Sigma Quotes

When you are finished changing, you're finished.

One of the things that baffles me (and there are quite a few) is how there can be so much lingering stigma with regards to mental illness, specifically bipolar disorder. In my opinion, living with manic depression takes a tremendous amount of balls. Not unlike a tour of Afghanistan (though the bombs and bullets, in this case, come from the inside). At times, being bipolar can be an all-consuming challenge, requiring a lot of stamina and even more courage, so if you're living with this illness and functioning at all, it's something to be proud of, not ashamed of. They should issue medals along with the steady stream of medication.

Books are keys that open many doors.

It ain't always rocket science, sometimes a door is just a door.

Often-times it's madness, not genius that moves the world forward. Who else but the mad would reach so far, stretching for the impossible and, in so doing, prove the impossible possible!

Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the models. Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

Are you sure, Gray?' He lifted his eyes. 'No . . . I'm not. I'm not sure of a damn thing.' He slipped his hands free of the monsignor's and peeled the battery off the phone, cutting the last ring in half. 'But that doesn't mean I won't act.

The truth is often one's best shield.

So we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t.” She shrugged. “That pretty much sums up quantum physics.

Wringin' your hands only stops you from rollin' up your sleeves.

it sucks to get old...but there's always beer

Pack speaking about his new love, Sky: “Well, let’s see. She has the animal husbandry skills of a vet, the organizational skills of a Six Sigma guru, and the mechanical skills of a…trained mechanic. She doesn’t require handyman help. And she’s nice to look at. Other than that, she leaves a lot to be desired. And maybe I omitted the best part, which is that she’s a fine human being with strong values.

That’s the beauty of the universe. There’s always a new mystery.

Control your own Destiny or somebody else will

Perfect is an illusion, one that was created to maintain the status quo. The Six Sigma charade is largely about hiding from change, because change is never perfect. Change means reinvention, and until something is reinvented, we have no idea what the spec is.

Gray imagined Kat scolding her husband in an operatic duet that has been going on between husbands and wives for ages, that eternal mix of exasperation and love." -- James Rollins

...when it came to explosives and radios, bad things sometimes happened to good engineers.

When everything is a priority, nothing is a priority.

Gurl, you got competition.” Jacob folded his arms on the table. “That’s Sally and Susan—beta, delta, boogie-sigma-chi-latte- VPs.

Well, it just goes to show you,” the inventor said as he flipped through the pages of notes and ideas, “It is easy to think outside the box when you aren’t smart enough to know where the box is.

Throughout history, knowledge rises and falls, ebbs and flows. What once was known is forgotten again, lost in time, sometimes for centuries, only to be rediscovered ages later.

When someone is always looking over their shoulder, they’re more likely to trip.

The measure of intelligence is the ability to change. —ALBERT EINSTEIN

Chaos is NOT a condition of doing business.

Shrapnel and a wave of sand struck the side like a bitch-slap from God Himself.

the hand has programmable fingerprints, a vibration motor, data interface capabilities-” “Wait. A vibration motor in your hand? Why?” “I’m a man, and I’m alone on the planet. Figure it out.

Though it was undeclared, there was a new world war being waged, where fundamental decency and respect for human rights were under assault by forces of intolerance, despotism, and blind fervor. And while its battles were sometimes waged in plain sight-- in New York City, in Iraq-- its greater struggle was carried on invisibly, fought in secret, its heroes unknown, its villains hidden.

We need religion, government, and laws to force a level of control over our baser natures. I intend to strip away the disease that is intelligence, to rip away the deception that allows humanity to believe itself mightier and more deserving of this planet.

We are star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Chaos is the enemy of any organization the strives to be outstanding.

Choices have to be made…before we are left with none.

Better to head off into the unknown than stay here, where death was most certain

Design is a funny word. Some people think Design means how it looks. But, of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works. —Steve Jobs

The only one disappointed by the ease of entry was the team’s explosives and demolitions expert. “Aw, man,” Kowalski groused. “I was all set to blow some crap up.

Silence fueled anxieties, gave them their true power. Expressing them aloud was a way of releasing that tension, of letting go, if only for a brief time.

There are a thousand paths into the future, forks after forks in the road ahead. Who knows, if one road closes, maybe another opens in another universe . . . and your soul, your consciousness, leaps over to continue that journey ever forward, always finding the right path.

The accumulation of grief over one lifetime is more then one heart can bear."Robert explained."Only the heartless could withstand more.Or the very young,those too naive to truly understand loss.

I took a course at Cal once called Statistical Analysis. And there was a guy in the course who used to make up all of his computations and he never used Sigma. He used his own initials. 'Cause he was the standard deviation.

Nondisclosure agreements and exclusivity agreements. Think like a corporation, lady. They've proven much better at enslaving the masses and pushing home their agenda than all of the terrorists in the history the human race put together.

It is high time Americans grew accustomed to our traditions.

If you want engagement, you must engage.

Festina lente. Make haste slowly.

She handed him her gun. “Down,” she ordered. “Shoot anybody that comes into view.” “What about you?” “No, don’t shoot me.” “I mean where are you going?

he took heed of a quote from Catch-22: Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you.

Too early…too late. A last message to live in the present. To accept the past and not rush the future.

In the face of inhumanity, a good man reacts, but a great one acts

Kaizen should be done when times are good or when the company is profitable, since your efforts to streamline and make improvements when the company is poor are limited to reduction in staff. Even if you try to go lean and cut out the fat to improve business performance, when your business is in a very difficult position financially there is no fat to be cut. If you are cutting out muscle, which you need, then you cannot say that your efforts to become lean are succeeding.The most important thing about doing kaizen is to do kaizen when times are good, the economy is strong, and the company is profitable

As to the strangest claim in the novel: that only 10 percent of the cells in our body are human (and the rest are bacteria and parasites). This is true! There is a wonderful book exploring this topic that is as horrific as it is humorous, Human Wildlife by Dr. Robert Buckman.

All right,” he said. “Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops.” He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. “See,” he said, “using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind’s default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis.” His chalk flew across the board again. “Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness...

Human memories were organized in the hippocampus region, but recent research suggested the information was only stored there on a short-term basis. Later, the hippocampus recoded these memories as electrical patterns across billions of synapses and distributed them for long-term storage over the entire cerebral cortex.

That sentiment had been the driving force behind humanity’s progress across the ages, a simple imperative fueled by our innate curiosity: to discover what was around the next bend, over the next horizon. It was that same inquisitiveness that impelled us to explore who we are, where we came from, and where we are headed next. Gray

Use every person's skill set to the fullest. Both optimists and pessimists contribute. An optimist invents the hot air balloon, and a pessimist invents the parachute." - Ramesh Lohia and Surbhi Lohia, consultants, Six Sigma, KaizeniSixSigmaKaizen. In Quality Quotes, Sep 1, 2016, Knowledge Center, ASQ [ AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR QUALITY]

WHAT IS REALITY? It’s both the simplest question to answer—and the hardest. Over the ages, it has baffled both philosophers and physicists. In The Republic, Plato described the true world as nothing more than a flickering shadow on a cave wall. Oddly enough, millennia later, scientists have come full circle to a similar conclusion.

So I had this date last night,” Dane goes on, ignoring my order. “Do you remember that girl from Sigma Kappa Whatever? She was at the gig last night, and everything was going great, both of us eye-fucking for like four frickin’ hours…” He pauses and turns to me, his voice turning urgent. “She takes me home, dude, and I’m sitting in the living room while she’s in the bathroom, and I’m so ready, because she’s so hot, right? And who walks in?” “Dane.” I close my eyes, willing him to shut the fuck up. “Her mom, dude!” he bursts out. “Her mom in her light pink nightie with legs for days. And let me tell you, man…Stacy’s mom has got it going on?” I can’t help myself. I break out in a laugh at the song reference and pinch the bridge of my nose, tired but a fraction more relaxed, even if I’d never admit it to him. Such an idiot.

The scientist’s behavior while facing the refutation of his ideas has been studied in depth as part of the so-called attribution bias. You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness. This explains why these scientists attributed their failures to the “ten sigma” rare event, indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them. Why? It is a human heuristic that makes us actually believe so in order not to kill our self-esteem and keep us going against adversity.

And what of our own universe? The newest conjecture is that all that we experience—from the tiniest vibrating string of energy to that massive galaxy spinning around a maelstrom of reality-ripping black holes—may be nothing more than a hologram, a three-dimensional illusion that, in fact, we may all be living in a created simulation. Could that be possible? Could Plato have been right all along: that we are blind to the true reality around us, that all we know is nothing more than the flickering shadow on a cave wall?

The problem with engineers today is that they don’t think on paper.

The richest harvest comes from best-tilled soil.

The past is the past. It's now up to us to sustain our own culture. We only lose what we fail to nurture.

this sudden appearance of Homo sapiens is attributable to the rapid mutation of only seventeen brain-building genes. A scant few, really.

Research today has become more about seeing if something can be done versus judging if it should. It's knowledge for the sake of knowledge, regardless of the impact on the world.

Ars longa, vita brevis,” she whispered, a quote from Hippocrates. One of her favorites. Life is short, art eternal.

The enclosed space trapped her anxiety, amplifying her fear.

If God had wanted men to ride bikes, He wouldn't have put our balls where they are.

Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.

Since 9/11, there’s been a huge spike in biodefense spending, resulting in a slew of new Level 4 labs popping up across the country.

It is easy to think outside the box when you aren’t smart enough to know where the box is.

The old adage “necessity is the mother of all invention” remains as true today as it did back in 3500 B.C.

There are a thousand paths into the future, forks after forks in the road ahead. Who knows, if one road closes, maybe another opens in another universe . . . and your soul, your consciousness, leaps over to continue that journey ever forward, always finding the right path.” Still,

Despite his image as a bloody tyrant, Genghis was also forward thinking. His empire had the first international postal system, invented the concept of diplomatic immunity, and even allowed women in its councils. But more importantly, the Mongols were also unprecedented in their religious tolerance.

Well what are you looking at me for? If this is a democratic process, I've been outvoted," he said in exasperation. "This is why democracy doesn't work. The crazy people always outnumber the sane people.

Honestly, people always talk about ‘normal’ as though it is something to aspire to, but that’s a load of crap. Normal isn’t an achievement, it’s a baseline. Normal is something you end up as if you never get around to doing something interesting.

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

In the discussion at Phi Beta Sigma, a social fraternity I joined for a while, I expressed my anger about society and white racism. The other told me that I sounded like a guy named Donald Warden who was preaching Blackness at the Berkley campus of the University of California. He was the head of an organization called the Afro-American Association. I went to Berkley to find Warden and hear what he was saying. The first member I met, though, was Maurice Dawson, one of Warden’s tight partners. He turned me off with his arrogance. I had come searching for something, and he scorned me because I did not already know what I was seeking. I could not understand what he was saying about “Afro-Americans.” The term was new to me. Dawson really put me down. “You know what an Afro-Cucan is?” “Yes” “You know what an Afro-Brazilian is?” “Yes” “Then why don’t you know what an Afro-American is?” It may have been apparent to him, but not to me. But I was stilled interested. Maurice taught me a lesson that I try to apply to the Black Panther Party today. I dissuade Party members from putting down people who do not understand. Even people who are unenlightened and seemingly bourgeois should be answered in a polite way. Things should be explained to them as fully as possible. I was turned off by a person who did not want to talk to me because I was not important enough. Maurice just wanted to preach to the converted, who already agreed with him. I try to be cordial, because that way you win people over. You cannot win them over by drawing a line of demarcation, saying you are on this side and I am on the other; that shows a lack of consciousness. After the Black Panther Party was formed, I nearly feel into this error. I could not understand why people were blind to what I saw so clearly. Then I realized that their understanding had to be developed.

Look, cell phone geolocation data shows very few clustering anomalies for this hour and climate. And that’s holding up pretty much across all major metro areas. It’s gone down six percentage points since news of the Karachi workshop hit the Web, and it’s trending downward. If people are protesting, they aren’t doing it in the streets.” He circled his finger over a few clusters of dots. “Some potential protest knots in Portland and Austin, but defiance-related tag cloud groupings in social media put us within the three-sigma rule—meaning roughly sixty-eight percent of the values lie within one standard deviation of the mean.

Just go look. That sentiment had been the driving force behind humanity's progress across the ages, a simple imperative fueled by our innate curiosity: to discover what was around the next bend, over the next horizon. It was that same inquisitiveness that impelled us to explore who we are, where we came from, and where we are headed next.

according to Native American legends, dogs with different-colored eyes could see both heaven and earth.

Bypass Gemini

They all knew borders no longer divided the world so much as ideologies.

Whiskey is for drinkin’, water is for fightin’.” She frowned. “Mark Twain,” he said.

Remember, child, life is not a straight line. It cycles.

QUIT = Quickly Uphold Important Things

to second guess your preferences and tastes based upon how others may interpret them is to unduly deny yourself well-earned freedom.

started

stubbornly

seventeenth century, Pope Leo XIII

young men think old men fools, and old men know young men to be.

It is a tradition among our desert tribes. A man may borrow what he needs. Stealing is crime.

Tesla once stated, instinct is something which transcends knowledge. “Anton,

Right now there are some fifteen thousand scientists authorized to work with deadly pathogens, but there are zero federal agencies charged with assessing the risks of all of these labs, let alone even keeping track of their number. As a consequence, there’ve been countless reports of mishandling of contagious pathogens, of vials gone missing, of poor records.

Bristol-Meyers Squibb has reported success with monatomic ruthenium to correct cancer cells. Same with platinum and iridium, according to Platinum Metals Review. These atoms actually make the DNA strand correct itself, rebuilding without drugs or radiation. Iridium has been shown to stimulate the pineal gland and appears to fire up ‘junk DNA,’ leading to the possibility of increased longevity and reopening aging pathways in the brain.

When the CERN teams reported a 'five-sigma' result for the Higgs boson, corresponding to a P-value of around 1 in 3.5 million, the BBC reported the conclusion correctly, saying this meant 'about a one-on-3.5 million chance that the signal they see would appear if there were no Higgs particle.' But nearly every other outlet got the meaning of this P-value wrong. For example, Forbes Magazine reported, 'The chances are less than 1 in a million that it is not the Higgs boson,' a clear example of the prosecutor's fallacy. The Independent was typical in claiming that 'there is less than a one in a million chance that their results are a statistical fluke.' This may not be blatantly mistaken as Forbes, but it is still assigning the small probability to 'their results are a statistical fluke', which is logically the same as saying this is the probability of the null hypothesis being tested.

Who was this mysterious founding member of an order that would grow in such prominence in history and legend? Why was this last knight never named as plainly as the others? The answer to that mystery is the beginning of a great adventure.

Most major Christian groups—Catholics, Byzantines, Nestorians, Jacobites—believe Mary’s father was a man named Joachim. But this is contested. The Koran claims she descended from a highly respected family, that of Imran. As does the Jewish faith.

Overfishing of the past fifty years has driven the population of large fish down by ninety percent. And climate change is acidifying and warming the waters, lessening its ability to hold oxygen, suffocating marine life. We are rapidly killing the seas beyond the ability to heal.

people always talk about ‘normal’ as though it is something to aspire to, but that’s a load of crap. Normal isn’t an achievement, it’s a baseline. Normal is something you end up as if you never get around to doing something interesting. You crave attention, speed, challenge, and wealth.

This is like the Six Sigma approach to quality. Six Sigma refers to the quest for continuous improvement, ultimately leading to 3.4 defects per million units. The problem is that once you’re heading down this road, there’s no room left for amazing improvements and remarkable innovations. Either you rolled ten strikes or you didn’t. Organizations that earn dramatic success always do it in markets where asymptotes don’t exist, or where they can be shattered. If you could figure out how to bowl 320, that would be amazing. Until that happens, pick a different sport if you want to be a linchpin.

«Senta, io capisco che per lei la notizia può essere sconvolgente, ma non deve preoccuparsi. Io e Sergej siamo due professionisti. Lui ha corretto le bozze di Tolstoj!». «Le bozze di Tolstoj? Ma se è morto nel 1910! Cosa vi siete bevuti?». «Adesso la Sigma ripubblica tutti i successi del grande scrittore russo». «I successi?» disse sbalordito Giorgio. «E che è, una compilation?». «Sì. Vojna i mir esce settimana prossima. Ma senza inizio in francese... senza Waterloo, più corto. Solo 300 pagine». Sergej sorrise contento e fiero. «Vojna i mir... Guerra e pace?». «Solo pace. Guerra la tagliamo tutta».

for ordinary African Americans, coping with hegemonic gender ideology can be so demanding that generating alternatives can seem virtually impossible. But the importance of this task cannot be underestimated because African American survival may depend on it. One important task lies in rejecting dominant gender ideology, in particular, its use of the thesis of "weak men, strong women" as a source of Black social control. Because hegemonic masculinity equates strength with dominance, an antiracist politics must challenge this connection. Within this project, the fundamental premise of any progressive Black gender ideology is that it cannot be based on someone else's subordination. This means that definitions of Black masculinity that rely on the subordination of Black women, poor people, children, LGBT people, or anyone else become invalid. Definitions of Black femininity that do not challenge relations of sexism, economic exploitation, age, heterosexism, and other markers of social inequality also become suspect. Rather than trying to be strong within existing gender ideology, the task lies in rejecting a gender ideology that measures masculinity and femininity using gendered definitions of strength. In this endeavor to craft a more progressive Black gender ideology, African American men and women face similar yet distinctive challenges. The task for African American men lies in developing new definitions of masculinity that uncouple strength from its close ties to male dominance. Good Black men need not rule their families with an iron hand, assault one another, pursue endless booty calls, and always seem to be "in control" in order to avoid the sigma of weakness. The task for African American women lies in redefining strength in ways that simultaneously enable Black women to reclaim historical sources of female power, yet reject the exploitation that has often accompanied that power. Good Black women need not be stoic mules whose primary release from work and responsibility comes once a week on Sunday morning. New definitions of strength would enable Black men and women alike to be seen as needing and worthy of one another's help and support without being stigmatized as either overly weak or unnaturally strong.

To truly understand the Nazis,” Ulmstrom said, leading the way, “you have to stop considering them as a political party. They called themselves Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—but in reality, they were really a cult.” “A cult?” Gray asked. “They bore all the trappings, ja? A spiritual leader who could not be questioned, disciples who wore matching clothes, rituals and blood oaths performed in secret, and most important of all, the creation of a potent totem to worship. The Hakenkreuz. The Broken Cross, also called the swastika. A symbol to supplant the crucifix and the Star of David.” “Hari krishnas on steroids,” Monk mumbled. “Do not joke. The Nazis understood the inherent power of ideas. A power greater than any gun or rocket. They used it to subjugate and brainwash an entire nation.