished work of His Son, Jesus Christ. So no matter how many mistakes you have made, don’t be afraid of Him. He loves you. Your Father is running toward you to embrace you! Today’s Thought My Father God runs to me in my time of need and showers His unmerited, undeserved, and unearned favor upon me. Today’s Prayer Father, thank You that I can experience Your love even when I have failed. No matter how many mistakes I may have made, I don’t have to be afraid to come to You. I am still Your beloved child, and I always have fellowship with You because of the finished work of Jesus. I thank You that You don’t demand perfection from me, but You supply perfection to me through the cross. It blesses my heart to know that You just love being with me. Thank You for running to embrace me. Amen.

The kingdom of Bosnia forms a division of the Ottoman empire, and is a key to the countries of Roumeli (or Romeli). Although its length and breadth be of unequal dimensions, yet it is not improper to say it is equal in climate to Misr and Sham (Egypt and Syria). Each one of its lofty mountains, exalted to Ayuk, (a bright red star that * The peace of Belgrade was signed on the first of September, 1739. By this peace the treaty of Passarowitz was nullified, and the rivers Danube, Save, and Una re-established, as the boundaries of the two empires. See note to page 1. always follows the Hyades,) is an eye-sore to a foe. By reason of this country's vicinity to the infidel nations, such as the deceitful Germans, Hungarians, Serbs (Sclavonians), the tribes of Croats, and the Venetians, strong and powerful, and furnished with abundance of cannon, muskets, and other weapons of destruction, it has had to carry on fierce war from time to time with one or other, or more, of these deceitful enemies—enemies accustomed to mischief, inured to deeds of violence, resembling wild mountaineers in asperity, and inflamed with the rage of seeking opportunities of putting their machinations into practice; but the inhabitants of Bosnia know this. The greater part of her peasants are strong, courageous, ardent, lion-hearted, professionally fond of war, and revengeful: if the enemy but only show himself in any quarter, they, never seeking any pretext for declining, hasten to the aid of each other. Though in general they are harmless, yet in conflict with an enemy they are particularly vehement and obstinate; in battle they are strong-hearted ; to high commands they are obedient, and submissive as sheep; they are free from injustice and wickedness; they commit no villany, and are never guilty of high-way robbery; and they are ready to sacrifice their lives in behalf of their religion and the emperor. This is an honour which the people of Bosnia have received as an inheritance from their forefathers, and which every parent bequeaths to his son at his death. By far the greater number of the inhabitants, but especially the warlike chiefs, capudans, and veterans of the borders, in order to mount and dismount without inconvenience, and to walk with greater freedom and agility, wear short and closely fitted garments: they wear the fur of the wolf and leopard about their shoulders, and eagles' wings in their caps, which are made of wolf-skins. The ornaments of their horses are wolf and bearskins: their weapons of defence are the sword, the javelin, the axe, the spear, pistols, and muskets : their cavalry are swift, and their foot nimble and quick. Thus dressed and accoutred they present a formidable appearance, and never fail to inspire their enemies with a dread of their valour and heroism. So much for the events which have taken place within so short a space of time.* It is not in our power to write and describe every thing connected with the war, or which came to pass during that eventful period. Let this suffice. * It will be seen by the dates given in page 1, that the war lasted about two years and five months. Prepared and printed from the rare and valuable collection of Omer EfFendi of Novi, a native of Bosnia, by Ibrahim.* * This Ibrahim was called Basmajee^ the printer. He is mentioned in history as a renegado, and to have been associated with the son of Mehemet Effendi, the negotiator of the peace of Paasarowitz, and who was, in 1721, deputed on a special em-, bassy to Louis XV. Seyd Effendi, who introduced the art of printing into Turkey. Ibrahim, under the auspices of the government, and by the munificence of Seyd Effendi aiding his labours^ succeeded in sending from the newly instituted presses several works, besides the Account of the War in Bosnia.

Spirituality, in short, is religion stripped down to its experiential dimension. More than do-it-yourself religion, spirituality is do-without-religion, a form of faith that denies its connections to the institutions, stories, and doctrines that gave it birth - religion without memory.

BBQ Grills There are a number of gas grills which might be obtainable to the market. Grill professionals from different manufactures point out that the grills can either be propane and none propane BBQ grills can be found. Once the necessity to purchase the brand new grill to switch the outdated one, one has to contemplate security components and the mobility of the grill. Gas out of doors grill are ideal for cooking out that saves the consumer an ideal deal on gas vitality giant, future-laden fuel grills have taken over the barbecue backyard what one has to keep in mind is that a better worth doesn’t guarantee performance. Gasoline grills make the most of propane or natural gasoline as gasoline. They're accessible in various textures and sizes. The commonest type of such a grill is the Cart Grill design mannequin. Infrared grills, however, produce built-in grills infrared warmth to cook dinner meals and are fueled using propane or pure gas. Charcoal bbq grills use charcoal briquettes because the gas supply and it generates high ranges of warmth. Electrical grills are much smaller in dimension and they can be simply placed in the kitchen. They offer nice convenience however are expensive to function compared to the other grill types. A grill is cooking gear that cooks by directly exposing meals to heat. The floor where the meals is placed is an open rack with a source of warmth beneath it. There are a number of forms of grills relying on the type of warmth source used.A barbeque grill is a grill that uses charcoal or wooden as the heat supply. Food produced from BBQ grills have gotten attribute grill marks made by the racks where they had been resting throughout cooking. BBQ grills are often used to cook dinner poultry meat. However they will also be used to cook dinner other forms of meat in addition to fish. Manufactures recommendation the grill customers to depart the grill open when u have completed grilling. The fueled propane grill finally ends up burning itself out after the fuel has been used up within the tank. Typically the regulator can develop a leak which may shortly empty the propane bottle. There are significant variations between the grills fueled by pure gases and the ones with propane. Selecting the best grill all is determined by your self upon the uniqueness of the product.one has to take into concern the security points associated to natural gases. Choosing a good quality barbeque grill could be quite a difficult job. Due to this fact, it is crucial that you understand the advantages and features of the different types of bbq grills. In addition, while making your alternative, you want to consider several features. Test the essential options of the grill including the heat management mechanism, ash cleanup and different points that affect the feel and taste of the food. Guantee that the grill framework accommodates a protecting coating for preventing rust.

learning—we have learned how to increase productivity, the outputs that can be produced with any inputs. There are two aspects of learning that we can distinguish: an improvement in best practices, reflected in increases in productivity of firms that marshal all available knowledge and technology, and improvements in the productivity of firms as they catch up to best practices. In fact, the distinction may be somewhat artificial; there may be no firm that has employed best practices in every aspect of its activities. One firm may be catching up with another in some dimension, but the second firm may be catching up with the first in others. In developing countries, almost all firms may be catching up with global best practices; but the real difference between developing and developed countries is the larger fraction of firms that are significantly below global best practices and the larger gap between their productivity and that of the best-performing firms. While we are concerned in this book with both aspects of learning, it is especially the learning associated with catching up that we believe has been given short shrift in the economics literature, and which is central to improvements in standards of living, especially in developing countries. But as we noted in chapter 1, the two are closely related; because of the improvements in best practices by the most innovative firms, most other firms are always engaged in a process of catching up. While the evidence of Solow and the work that followed demonstrated (what to many seems obvious) the importance of learning for increases in standards of living, to further explicate the role of learning, the first three sections of this chapter marshal other macro- and microeconomic evidence. In particular, we stress the pervasive gap between best practices and the productivity of most firms. We argue that this gap is far more important than the traditional allocative inefficiencies upon which most of economics has focused and is related to learning—or more accurately, the lack of learning. The final section provides a theoretical context within which to think about the sources of sustained increases in standards of living, employing the familiar distinction of movements of the production possibilities curve and movements toward the production possibilities curve. Using this framework, we explain why it is that we ascribe such importance to learning. Macroeconomic Perspectives There are several empirical arguments that can be brought to bear to support our conclusion concerning the importance of learning. The first is a simple argument: In theory, leading-edge technology is globally available. Thus, with sufficient capital and trained labor (or sufficient mobility for capital and trained labor), all countries should enjoy comparable standards of living. The only difference would be the rents associated with ownership of intellectual property rights and factor supplies. Yet there is an enormous divergence in economic performance and standards of living across national economies, far greater than can be explained by differences in factor supplies.1 And this includes many low-performing economies with high levels of capital intensity (especially among formerly socialist economies) and highly trained labor forces. Table 2.1 presents a comparison of formerly socialist countries with similar nonsocialist economies in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the state-controlled model of economic activity. TABLE 2.1 Quality of Life Comparisons, 1992–1994 (U.S. $) Source: Greenwald and Khan (2009), p. 30. In most of these cases, at the time communism was imposed after World War II, the subsequently socialist economies enjoyed higher levels of economic development than

A Power sidled into the diner. Say what you will about them, but they know how to make an entrance. An inky shadow wrapped in a lashing rain of ash and sleet, it rode on 144,000 constantly flickering legs of forked lightning. This particular jasper’s proper name was the basso profundo thrum of dark matter winging through the void, the fizz of neutrinos boiling off a moribund blue supergiant, and the bitter-tangerine taste of a quadrillion-dimension symmetry group. But I called it Sam for short.

In short, the Germans not merely enlarged the dimensions of the ancient megamachine, but made important innovations in the techniques of mass control: innovations that later corporate megamachines are now perfecting with the aid of spying devices, opinion polls, market research, and computerized dossiers on private life. In the background, the torture chamber and the crematorium, if not planetary incineration, are still ready to complete the job.

The uncertainty principle tells us that it would take infinitely long to measure energy (or mass) with infinite precision, and that the longer a particle lasts, the more accurate our measurement of its energy can be. But if the particle is short-lived and its energy cannot possibly be determined with infinite precision, the energy can temporarily deviate from that of a true long-lived particle. In fact, because of the uncertainty principle, particles will do whatever they can get away with for as long as they can.

The uncertainty principle tells us that you need high-momentum particles to probe or influence physical processes at short distances, and special relativity relates that momentum to a mass.

We've seen that the theories of the Core forces, each deeply based on symmetry, can be combined. The three separate Core symmetries can be realized as parts of a single, all-encompassing symmetry. Moreover, that encompassing symmetry brings unity and coherence to the clusters of the Core. From a motley six, we assemble the faultless Charge Account. We also discover that once we correct for the distorting effect of Grid fluctuations-and after upping the ante to include SUSY-the different powers of the Core forces derive from a common value at short distances. Even gravity, that hopelessly feeble misfit, comes into the field. To reach this clear and lofty perspective, we made some hopeful leaps of imagination. We assumed that the Grid-the entity that in everyday life we consider empty space-is a multilayered, multicolored superconductor. We assumed that the world contains the extra quantum dimensions required to support super-symmetry. And we boldly took the laws of physics, supplemented with these two "super" assumptions, up to energies and down to distances far beyond where we've tested them directly. From the intellectual success so far achieved-from the clarity and coherence of this vision of unification-we are tempted to believe that our assumptions correspond to reality. But in science, Mother Nature is the ultimate judge. After the solar expedition of 1919 confirmed his prediction for the bending of light by the Sun, a reporter asked Albert Einstein what it would have meant if the result had been otherwise. He replied, "Then God would have missed a great opportunity." Nature doesn't miss such opportunities. I anticipated that Nature's verdicts in favor of our "super" ideas will inaugurate a new golden age in fundamental physics.

It’s a sort of literary act of survival. I don’t have many words to express myself— rather, the opposite. I’m aware of a state of deprivation. And yet, at the same time, I feel free, light. I rediscover the reason that I write, the joy as well as the need. I find again the pleasure I’ve felt since I was a child: putting words in a notebook that no one will read. In Italian I write without style, in a primitive way. I’m always uncertain. My sole intention, along with a blind but sincere faith, is to be understood, and to understand myself. […] I start with very short pieces, usually no more than a handwritten page. I try to focus on something specific: a person, a moment, a place. I do what I ask my students to do when I teach creative writing. I explain to them that such fragments are the first steps to take before constructing a story. I think that a writer should observe the real world before imagining a nonexistent one. […] I’ve never tried to do anything this demanding as a writer. I find that my project is so arduous that it seems sadistic. I have to start again from the beginning, as if I had never written anything in my life. But, to be precise, I am not at the starting point: rather, I’m in another dimension, where I have no references, no armor. Where I’ve never felt so stupid.

Is it necessary to believe in the existence of the six realms and the heavens and hells to be a Buddhist? Not necessarily. It is possible to interpret these as, perhaps, referring to other dimensions of existence, parallel universes, or simply states of mind.

Following this logic, Epicurus concluded that there must exist ‘atoms’ (literally, the a-tomic or ‘uncuttable’). They must be of such a hardness and such a smallness that they can resist all blows and all attempts to divide them. They must have dimensions—be extended—if they are to make up the substance of the world, but their parts cannot be removed from them. There must also, crucially, be void space between the atoms so they can move, come together, and disperse.

Actually, I'm gonna have to introduce this song before I play it. This song is dedicated to a very good friend of mine named 'Jean', who's a spirit. She was possessing a person who was a very good friend of mine who was asleep. We've talked many times and she's told me about what it's like in other dimensions, like, places you'll go after you die. You're already there right now you know, there's places you'll go after you die, you're already there, you're already living that life simultaneously to this, 'cause they're in a kind of time zone where they uh, they're at every time at once and we're only in this short period of time. People who are spirits, they can be in every time zone at once because they don't have a sense of time. Subsequently they can't write songs, they can't do drugs, they can't have sex. They can't do all of the things we do because we have time. You don't realise time, it's not your flesh or anything like that, it's time. We're very lucky to have time, you should appreciate it while you have it because you're not gonna have it after you die.

Dear Readers: Please forgive this intrusion, but we (whom you will get to know shortly) feel a need to express to those who have been so kind to come along on Fletcher’s journey thus far: Sorry. It is now evident that what is about to happen to our hero is beyond usual earthly conventions, if one subscribes to the idea that earthly conventions are, in fact, usual. We suspect you do not; advanced and literate earthlings like you (yes, flattery is a tool plied in any dimension) are willing to suspend disbelief when faced with the irrefutable wonder and mystery that exist in such depth, scope, and volume on your planet. Still, you might have preferred the trajectory of Fletcher’s story to follow a less wild arc, perhaps something transformational, but more along the lines of a career change, or an act of heroism, or the meeting of a soul mate. At this point, we’re certain Fletcher would also opt for these more traditional choices. No one, however constrained their present life may be, is prepared when that life is tumbled, jumbled, tossed, spun, jerked, and turned upside down. We do not presume to think that a story can take such a sharp left turn without some sense of being jostled. We hope nothing was spilled. And now, we request your patience and a willingness to go with what is decidedly a very unusual flow. . . . Imagine how Fletcher feels.

The visible present is not in time and space, nor, of course, outside of them: there is nothing before it, after it, about it, that could compete with its visibility. And yet it is not alone, it is not everything. To put it precisely, it stops up my view, that is, time and space extend beyond the visible present, and at the same time they are behind it, in depth, in hiding. The visible can thus fill me and occupy me only because I who see it do not see it from the depths of nothingness, but from the midst of itself; I the seer am also visible. What makes the weight, the thickness, the flesh of each color, of each sound, of each tactile texture, of the present, and of the world is the fact that he who grasps them feels himself emerge from them by a sort of coiling up or redoubling, fundamentally homogeneous with them; he feels that he is the sensible itself coming to itself and that in return the sensible is in his eyes as it were his double or an extension of his own flesh. The space, the time of the things are shreds of himself, of his own spatialization, of his own temporalization, are no longer a multiplicity of individuals synchronically and diachronically distributed, but a relief of the simultaneous and of the successive, a spatial and temporal pulp where the individuals are formed by differentiation. The things—here, there, now, then—are no longer in themselves, in their own place, in their own time; they exist only at the end of those rays of spatiality and of temporality emitted in the secrecy of my flesh. And their solidity is not that of a pure object which the mind soars over; I experience their solidity from within insofar as I am among them and insofar as they communicate through me as a sentient thing. Like the memory screen of the psychoanalysts, the present, the visible counts so much for me and has an absolute prestige for me only by reason of this immense latent content of the past, the future, and the elsewhere, which it announces and which it conceals. There is therefore no need to add to the multiplicity of spatio-temporal atoms a transversal dimension of essences—what there is is a whole architecture, a whole complex of phenomena "in tiers," a whole series of "levels of being," which are differentiated by the coiling up of the visible and the universal over a certain visible wherein it is redoubled and inscribed. Fact and essence can no longer be distinguished, not because, mixed up in our experience, they in their purity would be inaccessible and would subsist as limit-ideas beyond our experience, but because—Being no longer being before me, but surrounding me and in a sense traversing me, and my vision of Being not forming itself from elsewhere, but from the midst of Being—the alleged facts, the spatio-temporal individuals, are from the first mounted on the axes, the pivots, the dimensions, the generality of my body, and the ideas are therefore already encrusted in its joints. There is no emplacement of space and time that would not be a variant of the others, as they are of it; there is no individual that would not be representative of a species or of a family of beings, would not have, would not be a certain style, a certain manner of managing the domain of space and time over which it has competency, of pronouncing, of articulating that domain, of radiating about a wholly virtual center—in short, a certain manner of being, in the active sense, a certain Wesen, in the sense that, says Heidegger, this word has when it is used as a verb. In short, there is no essence, no idea, that does not adhere to a domain of history and of geography. Not that it is confined there and inaccessible for the others, but because, like that of nature, the space or time of culture is not surveyable from above, and because the communication from one constituted culture to another occurs through the wild region wherein they all have originated.

Few world events are emblematic of a life, and form part of one's biography on the same footing as, and sometimes more profoundly than, personal events. I pride myself on having cut a single swathe from the Wall Street Crash of 1929 to the collapse of the Twin Towers in September 2001. From the one event to the other, there is something like a meteoric short-cut through an advancing globalism, following out its fateful course with an inexorable logic, beyond wars and 'historical' events, beyond the visible progress of societies. Something that must be described as monstrous unfolds in another dimension than that of the human efforts to control its course. The perfect crime supposes perfect guilt.

Actually, I'm gonna have to introduce this song before I play it. This song is dedicated to a very good friend of mine named 'Jean', who's a spirit. She was possessing a person who was a very good friend of mine who was asleep. We've talked many times and she's told me about what it's like in other dimensions, like, places you'll go after you die. You're already there right now you know, there's places you'll go after you die, you're already there, you're already living that life simultaneously to this, 'cause they're in a kind of time zone where they uh, they're at every time at once and we're only in this short period of time. People who are spirits, they can be in every time zone at once because they don't have a sense of time. Subsequently they can't write songs, they can't do drugs, they can't have sex. They can't do all of the things we do because we have time. You don't realise time, it's not your flesh or anything like that, it's time. We're very lucky to have time, you should appreciate it while you have it because your not gonna have it after you die.

3 Reasons Why You Should Visit Galapagos Islands Are you have been planning to spend their vacation in most of the beautiful place in the world. Then the Galapagos Islands is one of the most beautiful places in the world. The famous archipelago in the Pacific Ocean is a demand and desired destination for travelers all around the world. The Galapagos isn’t probably the easiest and cheapest accessible place in the world but still attracts huge numbers of visitors, although there is a limit on how many people can arrive in the Galapagos. These are not budget-friendly travel destination Islands, but there are some ways how to arrange your week in paradise from cruising the living onboard and archipelago to making the day trip from one of the islands. You have most already heard or read all superlatives Galapagos Island can offer many visitors. But if you hesitate if the time and money will be worth it, we’ve put a list of three reasons why we should visit the Galapagos Islands. After reading these reasons, we believe that there won’t be any hesitation. The Galapagos Legend should be on every traveler. Pristine beaches You come to Galapagos Island to see fantastic wildlife but firstly mention the beaches. The stretches of fine white sand are on every island, and although you won’t have that much time to relax and lay down here just because of that there is so much to do, so we are looking at you sea lions only walking on those beaches from one to another end is a great unforgettable experience. Never expect deck chairs, bars, or umbrellas beaches on the Galapagos have nothing familiar with those touristy and crowded places form travel catalogs. Wildlife When we think and talk about the Galapagos Islands, we have a suspicion that the wildlife would be something marvelous and unique. What we never know was that these superlatives would get a new dimension on the Galapagos. All the wildlife animal species from iguanas, birds, tortoises, sea lions crabs to fish are incredible, and nothing can make you on their natural behavior that is dissimilar from the animal's behavior we know from our countries. The Galapagos animals never feel fear human at all, so you can get close to them and take images of a lifetime. Island hikes There are many designed ways on islands of Galapagos that will help you to walk through a unique landscape and will also help you to understand the evaluation process better, evaluation of not only the islands but also of the flora and fauna which live here in unbelievable symbiosis. The hikes are short, so visitors are allowed to walk on the island on their own so that you want a certified guide to show you around. Hikes were one of the best activities we did on the Galapagos as it combined the exploration of almost barren volcanic islands and watching wildlife. Galapagos Legend help you plan the trip you have dreamed about. You can choose onshore activities that cater to your interests, from a wildlife safari to a side trip to the fabulous annual Carnival in Rio, Brazil. As you stay on shore before and after your trip, you have the option of staying at a delightful boutique-style hotel or in a 5-star hotel setting.

The catastrophe that lies in wait for us is not connected to a depletion of resources. Energy itself, in all its forms, will become more and more abundant (at any rate, within the broadest time frame that could conceivably concern us as humans). Nuclear energy is inexhaustible, as are solar energy, the force of the tides, of the great fluxes of nature, and indeed of natural catastrophes, earthquakes and volcanoes (and technological imagination may be relied on to find ways and means to harness them). What is alarming, by contrast, is the dynamics of disequilibrium, the uncontrollability of the energy system itself, which is capable of getting out of hand in deadly fashion in very short order. We have already had a few spectacular demonstrations of the consequences of the liberation of nuclear energy (Hiroshima, Chernobyl), but it must be remembered that any chain reaction at all, viral or radioactive, has catastrophic potential. Our degree of protection from pandemics is epitomized by the utterly useless glacis that often surrounds nuclear power stations. It is not impossible that the whole system of world-transformation through energy has already entered a virulent and epidemic stage corresponding to the most essential character of energy itself: a fall, a differential, an imbalance - a catastrophe in miniature which to begin with has positive effects but which, once overtaken by its own impetus, assumes the dimensions of a global catastrophe.

Setting the bar high in our approach to hiring has been, and will continue to be, the single most important element of Amazon.com’s success. During our hiring meetings, we ask people to consider three questions before making a decision: Will you admire this person? If you think about the people you’ve admired in your life, they are probably people you’ve been able to learn from or take an example from. For myself, I’ve always tried hard to work only with people I admire, and I encourage folks here to be just as demanding. Life is definitely too short to do otherwise. Will this person raise the average level of effectiveness of the group they’re entering? We want to fight entropy. The bar has to continuously go up. I ask people to visualize the company five years from now. At that point, each of us should look around and say, “The standards are so high now—boy, I’m glad I got in when I did!” Along what dimension might this person be a superstar? Many people have unique skills, interests, and perspectives that enrich the work environment for all of us. It’s often something that’s not even related to their jobs. One person here is a National Spelling Bee champion (1978, I believe). I suspect it doesn’t help her in her everyday work, but it does make working here more fun if you can occasionally snag her in the

Essay: Scientific Advances are Ruining Science Fiction I write science fiction thrillers for a living, set five to ten years in the future, an exercise that allows me to indulge my love of science, futurism, and philosophy, and to examine in fine granularity the impact of approaching revolutions in technology. But here is the problem: I’d love to write pure science fiction, set hundreds of years in the future. Why don’t I? I guess the short answer is that to do so, I’d have to turn a blind eye to everything I believe will be true hundreds of years from now. Because the truth is that books about the future of humanity, such as Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near, have ruined me. As a kid, I read nothing but science fiction. This was a genre that existed to examine individuals and societies through the lens of technological and scientific change. The best of this genre always focused on human beings as much as technology, something John W. Campbell insisted upon when he ushered in what is widely known as the Golden Age of Science Fiction. But for the most part, writers in past generations could feel confident that men and women would always be men and women, at least for many thousands of years to come. We might develop technology that would give us incredible abilities. Go back and forth through time, travel to other dimensions, or travel through the galaxy in great starships. But no matter what, in the end, we would still be Grade A, premium cut, humans. Loving, lusting, and laughing. Scheming and coveting. Crying, shouting, and hating. We would remain ambitious, ruthless, and greedy, but also selfless and heroic. Our intellects and motivations in this far future would not be all that different from what they are now, and if we lost a phaser battle with a Klingon, the Grim Reaper would still be waiting for us.

The military-strategic dimensions of world order were, in American thinking, inseparable from the economic dimensions. US planners viewed the establishment of a freer and more open international economic system as equally indispensable to the new order they were determined to construct from the ashes of history’s most horrific conflict. Experience had instructed them, Secretary of State Cordell Hull recalled, that free trade stood as an essential prerequisite for peace. The autarky, closed trading blocs, and nationalistic barriers to foreign investment and currency convertibility that had characterized the depression decade just encouraged interstate rivalry and conflict. A

donated skeletal collection; one more skull was just a final drop in the bucket. Megan and Todd Malone, a CT technician in the Radiology Department at UT Medical Center, ran skull 05-01 through the scanner, faceup, in a box that was packed with foam peanuts to hold it steady. Megan FedExed the scans to Quantico, where Diana and Phil Williams ran them through the experimental software. It was with high hopes, shortly after the scan, that I studied the computer screen showing the features ReFace had overlaid, with mathematical precision, atop the CT scan of Maybe-Leoma’s skull. Surely this image, I thought—the fruit of several years of collaboration by computer scientists, forensic artists, and anthropologists—would clearly settle the question of 05-01’s identity: Was she Leoma or was she Not-Leoma? Instead, the image merely amplified the question. The flesh-toned image on the screen—eyes closed, the features impassive—could have been a department-store mannequin, or a sphinx. There was nothing in the image, no matter how I rotated it in three dimensions, that said, “I am Leoma.” Nor was there anything that said, “I am not Leoma.” To borrow Winston Churchill’s famous description of Russia, the masklike face on the screen was “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.” Between the scan, the software, and the tissue-depth data that the software merged with the

There is a perpetual not-being-in-this-world dimension to being so short-sighted. I know that in the event of an apocalypse I will be eaten by the cannibals first and I can’t catch a ball.

To apprehend myself as victim in a sexist society is to know that there are few places where I can hide, that I can be attacked almost anywhere, at any time, by virtually anyone. Innocent chatter, the currency of ordinary social life, or a compliment (“You don’t think like a woman”), the well-intentioned advice of psychologists, the news item, the joke, the cosmetics advertisement—none of these is what it is or what it was. Each reveals itself, depending on the circumstances in which it appears, as a threat, an insult, an affront, as a reminder, however, subtle, that I belong to an inferior caste. In short, these are revealed as instruments of oppression or as articulations of a sexist institution. Since many things are not what they seem to be and since many apparently harmless sorts of things can suddenly exhibit a sinister dimension, social reality is revealed as deceptive.

When she'd come down to the kitchen after her shower, she'd deliberately left the lights off. She liked the way the cake looked in the bright light of the full moon that was streaming in through the windows. On the kitchen table a wooden spoon sat in a small saucepot, which held crushed hazelnuts that had been soaked and heated in Frangelico, next to the bowl of thick, velvety pastry cream she had prepared earlier. She released one of the layers from its baking pan and settled it onto the cake plate. She had sprinkled them while they were still warm with the same infused brandy, so they were now redolent with a harmonious perfume of filberts and chocolate. She deftly spread some of the pastry cream on the first layer and sprinkled a tablespoon of the crushed nuts on top of it. She added the second layer of cake, more buttery cream, and a dusting of nuts. Angelina always aimed for an extra shading of flavor when she created a recipe, something to complement and embrace the most prominent flavor in a dish, something that tickled the palate and the imagination. Here, she had chosen aromatic, earthy hazelnuts to add an extra dimension of texture and taste. She'd heard someplace that some musical composers said that it was the spaces between the notes that made all the difference; when you were cooking, it was the little details, too. Each layer of the dense cake covered the one beneath it as she laid them on, like dark disks of chocolate eclipsing moons made of creme anglaise instead of green cheese. In short order, the sixth and final layer had efficiently been fixed into place. She took a half step back to check for symmetry and balance, then moved on to the frosting. She poured the mixture of butter, milk, and chocolate that had been resting on the stove top into a mixing bowl, added a pinch of salt, a dash of real vanilla extract, and began whisking it all together with powdered sugar, which she shifted in stages to make sure that it combined thoroughly.

The universe is in fact a multiverse. Countless quantum realities exist, all layered within one another; we'll call these dimensions, for short.

It is surprising that we as a species have been as successful as we have despite our ignorance of the biological world and our biased perspective on its dimensions. Einstein said that "the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility"; in other words, what is incomprehensible is how much we comprehend. But I don't think that's quite right. I think that what is even more incomprehensible is that we have survived despite how little we have comprehended. We are like a driver who somehow gets down the road, despite being too short to see out the window, a little drunk and very fond of acceleration.

Africa contains the most variation in the world in physical type due to the vast variety of genetic heritage. It has the shortest and tallest people, populations with the thickest and thinnest lips, and very wide differences in the widths of noses and skull dimensions. Populations thought to consist of a single ‘tribe’ show a continuous grading of gene frequencies, while populations thought to be biologically separate have much greater genetic similarity than previously thought. The genetic diversity of Africa is often regarded as analogous to the fact that its population speaks 2,000 different languages.

So I loved you because I thought you would be fat. I thought you would increase, multiply, develop a big belly, double cheeks, triple chins, dimpled knees. I thought there would be more of you. You'd stand out in a crowd, flaunt fashion. We'd have to buy clothes in stores catering to the big fellow. In your hands birds would nest. On your knees children would perch. You would rock marvelously— better than any rocking chair, better than any row boat. You would conjure up the sound and feel of water, the expanse of sea—its waves and calms, its storms under control. In your arms I would be sailing without the bother of shipwreck. All our gardens would grow if you dropped the seeds. Pumpkins would explode for fullness. Tomatoes so heavy would collapse their vines. Cauliflowers sprouting the size of streetlights. Your voice would fill the house— raise the ceilings, flood the windows. I'd hear you in every room. Over storms your voice would carry, lightning would not diminish you. What happened? You are no larger than me. Our voices fill the same small space. No soft flesh to press my fingers into deeply before I hit the road of your body. Your bones are as clear to find as mine, neither distinct nor hidden. They are simply the usual set— they suffice. They hold us together with no genius. The self you offer me is not unlike my self— no great dimensions, no extraordinary appetite. I don't live in the tower of your sound. Trees are outside our human scale and birds belong more properly in them. The only nest we can build is a nest for ourselves. In short, my dear you are my equal. We can only grow what every other can grow— the seeds we have been given.

Her weight—46,328 gross tons … 66,000 tons displacement. Her dimensions—882.5 feet long … 92.5 feet wide … 60.5 feet from waterline to Boat Deck, or 175 feet from keel to the top of her four huge funnels. She was, in short, 11 stories high and four city blocks long. Triple screw, the Titanic had two sets of four-cylinder reciprocating engines, each driving a wing propeller, and a turbine driving the center propeller. This combination gave her 50,000 registered horsepower, but she could easily develop at least 55,000 horsepower. At full speed she could make 24 to 25 knots.

Hair fall - The two words that make up for the shortest yet the scariest horror story that no woman would ever want to witness. However, many women suffer from it and get stuck in a loop of trying various solutions to take control of hair fall. It’s important to understand to what amount the hair fall is normal and to what is abnormal. We lose about 100 strands every day but anything more than that is excessive and alarming. HAIR FALL PROBLEM Hair is a big part of our identity and appearance. It adds confidence and resembles our style in ways more than one. When one loses hair, they lose self-esteem and self-confidence. Therefore, it is necessary to find an answer to the question of ‘How to control hair fall?’ Hair Fall Problem For most of us, a good hair day instantly puts us in a good mood. Such is the importance associated with the appearance of our hair. When even an occasional bad hair day can seriously put a damper on our mood, imagine how dreadful it’s to deal with your precious hair locks beginning to fall off. If you're looking for a basic brush that gets rid of tangles with no discomfort or pain, look no moreoverthan the Patented Venting hairbrush DoubleC. This universal brush is made to detangle wet hair of all kinds and forms with ease. Each brush is made with light, soft, and strong bristles that can painlessly get rid of despite the most serious knots. The points also highlight SofTips at the top that massage the scalp and help improve follicle stimulation. Patented Venting hairbrushes work best on women with long, thick hair for they're usually too large and unwieldy on short or thin hair. Most maximum paddle brushes are created for dry hair, as a regular detangler, and smoother. Hair Fall Problem Different Types of Hair Brush Our wide collection of Nuway4haiHair Brushes covers DoubleC Brush, C Brush, Travel C Brush, Traveler Brush, MagicSpell Combo Brush, and many more. Available in various forms and sizes, these hair brushes for women have two hair types namely. Specially created to serve, appearance, and smoothen up the hair of all dimensions and arrangements, all the hairbrushes come following three distinct ranges, that is, Basic, Premium, and Specialist. Nuway4hair Top Sellers to Choose From 1. Patented Venting hairbrush DoubleC - Purple 2. Patented Venting hairbrush DoubleC - Blue 3. DoubleC Brush- Black 4. Patented Venting hairbrush DoubleC PRO - Gray

If we think about information spreading, it’s keeping track of how well-connected my friends are. That might be a better measure than just counting friends. What we thought about was, neither of these are actually designed for understanding information spread. Information spreads in a way that has two different features. One, it’s somewhat probabilistic. And, secondly, it has a finite time horizon. People get tired of it after a while, it decays, and it stops spreading after some time. So, if you look at the half-life of tweets or other things, sometimes they’ll be as short as eighteen hours, sometimes twenty-four hours. There might be a period in which things spread, and then it’s old news and it just dies out. And so what we added was sort of a simple measure that has two dimensions to it. We called this diffusion centrality.

Pulsed lasers produce incredibly short bursts of electromagnetic energy. For example, a pulsed femtosecond laser produces a flash of light that lasts for femtoseconds to a picosecond (a picosecond is one trillionth of a second, a femtosecond is one thousandth of a picosecond), instantly followed by another (and so on). These lasers brought about the possibility of exciting fluorophores with two photons of only half the necessary energy, but they need to arrive almost simultaneously to generate the ejection of a photon. Infrared pulsed lasers penetrate living tissue more effectively, with the advantage that fluorescence is achieved from much deeper in the tissue than normal fluorescence, where the depth of penetration is limited by multiple light scattering events. Multiphoton microscopy (mainly two photon in practice, but also feasible as three or more photons) allows imaging from as deep as a millimetre (one thousand micrometres), an improvement of several hundred micrometres over fluorescence confocal microscopy. A second advantage of two photon excitation is that it forms as a single spot in the axial plane (z axis) without the ‘hourglass’ spread of out of focus light (the point spread function) that happens with single photon excitation. This is because the actual two photon excitation will only occur at the highest concentration of photons, which is limited to the focal plane itself. Because there is no out of focus light, there is no need for a confocal pinhole, allowing more signal to reach the detector. Combined with the increased depth of penetration, and reduced light induced damage (phototoxicity) to living tissue, two photon microscopy has added a new dimension to the imaging of living tissue in whole animals. At the surface of a living brain, remarkable images of the paths of whole neurons over several hundred micrometres can be reconstructed as a 3D z section from an image stack imaged through a thinned area of the skull in an experimental animal. Endoscopes have been developed which incorporate a miniaturized two photon microscope, allowing deep imaging of intestinal epithelium, with potential to provide new information on intestinal diseases, as most of the cellular lining throughout our gut is thin enough to be imaged in this way. So far a whole range of conditions including virtually all the cancers of the digestive tract as well as inflammatory bowel disease have been investigated, reducing the need for biopsies and providing new insights as to the nature of these conditions.

The view from below2 There remains an experience of incomparable value. We have for once learnt to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled - in short, from the perspective of those who suffer. The important thing is that neither bitterness nor envy should have gnawed at the heart during this time, that we should have come to look with new eyes at matters great and small, sorrow and joy, strength and weakness, that our perception of generosity, humanity, justice and mercy should have become clearer, freer, less corruptible. We have to learn that personal suffering is a more effective key, a more rewarding principle for exploring the world in thought and action than personal good fortune. This perspective from below must not become the partisan possession of those who are eternally dissatisfied; rather, we must do justice to life in all its dimensions from a higher satisfaction, whose foundation is beyond any talk of ‘from below’ or ‘from above’. This is the way in which we may affirm it.

In short, energy lives in a sweet spot in five dimensions of conversations or group problem-solving sessions: a compelling goal, the possibility of contributing, a strong sense of engagement, the perception of progress, and the belief that the idea can succeed.

Infinity splits itself into many different viewpoints or “I am”s. Each of these viewpoints are at the same time a part of infinity (containing the whole) and separate, individual viewpoints. To make an infinitely long story short: You are such a split off, individual viewpoint, coming from the creator (infinity), containing all the potential of the creator (holographically), but also having a relationship to the creator (because of your separateness). From your original individual “I am” viewpoint, which is only separate once you split off several more viewpoints: “I am this”, “I am that”, “I am also that”. Each word you place after the original “I am” allows you to incarnate into a certain reality (plane, dimension, planet, atmosphere, galaxy, surrounding, universe, place, time, event, experience). Each reality you incarnate into has a certain context, meaning limitations or “game rules”. Which further realities you create within a certain context depends on the context. The Journey of the Soul is an adventurous and exciting one. He might incarnate into a certain universe, loose himself in it, and then, within that universe, incarnate into another one, and inside the second universe incarnate in yet another one, completely loosing track of the original source of his journey. Since the connection to infinity is never broken, the soul can never get entirely lost however.

Tertullian—the Spirit makes the basic prophetic utterance, obviously through the human medium, who then takes on different characters or acting-roles, and as such he steps into the role of the Father as the speaker, sometimes the role of the Christ, and at other times the Spirit speaks as the Spirit’s own self—indeed, the person addressed by the speaker also shifts. In short, for Tertullian, there are traces of divine conversation in the Old Testament. On what basis were such role assignments made and justified by early Christian interpreters such as Tertullian?—and what are the theological implications of such assignments? And vitally, when did the church begin using this reading strategy in conceptualizing God? Here I want to introduce the reader more thoroughly to a vehicle that I shall argue was irreducibly essential to the birth of the Trinity—a theodramatic reading strategy best termed “prosopological exegesis.” Previous Scholarship Related to Prosopological Exegesis In 1961 Carl Andresen’s landmark study, “Zur Entstehung und Geschichte des trinitarischen Personbegriffes” (“Toward the Origin and History of Trinitarian Conceptions of the Person”), foregrounded the degree to which early Christian exegesis contributed to the rise of Trinitarian dogma, bringing this critical dimension to the attention of patristic and systematic theologians.41 Andresen showed that Tertullian’s scriptural exegesis was definitive for his formulation of persons (Latin: personae) of the Trinity, and argued that this reading strategy—which Andresen termed prosopographische Schriftexegese (“prosopographic exegesis”)

A scaled-down version of the clash between the real and the virtual and its fantastic consequences at the planetary level: the dissociation between a very high-frequency virtual space and a zero-frequency real space. The two no longer have anything in common, nor is there any communication between them: the unconditional extension of the virtual (which includes not just the new images or remote simulation, but the whole cyberspace of geo-finance, the space of multimedia and the information superhighways) brings with it an unprecedented desertification of real space and of all that surrounds us. The information superhighways will have the same effect as our present superhighways or motorways. They will cancel out the landscape, lay waste to the territory and abolish real distances. What is merely physical and geographical in the case of our motorways will assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time. All short circuits (and the establishment of this planetary hyperspace is tantamount to one immense short circuit) produce electric shocks. What we see emerging here is no longer merely territorial desert, but social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information. A kind of Big Crunch, contemporaneous with the Big Bang of the financial markets and the information networks. We are merely at the dawning of the process, but the waste and the wastelands are already growing much faster than the computerization process itself. The two worlds, though literally cut off from each other, are equally exponential. But the discrepancy between them does not create any new political situation or genuine crisis, for memory fades at the same time as does the real. The discrepancy is only virtually catastrophic.

The issue of how kin and group selection relate illustrates one striking aspect of the levels of selection debate in biology, which explains why it has captured the attention of philosophers. The debate involves a curious mix of empirical and conceptual questions, often intertwined. At first blush, the levels question may seem purely empirical. Given that natural selection can occur at more than one level, surely we just need to find out the level(s) at which it does occur, or has done in the past? With enough empirical data, surely the question can be straightforwardly answered? In fact, matters are not so simple. Certainly, the debate is responsible to empirical data, but there is more to it than this. For not infrequently, one finds authors who agree about the basic biological facts in a given case, but who disagree about how to identify the level(s) of selection. Such disagreements are not the ‘normal’ scientific ones that can be resolved by collecting data, but have a conceptual, and in some cases even an ideological, dimension.

Obedience to God always, always, beautifies. It always adds dimension and fullness, which are the results of living how we were meant to live. Our greatest potential will be found in our greatest obedience. We will not be losing ourselves in obedience but gaining our true selves. God is the One with the blueprints after all. We think that obedience is going to give us the short shrift, but it is actually the plan for our success and thriving. Obedience will not flatten us.

What, then, is happiness? First of all, we must note that happiness is often confused with pleasure. From the fountains of pleasure, noted the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius in De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), there arises something of bitterness that torments us amid the flowers themselves. Or, as another poet put it, even the sweetest rose has its thorns. The particular sting of pleasure is that it is short-lived. Hence we often hunt after a pleasurable repetition, and in the process run the risk of becoming addicted. Pleasure is inherently addictive, precisely because it is not completely fulfilling. However much the pleasure, we always hunger for more. This can lead to extreme situations, such as in the case of a drug addict who forgoes everything—including propriety and sanity—in order to acquire the substance that gives him pleasure. Happiness, on the other hand, is deep, full, and enduring. It is satisfying in itself. Therefore it gives us peace and tranquillity. Whereas suffering follows in the wake of pleasure, either because the pleasure has ended or because its pursuit has led to painful imbalances, happiness has no untoward repercussions. It gives rise to harmony. The American philosopher George Santayana wrote in Little Essays, “Happiness is the only sanction of life; where happiness fails, existence remains a mad and lamentable experiment.”2 Happiness ends all sorrow; it concludes our frantic search for the next injection of pleasure. The person who is happy does not look for greater happiness. But pleasure always spurs us on to experience greater pleasure. It drives us, and in driving us it enslaves us. Happiness, however, sets us free. It is freedom. When we are happy we are whole. The pleasure-seeker is feeling incomplete and therefore is looking for completion, except his or her search is focused on external means that can never bring true happiness. If pleasure were the same as happiness, our Western consumer society, which provides unparalleled access to pleasures of all kinds, would produce the happiest human beings on earth. Instead, our society is filled with desperate and emotionally disturbed and spiritually unfulfilled individuals. In fact, many mental health authorities think it is the sickest society ever to exist on this planet. According to a recent poll, more than one-third of the American population is thought to suffer from one or the other mental illness—from chronic depression to schizophrenia. This is a scary figure, but not surprising when we look at our contemporary lifestyle of work, pressure, haste, drivenness, and consumerism. As long as we are spiritually fragmented, we must expect to also be physically, emotionally, and mentally unfit. Spiritual wholeness and psychosomatic well-being go hand in hand. Millions suffer from chronic diseases that are the result of emotional disturbance and wrong attitudes to life, expressed in unwholesome habits.