Signals Intelligence Quotes

Wit seduces by signaling intelligence without nerdiness.

A god who is capable of sending intelligible signals to millions of people simultaneously, and of receiving messages from all of them simultaneously, cannot be, whatever else he might be, simple. Such Bandwidth!

Intelligence is the capacity to receive, decode and transmit information efficiently. Stupidity is blockage of this process at any point. Bigotry, ideologies etc. block the ability to receive; robotic reality-tunnels block the ability to decode or integrate new signals; censorship blocks transmission.

Intelligence is not expecting people to understand what your intent is; it is anticipating how it will be perceived.

Liberty is a supreme precious good. It is our compass and reacts to our encounters, bumps into new realities, and navigates through the complexity of our world. It is map-reading the focus of our attention and listening to the wisdom of our past. Our freedom shall follow the signals of the lighthouse of our emotional intelligence and, at the same time, take account of the social veracities. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)

the brilliant book Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman describes seven key abilities most beneficial for human beings: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many of those who commit violence never learned these skills. If you know a young person who lacks them all, that’s an important pre-incident indicator, and he needs help.

Instead of labelling your emotions as problems to solve, you can see them as signals to interpret. Instead of judging your desires as shameful aberrations, you can learn to meet them in healthier ways. Instead of calling yourself critical names when you cannot build or break certain habits, you can explore your motivations. You can become a student of yourself rather than always seeking a wiser teacher.

Authority: One who is good at combating the enemy fools it with inscrutable moves, confuses it with false intelligence, makes it relax by concealing one’s strength, . . . deafens its ears by jumbling one’s orders and signals, blinds its eyes by converting one’s banners and insignias, . . . confounds its battle plan by providing distorted facts. —Tou Bi Fu Tan, A Scholar’s Dilettante Remarks on War (16th century A.D.)

Long ago the signalling had become no more than a meaningless ritual, now maintained by an animal which had forgotten to learn and a robot which had never known to forget.

We now have scientific evidence that the heart sends us emotional and intuitive signals

In the original form of the word, to worry someone else was to harass, strangle, or choke them. Likewise, to worry oneself is a form of self-harassment. To give it less of a role in our lives, we must understand what it really it is. Worry is the fear we manufacture—it is not authentic. If you choose to worry about something, have at it, but do so knowing it’s a choice. Most often, we worry because it provides some secondary reward. There are many variations, but a few of the most popular follow. Worry is a way to avoid change; when we worry, we don’t do anything about the matter. Worry is a way to avoid admitting powerlessness over something, since worry feels like we’re doing something. (Prayer also makes us feel like we’re doing something, and even the most committed agnostic will admit that prayer is more productive than worry.) Worry is a cloying way to have connection with others, the idea being that to worry about someone shows love. The other side of this is the belief that not worrying about someone means you don’t care about them. As many worried-about people will tell you, worry is a poor substitute for love or for taking loving action. Worry is a protection against future disappointment. After taking an important test, for example, a student might worry about whether he failed. If he can feel the experience of failure now, rehearse it, so to speak, by worrying about it, then failing won’t feel as bad when it happens. But there’s an interesting trade-off: Since he can’t do anything about it at this point anyway, would he rather spend two days worrying and then learn he failed, or spend those same two days not worrying, and then learn he failed? Perhaps most importantly, would he want to learn he had passed the test and spent two days of anxiety for nothing? In Emotional Intelligence, Daniel Goleman concludes that worrying is a sort of “magical amulet” which some people feel wards off danger. They believe that worrying about something will stop it from happening. He also correctly notes that most of what people worry about has a low probability of occurring, because we tend to take action about those things we feel are likely to occur. This means that very often the mere fact that you are worrying about something is a predictor that it isn’t likely to happen!

The program’s very existence was an indication that the agency’s mission had been transformed, from using technology to defend America to using technology to control it by redefining citizens’ private Internet communications as potential signals intelligence.

The old 'qualities' of masculinity - a narrow focus on life, domestic incompetence signalling a mind on higher things, emotional reserve and acts of endurance - have become absurdities, signs more of incompetence, insensitivity, lack of intelligence than of strength.

Like a baseball umpire, an intelligence analyst risks being blamed when something goes wrong but receives little notice when she does her job well.

it is not really “artificial” intelligence if a human designed the artifice.

Knowing what emotions tell us is the first, necessary part of the process. For example, anxiety is a signal that we feel something important is beyond our control.

signal transduction

Through the vehicle of our emotions, our mind, body, and spirit are sending signals that something has to shift.

The recent recognition that the genetic code possesses a unique capacity to resist errors caused by mutation imparts the biochemical intelligent design argument with an entirely new level of credibility. Like a giant SOS shaped with letters ablaze, the optimal nature of the genetic code signals that an Intelligent Agent used those rules to start and sustain life.

Researchers have concluded two things. One is that we drop out of conversations every twelve to eighteen seconds to process what people are saying; two, we often remember what we think about what another person is saying because that is a stronger internal process and chemical signal. In other words, our internal listening and dialogue trumps the other person’s speech.

The Concept of a “Panalogy” Douglas Lenat 1998: “If you pluck an isolated sentence from a book, it will likely lose some or all of its meaning—i.e., if you show it out of context to someone else, they will likely miss some or all of its intended significance. Thus, much of the meaning of a represented piece of information derives from the context in which the information is encoded and decoded. This can be a tremendous advantage. To the extent that the two thinking beings are sharing a common rich context, they may utilize terse signals to communicate complex thoughts.

There are no meaningful translations for these terms. They are needlessly recursive. They contain no usable intelligence, yet they are structured intelligently; there is no chance they could have arisen by chance. The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus. Viruses do not arise from kin, symbionts, or other allies. The signal is an attack.

Our imagination tells us that being as connected as we are—the ease of travel, technological advances and pooled intelligence—should have produced better results for more people than we’re now seeing.

I am a signal flare for explorers of the outer worlds, and a lamp post on a convoluted forest path. I believe this is what makes me shine in a nice way. Some people are threatened by it, but that is ok.

It's how we read the face, said Ian. Remember that you're talking to a psychologist. We like to think about things like that. It's a question of numerous little signals that create the overall impression. But how do internal states who themselves physically? Very easily, said Ian. Think of anger. The knitted brow. Think of determination. The gritted teeth. And intelligence? Liveliness and engagement with the world.

Since irregular combatants don’t have the combat power to stand up to government forces in a direct fight, they tend to hide, and thus to rely on cover and concealment. The concealment and protection afforded by complex environments help them avoid detection by security forces, letting them move freely and fight only when and where they choose. For this reason, guerrillas, bandits, and pirates have always flourished in areas where cover was good and government presence was weak. For most of human history, this meant remote, forested, mountainous areas such as the Afghan mountains discussed in the preface. But with the unprecedented level of global urbanization, this pattern is changing, prompting a major shift in the character of conflict. In the future environment of overcrowded, undergoverned, urban, coastal areas—combined with increasingly excellent remote surveillance capabilities (including drones, satellites, and signals intelligence) in remote rural areas—the cover is going to be in the cities.

I AM NOT SO INTELLIGENT The epiphany I had in my career in randomness came when I understood that I was not intelligent enough, nor strong enough, to even try to fight my emotions. Besides, I believe that I need my emotions to formulate my ideas and get the energy to execute them. I am just intelligent enough to understand that I have a predisposition to be fooled by randomness—and to accept the fact that I am rather emotional. I am dominated by my emotions—but as an aesthete, I am happy about that fact. I am just like every single character whom I ridiculed in this book. Not only that, but I may be even worse than them because there may be a negative correlation between beliefs and behavior (recall Popper the man). The difference between me and those I ridicule is that I try to be aware of it. No matter how long I study and try to understand probability, my emotions will respond to a different set of calculations, those that my unintelligent genes want me to handle. If my brain can tell the difference between noise and signal, my heart cannot. Such unintelligent behavior does not just cover probability and randomness. I do not think I am reasonable enough to avoid getting angry when a discourteous driver blows his horn at me for being one nanosecond late after a traffic light turns green. I am fully aware that such anger is self-destructive and offers no benefit, and that if I were to develop anger for every idiot around me doing something of the sort, I would be long dead. These small daily emotions are not rational. But we need them to function properly. We are designed to respond to hostility with hostility. I have enough enemies to add some spice to my life, but I sometimes wish I had a few more (I rarely go to the movies and need the entertainment). Life would be unbearably bland if we had no enemies on whom to waste efforts and energy.

Within the intelligence community the realization is that Open Source Intelligence is very, very valuable across the whole spectrum of messaging through news, sentiment and measurement,’ Kaplan says. ‘Combined with Human Intelligence and Signal Intelligence, it’s a really powerful predictive tool.

Attentional amplification of sensory awareness in any sensory medium is achieved by top-down signals from prefrontal cortex that modulate activity of single neurons in sensory brain areas in the absence of any sensory stimulation and significantly increase baseline activity in the corresponding target region.

The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the market is simply not credible. After nearly 50 years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.

So, let's get back to why the roots are the most important part of a tree. Conceivably, this is where the tree equivalent of a brain is located. Brain? you ask. Isn't that a bit farfetched? Possibly, but now we know that trees can learn. This means they must store experiences somewhere, and therefore, there must be some kind of a storage mechanism inside the organism. Just where it is, no one knows, but the roots are the part of the tree best suited to the task. The old spruce in Sweden also shows that what grows underground is the most permanent part of the tree-and where else would it store important information over a long period of time? Moreover, current research shows that a tree's delicate root networks is full of surprises. It is now an accepted fact that the root network is in charge of all chemical activity in the tree. And there's nothing earth shattering about that. Many of our internal processes are also regulated by chemical messengers. Roots absorb substances and bring them into the tree. In the other direction, they deliver the products of photosynthesis to the tree's fungal partners and even route warning signals to neighboring trees. But a brain? For there to be something we would recognize as a brain, neurological processes must be involved, and for these, in addition to chemical messages, you need electrical impulses. And these are precisely what we can measure in the tree, and we've been able to do so since as far back as the nineteenth century. For some years now, a heated controversy has flared up among scientists. Can plants think? Are they intelligent?

We’d be outraged if our government invested in expensive telescopes for the sole purpose of searching for orbiting teapots. But we can appreciate the case for spending money on SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, using radio telescopes to scan the skies in the hope of picking up signals from intelligent aliens.

It is in moments such as these—when impulsive feeling overrides the rational—that the newly discovered role for the amygdala is pivotal. Incoming signals from the senses let the amygdala scan every experience for trouble. This puts the amygdala in a powerful post in mental life, something like a psychological sentinel, challenging every situation, every perception, with but one kind of question in mind, the most primitive: “Is this something I hate? That hurts me? Something I fear?” If so—if the moment at hand somehow draws a “Yes”—the amygdala reacts instantaneously, like a neural tripwire, telegraphing a message of crisis to all parts of the brain.

- we no longer live in the Age of Reason. We don’t have reason we have computation. We don’t have a tree of knowledge; we have an information superhighway. We don’t have real intelligence; we have artificial intelligence. We no longer pursue truth, we seek data and signals. We no longer have philosophers, we have thinking pragmatists. We no longer have morals, we have lifestyles. We no longer have brains which serve as the seat of our thinking minds; we have neural sites, which remember, store body signals, control genes, generate dreams, anxieties and neuroses, quite independent of whether they think rationally or not. So starting from reason, where did we get?

Roosevelt fought hard for the United States to host the opening session [of the United Nations]; it seemed a magnanimous gesture to most of the delegates. But the real reason was to better enable the United States to eavesdrop on its guests. Coded messages between the foreign delegations and their distant capitals passed through U.S. telegraph lines in San Francisco. With wartime censorship laws still in effect, Western Union and the other commercial telegraph companies were required to pass on both coded and uncoded telegrams to U.S. Army codebreakers. Once the signals were captured, a specially designed time-delay device activated to allow recorders to be switched on. Devices were also developed to divert a single signal to several receivers. The intercepts were then forwarded to Arlington Hall, headquarters of the Army codebreakers, over forty-six special secure teletype lines. By the summer of 1945 the average number of daily messages had grown to 289,802, from only 46,865 in February 1943. The same soldiers who only a few weeks earlier had been deciphering German battle plans were now unraveling the codes and ciphers wound tightly around Argentine negotiating points. During the San Francisco Conference, for example, American codebreakers were reading messages sent to and from the French delegation, which was using the Hagelin M-209, a complex six-wheel cipher machine broken by the Army Security Agency during the war. The decrypts revealed how desperate France had become to maintain its image as a major world power after the war. On April 29, for example, Fouques Duparc, the secretary general of the French delegation, complained in an encrypted note to General Charles de Gaulle in Paris that France was not chosen to be one of the "inviting powers" to the conference. "Our inclusion among the sponsoring powers," he wrote, "would have signified, in the eyes of all, our return to our traditional place in the world." In charge of the San Francisco eavesdropping and codebreaking operation was Lieutenant Colonel Frank B. Rowlett, the protégé of William F. Friedman. Rowlett was relieved when the conference finally ended, and he considered it a great success. "Pressure of work due to the San Francisco Conference has at last abated," he wrote, "and the 24-hour day has been shortened. The feeling in the Branch is that the success of the Conference may owe a great deal to its contribution." The San Francisco Conference served as an important demonstration of the usefulness of peacetime signals intelligence. Impressive was not just the volume of messages intercepted but also the wide range of countries whose secrets could be read. Messages from Colombia provided details on quiet disagreements between Russia and its satellite nations as well as on "Russia's prejudice toward the Latin American countries." Spanish decrypts indicated that their diplomats in San Francisco were warned to oppose a number of Russian moves: "Red maneuver . . . must be stopped at once," said one. A Czechoslovakian message indicated that nation's opposition to the admission of Argentina to the UN. From the very moment of its birth, the United Nations was a microcosm of East-West spying. Just as with the founding conference, the United States pushed hard to locate the organization on American soil, largely to accommodate the eavesdroppers and codebreakers of NSA and its predecessors.

Unexpectedly, we found that the factors most people usually think of as driving group performance—i.e., cohesion, motivation, and satisfaction—were not statistically significant. The largest factor in predicting group intelligence was the equality of conversational turn taking; groups where a few people dominated the conversation were less collectively intelligent than those with a more equal distribution of conversational turn taking. The second most important factor was the social intelligence of a group’s members, as measured by their ability to read each other’s social signals. Women tend to do better at reading social signals, so groups with more women tended to do better (see the Social Signals Special Topic Box [at the end of Chapter 7]).

SETI   Many good-hearted people allowed their computers to work on packets of data acquired by SETI dishes in the hope of being part of discovering intelligent patterns to radio signals from deep space. That such signals ARE reported from time to time from far less extensive operations and that no such were reported (supposedly) by SETI of all those thousands of packets defies probability.

How can I think, feel, and behave differently to produce the effect/result that I want? Our mission, then, is to willfully move into the state of consciousness that allows us to connect to universal intelligence, make direct contact with the field of possibilities, and send out a clear signal that we truly expect to change and to see the results that we want—in the form of feedback—produced in our lives.

First, there is an old saying that “the future always foreshadows itself” via signs or signals of what is to come. Second, it is an accepted full part of wisdom to notice and take account of such signs. Third, human intelligence is considered one of the superlative attributes of our species, intelligence sufficient enough to recognize (theoretically anyway) disasters in the making. Fourth, however, there are no educational courses that might be called Recognition of Signs 101.

Incoming signals from the senses let the amygdala scan every experience for trouble. This puts the amygdala in a powerful post in mental life, something like a psychological sentinel, challenging every situation, every perception, with but one kind of question in mind, the most primitive: “Is this something I hate? That hurts me? Something I fear?” If so—if the moment at hand somehow draws a “Yes”—the amygdala reacts instantaneously, like a neural tripwire, telegraphing a message of crisis to all parts of the brain.

The emergence of self-organized ecoranges generates the potential for highly adaptable responses to environmental perturbations that might affect that ecorange. Within that system, all the plants are continually communicating with each other, sending chemical communications along the mycelial network to other plants in the community. (Plants also speak using auditory signals through a complex sound-based language that is far more ancient than the human though it exists in a much subtler sound spectrum than our own.)

In mathematics, students are at the mercy of rigidly applied algorithms. They learn to use certain formalisms in certain ways, often effectively, if provided with a pre-arranged signal that a particular formalism is wanted. In social studies and the humanities, the enemies of understanding are scripts and stereotypes. Students readily believe that events occur in typical ways, and they evoke these scripts even inappropriately. For example, they regard struggles between two parties in a dispute as a "good guy versus bad guy" movie script.

Women who seek a lasting mate, for example, have at their disposal a wide range of tactics, including displays of loyalty, signals of common interests, and acts of intelligence. Women purchase beauty products not because they have been brainwashed by the media, but because they have determined that using beauty products will increase their power to get what they want. Women are not unsuspecting dupes manipulated by the forces of Madison Avenue, but determine through their preferences which products they will consume—products that they perceive will enhance their value as a mate, friend, or group member.

In less than two years, I gained a clear understanding of the doctrine and operational technique of Social Democracy... The tactics of Social Democracy consisted in opening, at a given signal, a veritable onslaught of lies and slanders against the man whom they viewed as their strongest adversary-until his nerves gave way... simply in the hope of being allowed to live in peace... Thus did Social Democracy learn the value of strength, and for that reason it attacks mostly those who are of a stronger nature... They have less fear of a man of genius who lacks will-power than of a vigorous character with mediocre intelligence.

Those with a dismissive-avoidant attachment style tend to show higher levels of self-reliance, a reduced signaling of need for others, and a distancing, detached attitude toward parents or partners. In children, avoidance is related to aggression, antisocial behaviors, and inflated self-esteem. In adults, avoidance is related to low commitment in romantic relationships, avoidance of intimacy, higher levels of sexual coercion, and a more promiscuous, sexually unrestrained orientation.89 Dismissive-avoidant attachment bears the hallmark of a low-parenting strategy, favoring short-term relationships over intimate, long-term bonding.

In order to gain knowledge about a person through nonverbal pacifiers, there are a few guidelines you need to follow: (1) Recognize pacifying behaviors when they occur. I have provided you with all of the major pacifiers. As you make a concerted effort to spot these body signals, they will become increasingly easy to recognize in interactions with other people. (2) Establish a pacifying baseline for an individual. That way you can note any increase and/or intensity in that person’s pacifying behaviors and react accordingly. (3) When you see a person make a pacifying gesture, stop and ask yourself, “What caused him to do that?” You know the individual feels uneasy about something. Your job, as a collector of nonverbal intelligence, is to find out what that something is. (4) Understand that pacifying behaviors almost always are used to calm a person after a stressful event occurs. Thus, as a general principle, you can assume that if an individual is engaged in pacifying behavior, some stressful event or stimulus has preceded it and caused it to happen. (5) The ability to link a pacifying behavior with the specific stressor that caused it can help you better understand the person with whom you are interacting. (6) In certain circumstances you can actually say or do something to see if it stresses an individual (as reflected in an increase in pacifying behaviors) to better understand his thoughts and intentions. (7) Note what part of the body a person pacifies. This is significant, because the higher the stress, the greater the amount of facial or neck stroking is involved. (8) Remember, the greater the stress or discomfort, the greater the likelihood of pacifying behaviors to follow. Pacifiers are a great way to assess for comfort and discomfort. In a sense, pacifying behaviors are “supporting players” in our limbic reactions. Yet they reveal much about our emotional state and how we are truly feeling.

For years, the suspicion that Mr. Putin has a secret fortune has intrigued scholars, industry analysts, opposition figures, journalists and intelligence agencies but defied their efforts to uncover it. Numbers are thrown around suggesting that Mr. Putin may control $40 billion or even $70 billion, in theory making him the richest head of state in world history. For all the rumors and speculation, though, there has been little if any hard evidence, and Gunvor has adamantly denied any financial ties to Mr. Putin and repeated that denial on Friday. But Mr. Obama’s response to the Ukraine crisis, while derided by critics as slow and weak, has reinvigorated a 15-year global hunt for Mr. Putin’s hidden wealth. Now, as the Obama administration prepares to announce another round of sanctions as early as Monday targeting Russians it considers part of Mr. Putin’s financial circle, it is sending a not-very-subtle message that it thinks it knows where the Russian leader has his money, and that he could ultimately be targeted directly or indirectly. “It’s something that could be done that would send a very clear signal of taking the gloves off and not just dance around it,” said Juan C. Zarate, a White House counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush who helped pioneer the government’s modern financial campaign techniques to choke off terrorist money.

There is further proof of the evolution of the eye, as Shermer points out. This is the ineptitude of its "design": The anatomy of the human eye, in fact, shows anything but "intelligence" in its design. It is built upside down and backwards, requiring photons of light to travel through the cornea, lens, aquaeous fluid, blood vessels, ganglion cells, amacrine cells, horizontal cells, and bipolar cells before they reach the light-sensitive rods and cones that transduce the light signal into neutral impulses. - which are then sent to the visual cortex at the back of the brain for processing into meaningful patterns. For optimal vision, why would an intelligent designer have built an eye upside down and backward?

One of the simplest is the drive for survival, in other words, your very deep sense of self-protection. If, in the field of sensory inflows in which you are immersed, the parts of the self that gate inflows pick up sensory-encoded meanings that can affect your self-organizational integrity, they will have a very deep evolutionary drive to signal your conscious attention. However, if the paradigm or lens through which you view the world around you does not allow you to receive those signals consciously, this can be thought of as repression-driven gating then the unconscious parts of the self may begin to override the conscious programming. In response your emotional state or behavior may change, sometimes significantly. You just won’t know why.

In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on. All the telephones worked, and they sounded good, too. Rarely did anyone ever lose a call, and that was usually on an overseas line. Anyone could work a TV set, even your grandmother. Off, on, volume, change the channel, period. By then, just about everyone had an aerial on the roof, and the signal was strong: ten, twelve simple channels of programming, not all good, but lots of swell black-and-white movies from the thirties and forties, all day and most of the night. No soul-deadening porn or violence. Decent news programs and casual entertainment featuring intelligent, charming celebrities like Steve Allen, Groucho Marx, Jack Paar, Jack Benny, Rod Serling, and Ernie Kovacs. Yeah, call me old Uncle Fuckwad, I don’t care. William Blake’s “dark Satanic mills” of the industrial revolution may have enslaved the bodies of Victorian citizens, but information technology is a pure mindfuck. The TV Babies have morphed into the Palm People. For example, those people in the audience who can’t experience the performance unless they’re sending instant videos to their friends: Look at me, I must be alive, I can prove it, I’m filming this shit. You know what? I refuse to look at you. You’re a corpse. And you prove that every day, with everything you do and everything you say. Wake up, ya dope! Outside

The lesson we learn from Nightingale's experience is that, as painful as it may sound, we humans are barely able to reason on our own or when surrounded by like-minded people. When we try to reason this way, we end up rationalizing because we use arguments as self-reinforcing virtue signals. And the worst news is that the more intelligent we are and the more information we have access to, the more successful our rationalizations are. This is in part because we're more aware of what the members of the groups -- political parties, churches, and others -- that we belong to think, and we try to align with them. On the other hand, if you are exposed to an opinion and don't know where the opinion comes from, you're more likely to think about it on its merits.

First, our emotional state determines where we direct our attention, what we remember, and what we learn. Second is decision making: when we’re in the grip of any strong emotion—such as anger or sadness, but also elation or joy—we perceive the world differently, and the choices we make at that moment are influenced, for better or for worse. Third is our social relations. What we feel—and how we interpret other people’s feelings—sends signals to approach or avoid, to affiliate with someone or distance ourselves, to reward or punish. Fourth is the influence of emotions on our health. Positive and negative emotions cause different physiological reactions within our bodies and brains, releasing powerful chemicals that, in turn, affect our physical and mental well-being. And the fifth has to do with creativity, effectiveness, and performance.

In conjunction with his colleagues, Frantisek Baluska from the Institute of Cellular and Molecular Botany at the University of Bonn is of the opinion that brain-like structures can be found at root tips. In addition to signaling pathways, there are also numerous systems and molecules similar to those found in animals. When a root feels its way forward in the ground, it is aware of stimuli. The researchers measured electrical signals that led to changes in behavior after they were processed in a "transition zone." If the root encounters toxic substances, impenetrable stones, or saturated soil, it analyzes the situation and transmits the necessary adjustments to the growing tip. The root tip changes direction as a result of this communication and steers the growing root around the critical areas. Right now, the majority of plant researchers are skeptical about whether such behavior points to a repository for intelligence, the faculty of memory, and emotions. Among other things, they get worked up about carrying over findings in similar situations with animals and, at the end of the day, about how this threatens to blur the boundary between plants and animals. And so what? What would be so awful about that? The distinction between plant and animal is, after all, arbitrary and depends on the way an organism feeds itself: the former photosynthesizes and the latter eats other living beings. Finally, the only other big difference is in the amount of time it takes to process information and translate it into action. Does that mean that beings that live life in the slow lane are automatically worth less than ones on the fast track? Sometimes I suspect we would pay more attention to trees and other vegetation if we could establish beyond a doubt just how similar they are in many ways to animals.

Then there is degree of contrast: When determining contrast, the pre-attentional parts analyze incoming sensory data against the background inputs. As an example, if you are at a party where many people are talking, not only is the sound gated but the semantic meanings in the hum of conversation are also gated. Essentially, both sound and the meanings-in-the-sounds are reduced in intensity so you don’t get overwhelmed by the incoming sensory inputs. However, should you hear your name from across the crowded room, Did you hear what happened between Michael and Jenny? the gating channel that is contrasting sound meanings in the room will open more widely and allow the sensory input through. It signals the cerebral cortex to pay attention. Once signaled, the cortex, in association with other parts of the brain, uses stochastic processes to enhance the signal so that what is being said can be heard in detail.

You have got to be—” Her sentence is cut short when the elevator makes an abrupt stop, jostling both of us into the walls of the small carrier. “Huh, would you look at that?” I glance around the small room, wondering what’s wrong. “No, no, no,” Dottie says over and over again, as she rushes to the panel and presses the emergency button. When nothing happens, she presses all the other buttons. “That’s intelligent,” I say, arms crossed and observing her from behind. “Confuse the damn thing so it has no idea what to do.” She doesn’t answer, but instead pulls her phone out from her purse and starts holding it up in the air, searching for a signal. “It’s cute that you think raising the phone higher will grant you service. We’re in a metal box surrounded by concrete, sweetheart. I never get reception in here.” “Damn it,” she mutters, stuffing her phone back in her purse. “Looks like you’re stuck here with me until someone figures out the elevator broke, so it’s best you get comfortable.” I sit on the floor and then pat my lap. “You can sit right here.” “I’d rather lick the elevator floor.” “There’s a disgusting visual. Suit yourself.” I get comfortable and start rifling through my bag of food. Thank God I grabbed dinner before this, because I’m starving, and if I was stuck in this elevator with no food, I’d be a raging bastard, bashing his head against the metal door from pure hunger. Low blood sugar does crazy things to me. I bring the term hangry to a new level. There’s only— “Why are you smiling like that?” I look up at her. “Smiling like what? I’m just being normal.” “No, you’re smiling like you’re having a conversation inside your head and you think you’re funny.” How would she know that? “Well, I am funny.” I pop open my to-go box filled to the brim with a Philly cheesesteak sandwich and tons of fries. Staring at it, I say, “Oh yes, come to papa.

But once we shut ourselves away, we soon discover that we are not as alone as we thought. We are in the company of the words of those who came before us, of other people's stories, other people's books, other people's words, the thing we call tradition. I believe literature to be the most valuable hoard that humanity has gathered in its quest to understand itself. Societies, tribes, and peoples grow more intelligent, richer, and more advanced as they pay attention to the troubled words of their authors, and, as we all know, the burning of books and the denigration of writers are both signals that dark and improvident times are upon us. But literature is never just a national concern. The writer who shuts himself up in a room and first goes on a journey inside himself will, over the years, discover literature's eternal rule: he must have the artistry to tell his own stories as if they were other people's stories, and to tell other people's stories as if they were his own, for this is what literature is. But we must first travel through other people's stories and books.

Knowing one’s emotions. Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As we will see in Chapter 4, the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy. People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from whom to marry to what job to take. 2. Managing emotions. Handling feelings so they are appropriate is an ability that builds on self-awareness. Chapter 5 will examine the capacity to soothe oneself, to shake off rampant anxiety, gloom, or irritability—and the consequences of failure at this basic emotional skill. People who are poor in this ability are constantly battling feelings of distress, while those who excel in it can bounce back far more quickly from life’s setbacks and upsets. 3. Motivating oneself. As Chapter 6 will show, marshaling emotions in the service of a goal is essential for paying attention, for self-motivation and mastery, and for creativity. Emotional self-control—delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness—underlies accomplishment of every sort. And being able to get into the “flow” state enables outstanding performance of all kinds. People who have this skill tend to be more highly productive and effective in whatever they undertake. 4. Recognizing emotions in others. Empathy, another ability that builds on emotional self-awareness, is the fundamental “people skill.” Chapter 7 will investigate the roots of empathy, the social cost of being emotionally tone-deaf, and the reason empathy kindles altruism. People who are empathic are more attuned to the subtle social signals that indicate what others need or want. This makes them better at callings such as the caring professions, teaching, sales, and management. 5. Handling relationships. The art of relationships is, in large part, skill in managing emotions in others. Chapter 8 looks at social competence and incompetence, and the specific skills involved. These are the abilities that undergird popularity, leadership, and interpersonal effectiveness. People who excel in these skills do well at anything that relies on interacting smoothly with others; they are social stars.

The first is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute. In order to bring clarity, you’ve got to synthesize the complex. Leaders take internal and external noise and synthesize a message from it, recognizing the true signal within a lot of noise. I don’t want to hear that someone is the smartest person in the room. I want to hear them take their intelligence and use it to develop deep shared understanding within teams and define a course of action. Second, leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company. It’s insufficient to focus exclusively on your own unit. Leaders need to inspire optimism, creativity, shared commitment, and growth through times good and bad. They create an environment where everyone can do his or her best work. And they build organizations and teams that are stronger tomorrow than today. ​Third, and finally, they find a way to deliver success, to make things happen. This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on; finding balance between long-term success and short-term wins; and being boundary-less and globally minded in seeking solutions.

Of course plants don’t have neurons or brains. But research was suggesting they might have analogous structures, or at least some physiology that could do similar things, and a cognitive capacity that deserved to be taken seriously. Plants produce electrical impulses, and seem to have nodes at the tips of their roots that serve as local command centers. Glutamate and glycine, two of the most common neurotransmitters in animal brains, are present in plants also, and seem to be crucial to how they pass information through their stems and leaves. They have been found to form, store, and access memories, sense incredibly subtle changes in their environment, and send highly sophisticated chemicals aloft on the air in response. They send signals to different body parts to coordinate defenses. Plant neurobiology “aims to study plants in their full sensory and communicative complexity,” they wrote. And what is a brain, really, other than a hunk of specialized, excitable cells, coursing with electrical impulses? “Plant neurobiology” was nonliteral, sure, but it wasn’t a stretch, its proponents said. We don’t need new words for things that are functionally similar—just new prefixes. Plant brains, plant synapses, plant thought. See, they said: Darwin was doing it a century ago.

Funding did become available for a much more modest proposal: to send a carefully coded message in 1971 to aliens in outer space. A coded message containing 1,679 bits of information was transmitted via the giant Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico toward the Globular Cluster M13, about 25,100 light-years away. It was the world’s first cosmic greeting card, containing relevant information about the human race. But no reply message was received. Perhaps the aliens were not impressed with us, or possibly the speed of light got in the way. Given the large distances involved, the earliest date for a reply message would be 52,174 years from now. Since then, some scientists have expressed misgivings about advertising our existence to aliens in space, at least until we know their intentions toward us. They disagree with the proponents of the METI Project (Messaging to Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) who actively promote sending signals to alien civilizations in space. The reasoning behind the METI Project is that Earth already sends vast amounts of radio and TV signals into outer space, so a few more messages from the METI Project will not make much difference. But the critics of METI believe that we should not needlessly increase our chances of being discovered by potentially hostile aliens.

It was certainly true that I had “no sense of humour” in that I found nothing funny. I didn’t know, and perhaps would never know, the feeling of compulsion to exhale and convulse in the very specific way that humans evolved to do. Nor did I know the specific emotion of relief that is bound to it. But it would be wrong, I think, to say that I was incapable of using humour as a tool. As I understood it, humour was a social reflex. The ancestors of humans had been ape-animals living in small groups in Africa. Groups that worked together were more likely to survive and have offspring, so certain reflexes and perceptions naturally emerged to signal between members of the group. Yawning evolved to signal wake-rest cycles. Absence of facial hair and the dilation of blood vessels in the face evolved to signal embarrassment, anger, shame and fear. And laughter evolved to signal an absence of danger. If a human is out with a friend and they are approached by a dangerous-looking stranger, having that stranger revealed as benign might trigger laughter. I saw humour as the same reflex turned inward, serving to undo the effects of stress on the body by activating the parasympathetic nervous system. Interestingly, it also seemed to me that humour had extended, like many things, beyond its initial evolutionary context. It must have been very quickly adopted by human ancestor social systems. If a large human picks on a small human there’s a kind of tension that emerges where the tribe wonders if a broader violence will emerge. If a bystander watches and laughs they are non-verbally signaling to the bully that there’s no need for concern, much like what had occurred minutes before with my comments about Myrodyn, albeit in a somewhat different context. But humour didn’t stop there. Just as a human might feel amusement at things which seem bad but then actually aren’t, they might feel amusement at something which merely has the possibility of being bad, but doesn’t necessarily go through the intermediate step of being consciously evaluated as such: a sudden realization. Sudden realizations that don’t incur any regret were, in my opinion, the most alien form of humour, even if I could understand how they linked back to the evolutionary mechanism. A part of me suspected that this kind of surprise-based or absurdity-based humour had been refined by sexual selection as a signal of intelligence. If your prospective mate is able to offer you regular benign surprises it would (if you were human) not only feel good, but show that they were at least in some sense smarter or wittier than you, making them a good choice for a mate. The role of surprise and non-verbal signalling explained, by my thinking, why explaining humour was so hard for humans. If one explained a joke it usually ceased to be a surprise, and in situations where the laughter served as an all-clear-no-danger signal, explaining that verbally would crush the impulse to do it non-verbally.

We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.

Let’s take the threshold idea one step further. If intelligence matters only up to a point, then past that point, other things—things that have nothing to do with intelligence—must start to matter more. It’s like basketball again: once someone is tall enough, then we start to care about speed and court sense and agility and ball-handling skills and shooting touch. So, what might some of those other things be? Well, suppose that instead of measuring your IQ, I gave you a totally different kind of test. Write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects: a brick a blanket This is an example of what’s called a “divergence test” (as opposed to a test like the Raven’s, which asks you to sort through a list of possibilities and converge on the right answer). It requires you to use your imagination and take your mind in as many different directions as possible. With a divergence test, obviously there isn’t a single right answer. What the test giver is looking for are the number and the uniqueness of your responses. And what the test is measuring isn’t analytical intelligence but something profoundly different—something much closer to creativity. Divergence tests are every bit as challenging as convergence tests, and if you don’t believe that, I encourage you to pause and try the brick-and-blanket test right now. Here, for example, are answers to the “uses of objects” test collected by Liam Hudson from a student named Poole at a top British high school: (Brick). To use in smash-and-grab raids. To help hold a house together. To use in a game of Russian roulette if you want to keep fit at the same time (bricks at ten paces, turn and throw—no evasive action allowed). To hold the eiderdown on a bed tie a brick at each corner. As a breaker of empty Coca-Cola bottles. (Blanket). To use on a bed. As a cover for illicit sex in the woods. As a tent. To make smoke signals with. As a sail for a boat, cart or sled. As a substitute for a towel. As a target for shooting practice for short-sighted people. As a thing to catch people jumping out of burning skyscrapers.

You are a thinker. I am a thinker. We think that all human beings are thinkers. The amazing fact is that we tend to think against artificial intelligence — that various kind of computers or artificial robots can think, but most of us never cast any doubt on human thinking potential in general. If during natural conservation with human any computer or artificial robot could generate human-like responses by using its own ‘brain’ but not ready-form programming language which is antecedently written and included in the brain design and which consequently determine its function and response, then that computer or artificial robot would unquestionably be acknowledged as a thinker as we are. But is it absolutely true that all humans are capable of using their own brain while interpreting various signals and responding them? Indeed, religion or any other ideology is some kind of such program which is written by others and which determines our vision, mind and behavior models, depriving us of a clear and logical thinking. It forces us to see the world with its eyes, to construct our mind as it says and control our behavior as it wants. There can be no freedom, no alternative possibilities. You don’t need to understand its claims, you need only believe them. Whatever is unthinkable and unimaginable for you, is said higher for your understanding, you cannot even criticise what seems to be illogical and absurd for you. The unwritten golden rule of religion and its Holy Scripture is that — whatever you think, you cannot contradict what is written there. You can reconcile what is illogical and absurd in religion with logic and common sense, if it is possible, if not, you should confine your thinking to that illogicality and absurdity, which in turn would make you more and more a muddled thinker. For instance, if it is written there that you should cut head or legs of anyone who dare criticize your religion and your prophet, you should unquestionably believe that it is just and right punishment for him. You can reason in favor of softening that cruel image of your religion by saying that that ‘just and right punishment’ is considered within religious community, but not secular society. However, the absurdity of your vision still remains, because as an advocate of your religion you dream of its spread all over the world, where the cruel and insane claims of your religion would be the norm and standard for everyone. If it is written there that you can sexually exploit any slave girl or woman, especially who doesn’t hold your religious faith or she is an atheist, you should support that sexual violence without any question. After all of them, you would like to be named as a thinker. In my mind, you are a thinker, but a thinker who has got a psychological disorder. It is logical to ask whether all those ‘thinkers’ represent a potential danger for the humanity. I think, yes. However, we are lucky that not all believers would like to penetrate into deeper ‘secrets’ of religion. Many of them believe in God, meditate and balance their spiritual state without getting familiar with what is written in holy scriptures or holding very vague ideas concerning their content. Many believers live a secular life by using their own brain for it. One should love anybody only if he thinks that he should love him/her; if he loves him/her because of God, or religious claims, he can easily kill him/her once because of God, or religious claims, too. I think the grave danger is the last motive which religion cause to arise.

Be wary, however, when you come across phrases like “the computer thinks the Yankees will win the World Series.” If these are used as shorthand for a more precise phrase (“the output of the computer program is that the Yankees will win the World Series”), they may be totally benign. With all the information in the world today, it’s certainly helpful to have machines that can make calculations much faster than we can. But if you get the sense that the forecaster means this more literally—that he thinks of the computer as a sentient being, or the model as having a mind of its own—it may be a sign that there isn’t much thinking going on at all. Whatever biases and blind spots the forecaster has are sure to be replicated in his computer program. We have to view technology as what it always has been—a tool for the betterment of the human condition. We should neither worship at the altar of technology nor be frightened by it. Nobody has yet designed, and perhaps no one ever will, a computer that thinks like a human being.49 But computers are themselves a reflection of human progress and human ingenuity: it is not really “artificial” intelligence if a human designed the artifice.

What Emily rejects is not religion, but coercion. Signalling from behind her public failure is an intelligence collected enough to combat bullies who want to take over her mind and hardwire into it a formulaic ‘tale’—the ‘tale’ of all fundamentalist faiths that close down the right to freedom of judgement.

His research has shown that sensory signals from eye or ear travel first in the brain to the thalamus, and then—across a single synapse—to the amygdala; a second signal from the thalamus is routed to the neocortex—the thinking brain.

So what sort of signal does it send when a man as intelligent and thoughtful as Bill Bennett decides to contradict his entire body of work to support a man like Donald Trump? What value is left in intelligent reasoning? Donald Trump didn’t crash the guardrails of political and civil standards; rather, the highway officials eagerly removed the guardrails and stood by cheering as the lunatic behind the wheel drove the party straight off the cliff of reason. When a Williams College and Harvard Law grad like Bill Bennett considers a man who found the nuclear triad a puzzling mystery in a primary debate qualified to be president, the idiotocracy is in full ascendant. John F. Kennedy once held a dinner for all the living Nobel Prize laureates at the White House. Donald Trump invited the CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, to the White House so that he could complain about his Twitter account. Trump holds to a theory that there is some vast left-wing conspiracy in the tech world illuminati to personally slight him at every opportunity. But that’s just one of the many conspiracies that Trump embraces.

After all, the dinosaurs were superbly adapted to their environment; even if they perceived the signals of change, they became extinct because they could not adapt to unfamiliar environmental conditions.

obscurity" involves questions that are often unrecognized and not seen to be relevant until they are posed explicitly—which requires curiosity, a quality often in short supply. Data to illuminate obscurities are also often available—even if found in non-traditional sources that require imagination to identify, if procedures to filter signal from noise can be developed, and

Building emotional agility: 1. “Label your thoughts and emotions” My coworker is wrong—he makes me so angry becomes I’m having the thought that my coworker is wrong, and I’m feeling anger. 2. Accept them “The anger was a signal that something important was at stake and that he needed to take productive action. Instead of yelling at people, he could make a clear request of a colleague or move swiftly on a pressing issue. The more Jeffrey accepted his anger and brought his curiosity to it, the more it seemed to support rather than undermine his leadership.” 3. Act on your values “We encourage leaders to focus on the concept of workability: Is your response going to serve you and your organization in the long term as well as the short term? Will it help you steer others in a direction that furthers your collective purpose? Are you taking a step toward being the leader you most want to be and living the life you most want to live?

Amit Patel, a young Stanford graduate student with a special interest in “data mining,” is frequently credited with the groundbreaking insight into the significance of Google’s accidental data caches. His work with these data logs persuaded him that detailed stories about each user—thoughts, feelings, interests—could be constructed from the wake of unstructured signals that trailed every online action. These data, he concluded, actually provided a “broad sensor of human behavior” and could be put to immediate use in realizing cofounder Larry Page’s dream of Search as a comprehensive artificial intelligence.

Some twenty-three hundred miles away Major General H.H. “Hap” Arnold, head of the Army Air Corps, had traveled to Hamilton Field near Sacramento to personally see off a flight of thirteen B-l 7s destined for MacArthur in the Philippines by way of Hawaii. The first leg to Hickam Field took fourteen hours, so the big bombers flew with only four-man crews and were unarmed. One of the pilots objected. At least they ought to carry their bomb sights and machine guns. Arnold said they could be put aboard but without ammunition to save weight. So the bombers could home in on its signal, Major General Frederick L. Martin, head of the Hawaiian Air Force, had his staff ask station WGMB in Honolulu to stay on all night. Sure thing, general. Another night of ukuleles and Glenn Miller drifting out across the Pacific courtesy of the U.S. Army Air Corps. When Lieutenant Colonel George W. Bicknell of Army intelligence heard about it, he blew up. Why tip our hands whenever we have planes coming in? Why not keep WGMB on the air every night? One of those who caught the station was Lieutenant Kermit Tyler on his way to work the graveyard shift at the radar coordinating station at Fort Shafter. Must be planes coming in from the States, he told himself.

For then, if another bull market comes along, he will take the big rise not as a danger signal of an inevitable fall, not as a chance to cash in on his handsome profits, but rather as a vindication of the inflation hypothesis and as a reason to keep on buying common stocks no matter how high the market level nor how low the dividend return. That way lies sorrow.

And a million other distractions. Whenever that happens, I return my attention back to center. It’s like tuning to a radio station. I can easily lose the signal and let the dial wander to a different station, one filled with anxiety and stress. But I know what the bliss station feels like. I know the music it plays and how my body feels when I’m absorbed in it. Because I’ve been to the center so many times, I can usually find that station just a few minutes after I close my eyes. So I tune in there again now. I feel an immediate expansiveness in my consciousness, a sense of connection with the entire universe. I feel a sense of welcome, as though I’ve come home. I’m living at the address in consciousness where perfect well-being is the only reality. As I retune myself to center, another wave of bliss floods through my brain, mind, and body. I feel my consciousness lift out of my normal state, like a balloon rising in the wind, to meet and merge with a consciousness so vast and expansive that it has no end. I know that this is the same intelligence that runs the universe in such perfect order. It has a sense of rightness to it that all the cells in my body respond to. Every cell knows it’s come home, that it’s connected to the universal consciousness with which my mind has merged. The local reality field of my mind and body surrenders to union with the great nonlocal reality field of the universe. There is no room in this consciousness for worry, doubt, or fear. The anxious thoughts with which I began the meditation session are now left far behind me, as the balloon soars high above the world of ordinary local reality. My breath slows and deepens. Every breath is a connection with that great universal consciousness. Every inbreath flows out of that consciousness, while every outbreath flows into that consciousness. A warm feeling of well-being floods my body. Though the cool morning air felt chilly when I began the meditation, my body is now infused with the glow of connection. As I center myself again and again, I notice an intense glistening silver-white vortex of light above my head. I drift up through the portal. I find myself in a level of undifferentiated light. I look down at my mind, and it is flooded with that same white light. I am in Bliss Brain. Everything dissolves into the light. There’s no body, no me, no mind, no universe. Only the light. The light simply is. It has no beginning and no end. It stretches to infinity. It’s all there is; there’s nothing else in this real world of light other than the light. I lose myself in oneness with the light. 2.1. Entering Bliss Brain. There’s a tingling pressure in the center of my forehead where the connection to the light tunnel is strongest. Angelic music echoes in my brain, sound adding itself to light. My

the subject doesn’t exist “objectively,” but it also doesn’t exist in itself, as an isolated solipsist monad: it exists only for another subject, it comes to be through stumbling upon the abyss of another’s desire, through not knowing what the Other wants from it. We encounter in reality elements which appear to signal another subject’s presence (artificial buildings, writings …) and subject is what we presuppose to be implied by these artefacts. That’s why Artificial Intelligence is so disturbing: it can generate objects which we are accustomed to perceive as the expression of another subject.

The intercept slips are pulled into the hut on the wooden tray and then move from chair to chair according to some highly organized scheme that Waterhouse can only vaguely grasp at this point. Someone explains to him that the bombes just broke the day’s codes around sundown, and so the entire day’s load of intercepts has just come down the tunnel from Hut 6 during the last couple of hours. He decides to think of the hut as a mathematical black box for the time being—that is, he’ll concentrate only on its inputs and outputs of information and ignore the internal details. Bletchley Park, taken in its entirety, is a black box of sorts: random letters stream into it, strategic intelligence streams out, and the internal particulars are of no interest to most of the people on the Ultra distribution list. The question that Waterhouse is here to figure out is: is there another vector of information coming out of this place, hidden subliminally in the teletype signals and the behaviors of the Allied commanders?

The Abwehr also achieved a great success against the Dutch resistance beginning in March 1942. It called this counter-intelligence coup Operation North Pole, or the Englandspiel. This disaster was almost entirely due to appallingly lax practices in N Section at SOE’s London headquarters. An SOE radio operator was picked up in a sweep in The Hague. The Abwehr forced him to transmit to London. He did so, assuming that, because he had left off the security check at the end of his message, London would know that he had been captured. But to his horror London assumed that he had simply forgotten it, and replied telling him to arrange a drop zone for another agent to be parachuted in. A German reception committee was waiting for the new agent, and he was in turn forced to signal back as instructed. The chain continued, with one agent after another seized on arrival. Each was deeply shocked to find that the Germans knew everything about them, even the colour of the walls in their briefing room back in England. The Abwehr and SD, for once working harmoniously together, thus managed to capture around fifty Dutch officers and agents. Anglo-Dutch relations were severely damaged by this disaster; in fact many people in the Netherlands suspected treachery at the London end. There was no conspiracy, just a terrible combination of incompetence, complacency and ignorance of conditions in occupied Holland.

the dishonor that accompanies enslavement. Its modern formation is the residue, the assumption of criminality flash-signaled by skin color. People who say this is not so, that there is a disproportionate percentage of crime committed by blacks, miss something: the unconscionable, immoral, and dangerous treatment of blacks by the justice system and the press. It is unconscionable because it is racist disinformation. Unless, for example, you can intelligently use the phrase “white on white crime,” you cannot use the phrase “black on black crime.

A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.” Michael Hayden, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, sent a distress signal when he wrote (in the New York Times): “These are truly uncharted waters for the country. We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality, or occasionally over what constituted objective reality, but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself.” The battle lines, Hayden perceived, made for some strange bedfellows. “In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement, and science—all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based.

So we can think of the precepts both as keys to self discovery, allowing us to see how habitual patterns of thinking lead us to do things that are hurtful to ourselves and others, and as companions signaling us when we are about to take hurtful action. They encourage us in the spirit of open questioning to unveil our deepest beliefs that define for us the shape and limitations of how we view who we are. They reveal with crystal clarity the truth that our happiness and well-being are intricately connected to the happiness and well-being of others; we can't have one without the other. In the deepest sense, our actions are our heritage let go into the world.

An intelligent and industrious crofter was proud to show our commissioner a cart of his own particular invention, and which, though furnished with what is proverbially regarded as a superfluity in the shape of of a 'third wheel', seemed exceedingly well adapted to its purpose. It was in use at the time for the purpose of driving home turnips from the field, the team consisting of the owner's two cows; and a more tractable or docile team it would have been difficult to imagine, indeed the assurance was given by a neighbour that not only did they obey their owner readily and efficiently in the draught, but that one of them, in particular, would come from the most distant part of the holding whenever he chose to call and wave his hat as a signal that her presence was wanted for business!

The assistant manager had exhausted his power of initiative by volunteering to call her. The others volunteered nothing. The signal engineer was a college-boyish man in his thirties, who kept saying aggressively, “But this has never happened before, Miss Taggart! The interlocker has never failed. It’s not supposed to fail. We know our jobs, we can take care of it as well as anybody can—but not if it breaks down when it’s not supposed to!” She could not tell whether the dispatcher, an elderly man with years of railroad work behind him, still retained his intelligence but chose to hide it, or whether months of suppressing it had choked it for good, granting him the safety of stagnation.

In today's rapidly evolving world, the saying 'time waits for no one' has never rung truer. The relentless march of seconds, minutes, and hours continues—indifferent to our aspirations and dreams. But here's the twist: we can harness the very essence of time's unceasing rhythm to our advantage. The clock's unyielding tick-tock is not a foe; it's our most potent ally, signaling the urgency for disruption and innovation.

Hero opened her mouth, still unsure of whether to use English or Tagalog when talking to Paz. Paz had a habit of speaking to Roni in a mixture of English, Tagalog, and Pangasinan. It felt like Roni didn't really know the difference between Tagalog and Pangasinan, and moved between the two interchangeably as if they were one language. Nobody had told her otherwise, Hero supposed. But for Hero, listening to the mixture was like listening to a radio whose transmission would occasionally short out; she'd get half a sentence, then nothing -- eventually the intelligible parts would start back up, but she'd already lost her place in the conversation. But when Pol would come in, they'd switch to English, and like adjusting a dial to get a sharper signal, Hero would be able to tune in again.

The driving force behind many of Israel’s most celebrated defense products is Unit 8200. The intelligence unit of the IDF, it is the equivalent of the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US and is staffed by elite young recruits with an appetite for spying, computer hacking, and surveillance. Its primary goal is mass monitoring of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, detailing all their personal and political information, and listening to communications from allies and foes across the world. This is achieved principally through a base in the Negev desert where lines of satellite dishes suck up domestic and international calls and a range of other communications. The Urim base feeds information to Unit 8200 and Israel collates details from both the base and covert listening posts in its embassies around the globe. Urim is one of the world’s biggest signals intelligence stations.

US agencies had collected other revealing intelligence as well. In a triumph of signals collection, the intel community had penetrated Russian communications networks. They now had direct access to Russian battlefield communications. They were listening in real time as Russian commanders discussed in detail preparing and positioning their units for attack.

One way to deal with the problem is with the “efference copy” mechanisms I described earlier. As you move, you send a signal to the parts of yourself that deal with perception, telling them to ignore some of what comes in: “Don’t worry, that’s just me.

THE SIGNAL CAME FROM XENIA, a small planet in a modest star system near the tip of one spiral arm of the Pinwheel Galaxy. There, at the start of a night that lasted for several Earth years, something like a child held up something not quite a flashlight to something quite unlike the Earth’s night sky. Near the child stood the closest living thing to what might be called its parent. On Xenia, the entire species of intelligent beings contributed a little germ plasm to birth each new child. But each Xenian was given one child to raise. On Xenia, everyone was everyone else’s parent and everyone else’s child, everyone’s older sister and younger brother all at once. When one person died, so did everyone and no one. On Xenia, fear and desire and hunger and fatigue and sadness and all other transitory feelings were lost in a shared grace, the way that separate stars are lost in the daytime sun. “There,” the something-like-a-father said to its something-like-a-child, in something almost like speech. “A little higher. Right up there.” The little one lay back, floating on its living kinship raft above the intelligent soil. It felt its not-quite arm nudged by a process of assistance no one from Earth would have a name for. “There?” the younger one asked. “Right there? Why didn’t they ever answer?” The older one replied not in sound or light but in changes in the surrounding air. “We bathed them in signals for thousands of their generations. We tried everything we could think of. We never managed to get their attention.” The sequence of chemicals that the young one emitted was not quite a laugh. It was a whole verdict, really, an entire astrobiological theory. “They must have been very busy.” THE DAYS LENGTHENED.

the Zhengzhou Information Science and Technology Institute does not actually exist. It has no website, no phone number and no buildings. It does have a post office box in Henan province’s capital city, Zhengzhou, but that’s about it. The name is in fact a cover for the university that trains China’s military hackers and signals intelligence officers, the People’s Liberation Army Information Engineering University, which is based in Zhengzhou.109 Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Clemson University in South Carolina, Louisiana State University, and City University of New York have all collaborated with individuals who disguise their affiliation with this PLA university, which is in effect its cyberwarfare training school.

The various branches of the US military have special operations forces. These are made up of units of soldiers who have been specially trained to tackle the most risky and dangerous military operations in the world—most of which are never heard about by the general public. Special-ops forces such as the Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, Marine RECONs, and Air Force Special Tactics are comprised of the most elite soldiers in the world. Their training is beyond rigorous, and the qualifications to join such exclusive groups of warriors are extremely high. These elite soldiers make up a small percentage of the total military, but they are the tip of the spear when it comes to critical combat operations. These units usually operate in small numbers, drop behind enemy lines, practice tactics repetitively before executing a given operation, and train for every combat condition they might encounter. But even with an exceptional level of training and expertise, there is one critical component that is absolutely necessary for them to successfully reach their objective: communication. These elite special-ops fighters are part of a larger overarching entity with which they must stay in communication—SOCOM. This acronym stands for Special Operations Command.1 Key to their success from the elite soldier on the field all the way to the commander-in-chief is communication through SOCOM. A unit or soldier on mission in the theater of battle can have the latest weapons and technology, but they cannot access the fuller power and might of the military without the critical link—communications. If a satellite phone goes down or can’t access a signal, this life-or-death communication is broken. Without the ability to call in for air support when being overrun, medical evacuation when someone is injured, or passing on key intelligence information to SOCOM, an operation can be compromised. When communication is absent, things can go south in a hurry. In the realm of special military operations, communication is life.

Read the notes.Never buy a stock without reading the footnotes to the financial statements in the annual report. Usually labeled “summary of significant accounting policies,” one key note describes how the company recognizes revenue, records inventories, treats installment or contract sales, expenses its marketing costs, and accounts for the other major aspects of its business.7 In the other footnotes, watch for disclosures about debt, stock options, loans to customers, reserves against losses, and other “risk factors” that can take a big chomp out of earnings. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like “capitalized,” “deferred,” and “restructuring”—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like “began,” “change,” and “however.” None of those words mean you should not buy the stock, but all mean that you need to investigate further. Be sure to compare the footnotes with those in the financial statements of at least one firm that’s a close competitor, to see how aggressive your company’s accountants are. Read more. If you are an enterprising investor willing to put plenty of time and energy into your portfolio, then you owe it to yourself to learn more about financial reporting. That’s the only way to minimize your odds of being misled by a shifty earnings statement. Three solid books full of timely and specific examples are Martin Fridson and Fernando Alvarez’s Financial Statement Analysis, Charles Mulford and Eugene Comiskey’s The Financial Numbers Game, and Howard Schilit’s Financial Shenanigans. 8

In the imagination of two late-twentieth-century filmmakers, an unseen force of artificial intelligence has overtaken the human species, has managed to control humans in an alternate reality in which everything one sees, feels, hears, tastes, smells, touches is in actuality a program. There are programs within programs, and humans become not just programmed but are in danger of and, in fact, well on their way to becoming nothing more than programs. What is reality and what is a program morph into one. The interlocking program passes for life itself. The great quest in the film series The Matrix involves those humans who awaken to this realization as they search for a way to escape their entrapment. Those who accept their programming get to lead deadened, surface lives enslaved to a semblance of reality. They are captives, safe on the surface, as long as they are unaware of their captivity. Perhaps it is the unthinking acquiescence, the blindness to one’s imprisonment, that is the most effective way for human beings to remain captive. People who do not know that they are captive will not resist their bondage. But those who awaken to their captivity threaten the hum of the matrix. Any attempt to escape their imprisonment risks detection, signals a breach in the order, exposes the artifice of unreality that has been imposed upon human beings. The Matrix, the unseen master program fed by the survival instinct of an automated collective, does not react well to threats to its existence. In a crucial moment, a man who has only recently awakened to the program in which he and his species are ensnared consults a wise woman, the Oracle, who, it appears, could guide him. He is uncertain and wary, as he takes a seat next to her on a park bench that may or may not be real. She speaks in code and metaphor. A flock of birds alights on the pavement beyond them. “See those birds,” the Oracle says to him. “At some point a program was written to govern them.” She looks up and scans the horizon. “A program was written to watch over the trees and the wind, the sunrise and sunset. There are programs running all over the place.” Some of these programs go without notice, so perfectly attuned they are to their task, so deeply embedded in the drone of existence. “The ones doing their job,” she tells him, “doing what they were meant to do are invisible. You’d never even know they were here.” So, too, with the caste system as it goes about its work in silence, the string of a puppet master unseen by those whose subconscious it directs, its instructions an intravenous drip to the mind, caste in the guise of normalcy, injustice looking just, atrocities looking unavoidable to keep the machinery humming, the matrix of caste as a facsimile for life itself and whose purpose is maintaining the primacy of those hoarding and holding tight to power.

The odors perceived by the ant seem to lead to a highly standardized course of conduct; but the value of a simple stimulus, such as an odor, for conveying information depends not only on the information conveyed by the stimulus itself but on the whole nervous constitution of the sender and the receiver of the stimulus as well. Suppose I find myself in the woods with an intelligent savage who cannot speak my language and whose language I cannot speak. Even without any code of sign language common to the two of us, I can learn a great deal from him. All I need to do is to be alert to those moments when he shows the signs of emotion or interest. I then cast my eyes around, perhaps paying special attention to the direction of his glance, and fix in my memory what I see or hear. It will not be long before I discover the things which seem important to him, not because he has communicated them to me by language, but because I myself have observed them. In other words, a signal without an intrinsic content may acquire meaning in his mind by what he observes at the time, and may acquire meaning in my mind by what I observe at the time. The ability that he has to pick out the moments of my special, active attention is in itself a language as varied in possibilities as the range of impressions that the two of us are able to encompass. Thus social animals may have an active, intelligent, flexible means of communication long before the development of language.

When the neocortex wants to do something, it sends a signal to the old brain, in a sense asking the old brain to do its bidding. For example, breathing is a function of the brain stem, requiring no thought or input from the neocortex. The neocortex can temporarily control breathing, as when you consciously decide to hold your breath. But if the brain stem detects that your body needs more oxygen, it will ignore the neocortex and take back control. Similarly, the neocortex might think, 'Don't eat this piece of cake. It isn't healthy.'' But if older and more primitive parts of the brain say, 'Looks good, smells good, eat it,' the cake can be hard to resist.

When I go out into the street and look people in the eye, I understand how the system works on society. Human beings have abandoned without realizing what is truly essential in this life, and they have done so because there are many titles to be harvested waiting in the dens of inclusive indoctrination, many jobs that demand that doctrine, many tributes and debts to silence Caesar, in this frivolous and superficial holographic recreation of life, love is similar to a colic, none of them believe that feeling "butterflies in the stomach" is an experience we are part of when we are in the first stage of falling in love. So, all that once was, no longer will be, and depersonalizing the human race is a great job of social engineering that the ancient shapers of humanity did very well in times past and present. But we cannot cross the bridge or break the gap or make a quantum leap through consciousness if we do not unite! If we cannot connect our hearts with our brains and send a signal across the skies to the farthest reaches of this planet, we will be lost forever! So do you realize what I am talking about? Do you understand why to this world you are just a number that adds up with your work and subtracts with your old age? Do you understand why it is necessary to regain that power before it is too late? The new generations are being subjected to a large-scale social experiment, the days will come when the men and women of the future will be replaced by a thing similar to artificial intelligence and will no longer need feelings, much less organs. So... When I go out on the street and look people in the eye, that's when I understand how the system works on society. From the book The Game of Life

British Spitfires, using signals intelligence to pinpoint the German Luftwaffe headquarters, shot up the San Domenico Palace—a grand hotel in Taormina, once favored by D. H. Lawrence—and unhinged the Axis air defenses just as invaders approached the island. Little

You may believe you are above others, more intelligent, better, morally superior, more virtuous, more righteous, more genuine, but unless you have awareness, which is related to your pineal gland, Claustrum oil, and stimulated mainly by meditation and sunlight, these traits that only exist in your mind will soon disappear when you realize that you have been totally blind and oblivious to the real world you live in. That is why the pineal gland has been the target, from the beginning.

is like information theory; it is noise driving out signal. But it is noise posing as signal so you do not even recognize it as noise. The intelligence agencies call it disinformation, something the Soviet Bloc relies on heavily. If you can float enough disinformation into circulation you will totally abolish everyone’s contact with reality, probably your own included.

At the time of my visit, Finnish evolutionary ecologist Aino Kalske, Japanese chemical ecologist Kaori Shiojiri, and Cornell chemical ecologist André Kessler had recently found that goldenrods that live in peaceful areas without much threat from predators will issue chemical alarm calls that are incredibly specific—decipherable only to their close kin—on the rare occasion they are attacked. But goldenrods in more hostile territory signal to their neighbors using chemical phrases easily understood by all the goldenrod in the area, not just their biological kin. Instead of using coded whisper networks, these goldenrod broadcast the threat over loudspeaker, so to speak. It is the first time research has confirmed that these sort of chemical communications are beneficial not only to the plant receiving them but also to the sender.* When times are truly tough, you don’t want to be left standing in a field alone when it’s over, if you’re a plant. There’ll be no one to mate with, no one to help bring in pollinators. It’s the closest scientists have come to showing intentionality in plant communication: these are signals meant to be heard. And as we know, by some measures, intention is an indicator of intelligent behavior.