Thomson One Quotes

Thomson: "Just our luck! The one time we manage to catch the culprits they turn out to be innocent! It's really too bad of them!" Thompson: "You'd think they'd done it on purpose!

Flying daggers don't kill people, Chloe thought, leaping sidewise at the last minute to avoid one, grabbing the pedestrian rail. People kill people.

...What I have denied and what my reason compels me to deny, is the existence of a Being throned above us as a god, directing our mundane affairs in detail, regarding us as individuals, punishing us, rewarding us as human judges might. When the churches learn to take this rational view of things, when they become true schools of ethics and stop teaching fables, they will be more effective than they are to-day... If they would turn all that ability to teaching this one thing – the fact that honesty is best, that selfishness and lies of any sort must surely fail to produce happiness – they would accomplish actual things. Religious faiths and creeds have greatly hampered our development. They have absorbed and wasted some fine intellects. That creeds are getting to be less and less important to the average mind with every passing year is a good sign, I think, although I do not wish to talk about what is commonly called theology. The criticisms which have been hurled at me have not worried me. A man cannot control his beliefs. If he is honest in his frank expression of them, that is all that can in justice be required of him. Professor Thomson and a thousand others do not in the least agree with me. His criticism of me, as I read it, charged that because I doubted the soul’s immortality, or ‘personality,’ as he called it, my mind must be abnormal, ‘pathological,’ in other, words, diseased... I try to say exactly what I honestly believe to be the truth, and more than that no man can do. I honestly believe that creedists have built up a mighty structure of inaccuracy, based, curiously, on those fundamental truths which I, with every honest man, must not alone admit but earnestly acclaim. I have been working on the same lines for many years. I have tried to go as far as possible toward the bottom of each subject I have studied. I have not reached my conclusions through study of traditions; I have reached them through the study of hard fact. I cannot see that unproved theories or sentiment should be permitted to have influence in the building of conviction upon matters so important. Science proves its theories or it rejects them. I have never seen the slightest scientific proof of the religious theories of heaven and hell, of future life for individuals, or of a personal God. I earnestly believe that I am right; I cannot help believing as I do... I cannot accept as final any theory which is not provable. The theories of the theologians cannot be proved. Proof, proof! That is what I always have been after; that is what my mind requires before it can accept a theory as fact. Some things are provable, some things disprovable, some things are doubtful. All the problems which perplex us, now, will, soon or late, be solved, and solved beyond a question through scientific investigation. The thing which most impresses me about theology is that it does not seem to be investigating. It seems to be asserting, merely, without actual study. ...Moral teaching is the thing we need most in this world, and many of these men could be great moral teachers if they would but give their whole time to it, and to scientific search for the rock-bottom truth, instead of wasting it upon expounding theories of theology which are not in the first place firmly based. What we need is search for fundamentals, not reiteration of traditions born in days when men knew even less than we do now. [Columbian Magazine interview]

I've never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.

Choosing to break up your family is one of the most difficult decisions you will make in a lifetime. But once you have come to it; it will be with certainty. Certainty that you are ready to embrace the changes, the challenges and the joys of starting a new life.

The lies you wanted to hear were the easiest ones to tell.

When I came back from death it was morning, the back door was open and one of the buttons of my shirt had disappeared.

It was as if Jed had moved from one dimension to another. His original dimension hadn't reported him missing, and his new dimension didn't acknowledge his presence. Maybe what he'd really done was end up somewhere between the two. Some days he almost felt invisible.

The lingerie department is the only one that she can reach in her wheelchair. Nevertheless, she is fired the next day because of complaints that a woman who is so obviously not sexually attractive selling alluring nightgowns makes customers uncomfortable. Daunted by her dismissal, she seeks consolation in the arms of the young manager and soon finds herself pregnant. Upon learning of this news, he leaves her for a nondisabled woman with a fuller bustline and better homemaking skills in his inaccessible kitchen.

His work was so great that it cannot be compassed in a few words. His death is one of the greatest losses ever to occur to British science. {Describing Ernest Rutherford upon his death at age 66. Thomson, then 80 years old, was once his teacher.}

He thought of his old tapes, the ones he'd had for years, the ones he'd used over and over again. Their silence was always different to the silence of a new tape: it was loaded, prickly with things recorded and erased; a silence that was like ghosts. That house was an old tape masquerading as a new one. It had recorded and erased, but it was pretending it had just come out of the cellophane. It had ghosts, but it wasn't owning up to them.

The strong man lit a cigarette. It looked too frail for his hand. They looked like King Kong and Fay Wray, that hand, that cigarette. There was a movie going on right under his nose and he didn't even know. The guy had about one brain cell and he was doing time in it.

I was conscious of that moment of stepping into the woods and leaving everything else behind. That one instant when all the sounds of people, of traffic, of doors opening and closing, were suddenly gone, swallowed up by trees and ferns. It was like a curtain falling on a stage, and I waited for that moment every time. My heart opened just a little bit wider.

I have never known a musician who regretted being one. Whatever deceptions life may have in store for you, music itself is not going to let you down.

… Fourier's great mathematical poem ... {Referring to Joseph Fourier's mathematical theory of the conduction of heat, one of the precursors to thermodynamics.}

Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be My miserable self than He, than He Who formed such creatures to His own disgrace. The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou From whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! abhorred Malignant and implacable! I vow That not for all Thy power furled and unfurled, For all the temples to Thy glory built, Would I assume the ignominious guilt Of having made such men in such a world. As if a Being, God or Fiend, could reign, At once so wicked, foolish and insane, As to produce men when He might refrain! The world rolls round for ever like a mill; It grinds out death and life and good and ill; It has no purpose, heart or mind or will. While air of Space and Time's full river flow The mill must blindly whirl unresting so: It may be wearing out, but who can know? Man might know one thing were his sight less dim; That it whirls not to suit his petty whim, That it is quite indifferent to him. Nay, does it treat him harshly as he saith? It grinds him some slow years of bitter breath, Then grinds him back into eternal death.

Shereshevsky’s imagination was so vivid that in one experiment, he was able to raise the temperature of one hand while lowering the temperature of the other, merely by imagining one on a stove and one on a block of ice.

Alarmed and bordering on terrified, Frankie reached for the closest thing she could find that might work as a weapon – which in Louise’s house was a curling iron – and tiptoed downstairs to confront the intruder - Chapter One

Mathematics, as much as music or any other art, is one of the means by which we rise to a complete self-consciousness. The significance of mathematics resides precisely in the fact that it is an art; by informing us of the nature of our own minds it informs us of much that depends on our minds.

Chloe thought madly about tiny FM radios that she could hide in her ear and pull her hair over to hide, about getting very badly drunk or stoned, about getting one of the loopier Wiccans at school to put her into a trance before the reading. Anything that could get her through it with her sanity intact and a straight face.

Vasco bought a bottle of vodka to celebrate and they drank it in the old sailors' graveyard in Mangrove South. This was where the funeral business had first put down its roots. Over the wall, between two warehouses, Jed could just make out the Witch's Fingers, four long talons of sand that lay in the mouth of the river. Rumour had it that, on stormy nights a century ago, they used to reach out, gouge holes in passing ships, and drag them down. Hundreds of wrecks lay buried in that glistening silt. The city's black heart had beaten strongly even then. There was one funeral director, supposedly, who used to put lamps out on the Fingers and lure ships to their doom.

What passed in the mind of this man at the supreme moment of his agony cannot be told in words. He was still comparatively young, he was surrounded by the loving care of a devoted family, but he had convinced himself by a course of reasoning, illogical perhaps, yet certainly plausible, that he must separate himself from all he held dear in the world, even life itself. To form the slightest idea of his feelings, one must have seen his face with its expression of enforced resignation and its tear-moistened eyes raised to heaven. The minute hand moved on. The pistols were loaded; he stretched forth his hand, took one up, and murmured his daughter's name. Then he laid it down seized his pen, and wrote a few words. It seemed to him as if he had not taken a sufficient farewell of his beloved daughter. Then he turned again to the clock, counting time now not by minutes, but by seconds. He took up the deadly weapon again, his lips parted and his eyes fixed on the clock, and then shuddered at the click of the trigger as he cocked the pistol. At this moment of mortal anguish the cold sweat came forth upon his brow, a pang stronger than death clutched at his heart-strings. He heard the door of the staircase creak on its hinges—the clock gave its warning to strike eleven—the door of his study opened; Morrel did not turn round—he expected these words of Cocles, "The agent of Thomson & French." He placed the muzzle of the pistol between his teeth. Suddenly he heard a cry—it was his daughter's voice. He turned and saw Julie. The pistol fell from his hands. "My father!" cried the young girl, out of breath, and half dead with joy—"saved, you are saved!" And she threw herself into his arms, holding in her extended hand a red, netted silk purse.

One may feel inclined to say that Thomson, the father, was awarded the Nobel Prize for having shown that electron is a particle, and Thomson, the son, for having shown that electron is a wave.

Bette Davis lived long enough to hear the Kim Carnes song, 'Bette Davis Eyes'. The lyrics to that song were not very interesting. But the fact of the song was the proof of an acknowledgement that in the twentieth century we lived through an age of immense romantic personalities larger than life, yet models for it, too - for good or ill. Like twin moons, promising a struggle and an embrace, the Davis eyes would survive her - and us. Kim Carnes has hardly had a consistent career, but that one song - sluggish yet surging, druggy and dreamy - became an instant classic. It's like the sigh of the islanders when they behold their Kong. And I suspect it made the real eyes smile, whatever else was on their mind.

I think," Paul said delicately, "she might be a little… concerned about your current choice of boyfriends." Which one? Chloe almost asked. "Alyec? What the fuck, man? I wasn't pissed or rude to her face about Ottavio or that loser Steve who brought fucking ecstasy into my mom's house and tried to sell it at my Halloween party." Paul nodded again, getting quieter as she got louder. He did not disagree. "Alyec is completely hot, doesn't take himself seriously, and doesn't deal drugs. Look, whatever," Chloe said, calming down. She could feel her fingertips beginning to itch again. "I think she's acting like a real bitch about everything, and frankly, I don't have time to deal with her shit right now. If she's not going to be around to lend an ear, at least she can keep her distance and shut the fuck up.

One of the reasons for learning about type is to recognize that we are constantly motivated, simply by the way we’ve established our neural networks, to shape reality along particular functional lines. Another is to recognize the possibilities for growth and change that exist within—and apart from—the framework we have created for ourselves. Even small changes in our usual way of doing things can make big differences in the way our brain is operating. We develop the ability to think in new ways, and this stimulates creative change in all areas of our lives.

I am now convinced that we have recently become possessed of experimental evidence of the discrete or grained nature of matter, which the atomic hypothesis sought in vain for hundreds and thousands of years. The isolation and counting of gaseous ions, on the one hand, which have crowned with success the long and brilliant researches of J.J. Thomson, and, on the other, agreement of the Brownian movement with the requirements of the kinetic hypothesis, established by many investigators and most conclusively by J. Perrin, justify the most cautious scientist in now speaking of the experimental proof of the atomic nature of matter, The atomic hypothesis is thus raised to the position of a scientifically well-founded theory, and can claim a place in a text-book intended for use as an introduction to the present state of our knowledge of General Chemistry.

The task of the modern individual is to move appropriately and effectively from disengaged spectator to attentive perceiver in order to slide easily into the social order. The starer, in contrast, is an undisciplined spectator arrested in an earlier developmental stage or one resistant to the attentiveness of the modern networker. The starer is a properly attentive spectator befuddled, halted in mid-glance, mobility throttled, processing checked, network run amuck...So the challenge of proper looking is converting the impulse to stare into attention, which is socially acceptable. (21-22)

Ohm found that the results could be summed up in such a simple law that he who runs may read it, and a schoolboy now can predict what a Faraday then could only guess at roughly. By Ohm's discovery a large part of the domain of electricity became annexed by Coulomb's discovery of the law of inverse squares, and completely annexed by Green's investigations. Poisson attacked the difficult problem of induced magnetisation, and his results, though differently expressed, are still the theory, as a most important first approximation. Ampere brought a multitude of phenomena into theory by his investigations of the mechanical forces between conductors supporting currents and magnets. Then there were the remarkable researches of Faraday, the prince of experimentalists, on electrostatics and electrodynamics and the induction of currents. These were rather long in being brought from the crude experimental state to a compact system, expressing the real essence. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Faraday was not a mathematician. It can scarcely be doubted that had he been one, he would have anticipated much later work. He would, for instance, knowing Ampere's theory, by his own results have readily been led to Neumann's theory, and the connected work of Helmholtz and Thomson. But it is perhaps too much to expect a man to be both the prince of experimentalists and a competent mathematician.

I at this writing am an old man, only three years short of my three score and ten. And they tell me that Wycliffe’s bones have been dug up and burned and cast into the river that leads to the sea. The Church--she thinks--has had her revenge. But, as I hear it, Wycliffe’s writings had already touched one man in Bohemia, John Huss, whom the Church burned several years ago. And though both Wycliffe and Huss be dead, There are rumors of unrest in that small country, unrest caused by those who seek true religion. In England, King Henry rules hand in glove with the Pope, but not forever, I think. We are still here--the Lollards, I mean. Did you guess it? Yes, I have become a “poor priest.” And I will tell you this: the writings of Wycliffe have been driven out of Oxford, but they can be found in every other nook in England. Indeed, many a time I have talked with an Oxford scholar on the road and have seen God open his heart to the truth. This is what Saint Paul meant when he spoke of Christians as being pressed but never pinned. The Church rages, but the truth goes on. Many a stout English yeoman embraces it in these days and leads his family in true godly worship. John Wycliffe was our morning star. When all was darkest and England lay asleep in the deadly arms of the papacy, God sent him to us. The Scripture has come to England. What will it hold back? Soon--though perhaps not in my lifetime-- the dawn will break, and there will be a new day in England.

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead... ...When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin. It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus... ...Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.

Narcissists, on the other hand, lack any chemical empathic response for anyone except themselves. So their whole world revolves around them and anyone they consider part of themselves (such as an obedient child or spouse – who generally realise that if they don’t toe the line they will be cut off with the speed and efficiency of a guillotine). A malignant narcissist takes it one step further in that the narcissist will actively go out of their way to destroy someone they believe has slighted them or not given them the godlike status they feel they deserve.

James Tour is a leading origin-of-life researcher with over 630 research publications and over 120 patents. He was inducted into the National Academy of Inventors in 2015, listed in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters in 2014, and named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine. Here is how he recently described the state of the field: We have no idea how the molecules that compose living systems could have been devised such that they would work in concert to fulfill biology’s functions. We have no idea how the basic set of molecules, carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids and proteins were made and how they could have coupled in proper sequences, and then transformed into the ordered assemblies until there was the construction of a complex biological system, and eventually to that first cell. Nobody has any idea on how this was done when using our commonly understood mechanisms of chemical science. Those that say that they understand are generally wholly uninformed regarding chemical synthesis. Those that say, “Oh this is well worked out,” they know nothing—nothing—about chemical synthesis—nothing. … From a synthetic chemical perspective, neither I nor any of my colleagues can fathom a prebiotic molecular route to construction of a complex system. We cannot even figure out the prebiotic routes to the basic building blocks of life: carbohydrates, nucleic acids, lipids, and proteins. Chemists are collectively bewildered. Hence I say that no chemist understands prebiotic synthesis of the requisite building blocks, let alone assembly into a complex system. That’s how clueless we are. I have asked all of my colleagues—National Academy members, Nobel Prize winners—I sit with them in offices. Nobody understands this. So if your professors say it’s all worked out, if your teachers say it’s all worked out, they don’t know what they’re talking about.23

What are the great poetical names of the last hundred years or so? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Landor, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Morris, Rossetti, Swinburne—we may stop there. Of these, all but Keats, Browning, Rossetti were University men, and of these three, Keats, who died young, cut off in his prime, was the only one not fairly well to do. It may seem a brutal thing to say, and it is a sad thing to say: but, as a matter of hard fact, the theory that poetical genius bloweth where it listeth, and equally in poor and rich, holds little truth. As a matter of hard fact, nine out of those twelve were University men: which means that somehow or other they procured the means to get the best education England can give. As a matter of hard fact, of the remaining three you know that Browning was well to do, and I challenge you that, if he had not been well to do, he would no more have attained to write Saul or The Ring and the Book than Ruskin would have attained to writing Modern Painters if his father had not dealt prosperously in business. Rossetti had a small private income; and, moreover, he painted. There remains but Keats; whom Atropos slew young, as she slew John Clare in a mad-house, and James Thomson by the laudanum he took to drug disappointment. These are dreadful facts, but let us face them. It is—however dishonouring to us as a nation—certain that, by some fault in our commonwealth, the poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance. Believe me—and I have spent a great part of ten years in watching some three hundred and twenty elementary schools, we may prate of democracy, but actually, a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ (cit. The Art of Writing, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch) Nobody could put the point more plainly. ‘The poor poet has not in these days, nor has had for two hundred years, a dog’s chance . . . a poor child in England has little more hope than had the son of an Athenian slave to be emancipated into that intellectual freedom of which great writings are born.’ That is it. Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own. However, thanks to the toils of those obscure women in the past, of whom I wish we knew more, thanks, curiously enough to two wars, the Crimean which let Florence Nightingale out of her drawing-room, and the European War which opened the doors to the average woman some sixty years later, these evils are in the way to be bettered. Otherwise you would not be here tonight, and your chance of earning five hundred pounds a year, precarious as I am afraid that it still is, would be minute in the extreme.

To the traditional traveller—let alone travel writer—this might seem absurd. The whole point of travel is to go deep. To spend time in a place, to get under its skin. How can one possibly appreciate what makes a city or a country tick in a bare ten hours

It takes ten seconds for patients and loved ones and inspectors to decide about your establishment. We are influenced by what we see, hear and smell. You want that first impression to be positive.

Every person—including you—has been given a gift by God. Every gift is of immense value, no matter how it might compare to someone else’s gifts. No one got a cheap or valueless gift from God. Every gift has the capacity to multiply (and is meant to do so). The gifts are essentially “on loan,” meant to be stewarded.

In fact, it seems that anyone can become a synesthete. In 2014, Daniel Bor at the University of Sussex and his colleagues managed to turn thirty-three adults into temporary synesthetes in just over a month.5 Their volunteers took part in half-hour training sessions, five days a week, in which they learned thirteen letter and color associations. By week five, many of the volunteers were reporting that they saw colored letters when they read regular black text. “When reading a sign on campus I saw all the letter E’s coloured green,” said one participant.

It turns out that there is only one other person known to have this extraordinary, and rare, combination of synesthesia and color blindness. He is Spike Jahan and he is a student of Ramachandran. Jahan approached Ramachandran shortly after he had attended a lecture on synesthesia. He told Ramachandran that he was color blind and had trouble distinguishing reds, greens, browns and oranges. He also had number-color synesthesia. However, the colors Jahan saw in his mind were tinged with colors that he had never seen in the real world. He called them “Martian colors.

I’m intrigued. I thought I’d heard of every kind of synesthesia, but this one was new to me. “So how many numbers and personalities are there?” I ask. “Each number is a small collection of personality traits, almost like a person,

When Loftus was just fourteen years old, her mother drowned in a swimming pool. On her forty-fourth birthday, Loftus attended a family gathering at which an uncle informed her that she had been the one to discover her mother’s dead body. Although she had previously remembered little about her mother’s death, suddenly memories of the incident came flooding back. A few days later, Loftus’s brother called her and told her that their uncle had made a mistake—it had actually been an aunt that had found their mother. The memories that had appeared so clear and vivid for the past few days were entirely false.

Thomson’s tidal solution was something like the inverse of Bush’s lawnmower. The surveying machine would read the land’s data of hills and dips and even manhole covers and output a graph; the tide machine invented by Thomson and his brother, which they christened the harmonic analyzer, took a graph as input. The operator stood before a long, open wooden box resting on eight legs, a steel pointer and a hand crank protruding from its innards. With his right hand, he took hold of the pointer and traced a graph of water levels, months’ data on high tides and low; with his left, he steadily turned the crank that turned the oiled gears in the casket. Inside, eleven little cranks rotated at their own speeds, each isolating one of the simple functions that added up to the chaotic tide. At the end, their gauges displayed eleven little numbers—the average water level, the pull of the moon, the pull of the sun, and so on—that together filled in the equation to state the tides. All of it, in principle, could be ground out by human hands on a notepad—but, said Thomson, this was “calculation of so methodical a kind that a machine ought to be found to do it.

We believed Harriet had been collected in 1835 by Charles Darwin himself. She was brought to Australia from England in 1841 by Captain Wickham aboard the HMS Beagle. Actually, three giant Galapagos tortoises had been donated to the Brisbane Botanic Gardens, after Darwin realized they did not flourish in England, where he had originally taken them in 1835. How could we determine whether Harriet was one of the Darwin Three? Scott Thomson found a giant tortoise in the collection of the Queensland Museum that had been mislabeled an Aldabran tortoise. Carved on the carapace was the animal’s name. “Tom,” and “1929.” We now had potentially found two of the three Darwin tortoises. Harriet and Tom had been seen together in living memory. The third tortoise was never found and was presumed buried somewhere in the botanic gardens. Harriet lived on. Steve and I became very excited at this news. Our studies and research into Harriet’s history continued for years, and it was amazing to learn what a special resident we had at the zoo. Despite her impressive background, Harriet remained attractively modest. She had a sweet personality like a little dog. She loved hibiscus flowers, and certain veggies were her favorites. Steve carried on a practice that his parents had implemented: Whatever you feed animals should be good enough for you to eat. Thus Harriet got the most beautiful mustard greens, kale, eggplant, zucchinis, and even roses. In return, Harriet gave zoo visitors a rare chance to watch her keepers cuddle and scratch one of the grandest creatures on earth. She was the oldest living chelonian and the only living creature to have met Charles Darwin and traveled aboard the Beagle. And she gave us all something else, too--a lesson in how to live a long life. Don’t worry too much. Take it easy. Stop and munch the flowers. It was a lesson Steve noted and understood but could never quite take to heart. He was a meteor. Harriet was more of a mountain. In this world, we need both.

there's not one of them who doesn't approve of a man getting his tackle out and rodgering as many women as possible.

How are you doing?’ she asked, and leaned over and squeezed his arm. ‘I’m fine,’ said Barney. She let those words drift out into the dark, let silence consume them, let them dissolve into nothing. ‘On a scale of one to ten of fine,’ she said, ‘where one is actually fine and ten is, like, so not fine you’re a supersonic rocket of not fine waiting to explode, how fine are you?

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent…. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

Carlton Church: Japan Finally Acknowledges Negative Nuclear Effects One of the leading sources of news and information, Thomson Reuters, has just reported about Japan’s acknowledgement of casualty caused by the Fukushima nuclear power plant wreckage. However, it may be too late for the victim as the young man, an unnamed worker in his 30s working as a construction contractor in Tokyo Electric Power Co’s Fukushima Daiichi plant and other nuclear facilities, is already suffering from cancer since 2011. The ministry’s recognition of radiation as a possible cause may set back efforts to recover from the disaster, as the government and the nuclear industry have been at pains to say that the health effects from radiation have been minimal. It may also add to compensation payments that had reached more than 7 trillion yen ($59 billion) by July this year. It can also cause a lot of setbacks from a lot of nuclear projects which were supposed to be due in the succeeding years. A streak of legal issues and complaints are also to be faced by Tokyo Electric, mostly on compensations for those affected. According to further reviews, it is estimated removing the melted fuel from the wrecked reactors and cleaning up the site will cost tens of billions of dollars and take decades to complete. Despite the recognition, a lot more people are still anxious. The recognition would mean acknowledgment of possible radiation effects still lingering in Japan’s boundaries. When it was once denied, the public are consoled of the improbability of being exposed to radiation but now that the government has expressed its possibility, many individuals fear of their and their families’ lives. Hundreds of deaths have been attributed to the chaos of evacuations during the crisis and because of the hardship and mental trauma refugees have experienced since then, but the government had said that radiation was not a cause. Yet now, it is different. The trauma and fear are emphasized more. Anti-nuclear organizations, on the other hand, are happy that their warnings are now being regarded. Carlton Church International, one of the non-profit organization campaigning against nuclear proliferation, spokesperson, Abigail Shcumman stated, “I don’t think ‘I told you so’ would be appropriate but that is what I really wanted to say”. She added, “We are pleased that at last, we are being heard. However, we continue to get worried for the people and the children. They are exposed and need guidance on what to do”. - See more at: carltonchurchreview.blogspot.com

How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children. —Charles Darwin

the books or, even better, one of my films: ‘I’ll take a few questions after the screening.’ The lecturer’s job is not arduous—a couple of hours

The notion that the atom consists of a nucleus with electrons in orbit around it, which is taken for granted in modern science, originated when British physicist J.J. Thomson tried to explain the order of the elements displayed in the periodic table. Similarly, when Bohr, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, applied new ideas about the quantum of energy to the atom, he was specifically trying to obtain a deeper understanding of the periodic system of the elements.24 A

I long for a ruler. One who will be merciful and just. Who will be good, truly good. Life would be so small if we were all we had. We need something—someone—to make us look up.

The Second Law indicates that not all the processes compatible with the First Law can actually occur. Whereas one can easily perform work to heat up the system, it is not always enough to supply heat to increase the mechanical energy. At least two heat sources at different temperatures are needed, as shown by Carnot’s argument (sometimes one of the sources may be naturally supplied by the environment). Essentially the Second Law states that heat can never pass from a colder to a warmer body without some other related change occurring at the same time (see also the next chapter). The new ideas were propagated in a rapid fashion thanks to the lively and elegant exposition by Thomson [17]. The conservation of energy in the atomic model found its final treatment in the hands of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–94), who, like Mayer, started from physiological considerations, and about whom we spoke in detail in the previous chapter. In his fundamental work of 1847 [18] he explicitly introduced the concept of potential energy.

For one thing, our society is relentlessly external. When we feel frustrated or dissatisfied, our first impulse is to blame our job, partner, or environment for our lack of interest. We’re encouraged at every turn to solve the problem by embarking on a new career, finding a more exciting love life, or starting a hobby. Usually, however, a feeling of restlessness or dissatisfaction occurs not because our outer situation has lost its appeal but because our unexpressed potential has no other way to get our attention. If anything, our unlived possibilities claim our attention most insistently when we’ve built an outer life strong enough to withstand their realization. The theory of psychological types offers a kind of vocabulary for recognizing and talking about the different ways this sort of thing happens to people. It tells us how our personalities take shape, depending on the gifts and strengths we put into play, and what kinds of inner possibilities may be trying to get our attention.

If I may be permitted the indulgence of another of my favourite pictures, it is that of a seaside bay. With a small boat, and the tide low, one has to be extremely careful not to strike barely submerged rocks, and has to navigate with caution among the visible obstructions. The situation is by no means carefree; it could be damaging to one’s craft, even dangerous to one’s person.Yet, a few hours later, with a full tide, the whole scene is transformed. The menacing rocks are now at least several feet below one’s keel, and one may sail freely within the area. This has more than incidental parallels with James C. Thomson’s concept, which he named High Level Health. Not mere absence or avoidance of uncomfortable symptoms, but a genuine freedom to live and move fully

Only in the late eighteenth century, with Burke and his theory of the sublime, Wordsworth and his mountains, Rousseau and his thoughts on Nature, did any sense of the romantic appeal of such wilderness areas begin in Europe. But having discovered such a sensibility ourselves, there has always been a reluctance to ascribe it to any other culture, let alone one which might have come to it before us.

Then, in one beautifully choreographed movement, he drew the sword from inside his long coat, swished it through the air with the flourish of Aragorn, and sliced off the head of the honourable member for some part of Lanarkshire. Bloody spurted and the decapitated head lopped onto the bed, bounced once and fell heavily on the floor. Utterson had stopped the movement of the sword before it had also taken out the secretary, who was now in the uncomfortable position of having sex with the wrong kind of stiff.

Oh, and one more thing,' he added casually, pausing on the gangplank. 'The resistance has found out that the Reapers are planning to capture you, Max, at tonight's performance. They know about your disguise.' 'What?!' Max stared at Emil in horror. 'Yah, I know,' said Emil, shrugging. 'It is not so good.

It goes without saying that no one can call himself educated who does not understand the central and simple ideas of Mendelism and other new departures in biology.

He was comfortable in his inconspicuousness, but his inconspicuousness was mainly because no one paid much attention to anyone anymore. Everyone was too self-obsessed, everyone too attached to their phones. Twenty years ago you had to make an effort to blend in. Now you went anywhere, held a phone in your hand, and you became any old Average Joe.

Put a few hundred of them together in a room, and it was like one of Dante’s layers of Hell. One of the shitty layers, near the bottom.

Even as a boy Andrew Carnegie discovered the astonishing importance that people place on their names. When he was ten years old, he had a father rabbit and a mother rabbit. He awoke one morning to discover that he had a whole nest full of little rabbits and nothing to feed them. What do you suppose he did? Well, he had a brilliant idea. He told half a dozen boys in the neighborhood that if they would go out every day and pull enough dandelions and grass and clover to feed the rabbits, he would name the rabbits in their honor. The plan worked like magic, and here is the point of the story. Andrew Carnegie never forgot that incident. And years later, he made millions of dollars by using the same technique in business. He wanted to sell steel rails to the Pennsylvania Railroad. J. Edgar Thomson was president of the railroad then. So Andrew Carnegie, remembering the lesson he had learned from his rabbits, built a huge steel mill in Pittsburgh and called it the J. Edgar Thomson Steel works. Now let me ask you a question. When the Pennsylvania Railroad needed steel rails after that, where do you suppose J. Edgar Thomson bought them? —DALE CARNEGIE

My self is at one remove Because it has gone to you Who will not display The sense of me another, Being bound in yourself By my forlorn desire. And yet I would not not love If I could choose not to; For I require to play By hazarding myself To you, my self, the other Whom I always desire. — Veronica Forrest-Thomson, from “Canzon, for British Rail Services,” Collected Poems and Translations (Allardyce Barnett, 1990),

if this is part of an existential crisis, then it’s very important to remind yourself to get out of the house, in addition find people to talk to about it. My theory is that the reason death has such a severe impact on our lives is because it is NOT spoken of in public, and we feel like we’re left alone trying to understand death and dying. One immediate thing you can do is to find or join a “Death Café”, which are popping up around the U.S., Australia and Canada. Alternatively, you can start such a discussion group yourself. This can create a therapeutic outlet to contemplate the topics that are usually avoided in normal interaction.

One night I happened to come upon a documentary called Facing the Storm, about the buffalos in Montana. Robert Thomson of the Montana Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks discussed how buffalo run into the storm, thus minimizing how long they will be in it. They don’t ignore it, run from it, or just hope it will go away, which is what we often do when we want to avoid our storms of emotion. We don’t realize that by doing this we’re maximizing our time in the pain. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief. Better to turn toward it and allow it to run its natural course, knowing that the pain will eventually pass, that one of these days we will find the love on the other side of pain.

It's easier to cry for our own dead at other funerals. Many will be in fear that it will soon be their loved one they mourn

Sometimes the person you're closest to is the one you understand the least. Sometimes, when you're that close, everything just blurs.

One wise commentator noted: “The noblest aim is to seek to do good to others…Hence the mission of the spiritual physician takes first place among vocations…The wise man will see that the work…is to persuade men to turn from sin to God and goodness…and the chief honour of heaven is reserved for those who have been wise in effecting the conversions of souls to righteousness” (Thomson, p.

Problems accumulate over a long time while few see what’s happening, except the assholes who profit from the disorder.  And they add fuel to the fire so gradually no one notices the decline until suddenly everything goes to shit.  Then, people die.  In job lots.

decent bloke wanting a job done. ‘It will be expensive,’ she warned, rat-a-tatting the page with her ballpoint. Were Jackie here she would suggest Stella talk up the benefits of Clean Slate so when she priced the work the client was primed to think it worth every penny. She had killed the job. Barlow nodded. ‘I want it sorted.’ He repeated, more to himself, ‘I will pay.’ Reprieve. Stella flipped open her Filofax. They decided on two sessions a week. She scratched out a recruitment meeting with Jackie that clashed with one day. Standing in a shaft of sunlight from the conservatory, Barlow enquired: ‘Who will be coming?’ Stella looked out at a green lawn so neat it

One might as well, in considering how to watch a movie, recognize the extent to which public life in America has itself become an untidy, unrated motion picture that has a captive but disenchanted audience.

Chloe’s mom opened the door for Kim, then stared at her. She wore a black felt hat pulled tightly down to cover her ears and loose black jeans with a frumpy black sweater, like she was trying to disguise her whole body, not just her head. Round Lennon-style sunglasses with thick red lenses hid her slitted eyes. She stuck a gloved hand out and presented Anna King with a bouquet of flowers. “Here. I hope this is an acceptable hostess gift. Thank you for inviting me to the party. I’ve never been to one before.

Try to fancy poor Jesus, for example, coming to life again (actually, not doctrinally), and learning that he was the founder, the teacher, the exemplar, the very God of Christendom; fancy him searching for some trait of his own life and ruling principles in the lives and ruling principles of the millions who call themselves Christians; fancy him in spiritual communion with the Pope, the cardinals, the bishops (though their lackeys would never admit him to the presence of any of these), the most prominent ministers of the various Christian sects. He would find himself an outcast in his nominal kingdom, denounced and reviled as a madman, an idiot, an impostor; the moral and intellectual life of Christendom would be as alien and bewildering to him as its steamboats and railways and telegraphs. Paul and the other early apostles, the ancient heathenisms of Greece and Rome, of the East and the West, old philosophies and older superstitions, national characteristics, physical and other circumstances, the growth of science, the ever-varying conditions of life and modes of thought; everything, in brief, affecting the character of the converts, has affected the religion. By the time a doctrine gets embodied in a Church or other institution, its original spirit has nearly vanished. Its progress may be well compared to the course of a great river, rivers being remarkably convenient things for all such analogies. Some remotest mountain–rill or rocky well–spring has the honour of being termed its source; and the name of this tiny trickling is borne triumphant down a thousand broadening leagues to the sea. The rill is soon joined by others, each very like itself. As it flows onward, ever descending (for this is the universal law), it is joined by streamlets and rivers more and more unlike itself, they having flowed through unlike soils and regions; and more than one may be greater than itself, as the Missouri is greater than the Mississippi; and its own original waters are more and more modified by the new and various districts they traverse. As it proceeds, growing deeper and wider, villages and towns arise on its banks, and it receives copious tribute not merely of natural streams, but likewise of sewage and the pestilent refuse abominations of manifold factories and wharves. When it is become a mighty river, crowded with ships and bordered by some wealthy and populous capital, it may be a mere open cloaca maxima; and at any rate it must be as dissimilar in the quality of its waters as in their quantity and surroundings from the pure rill of the mountain solitudes, from the pure brook of the woodland shadows and pastoral peace. The waters actually from the fountain-head are but an insignificant drop in the vast and composite volumes of the thick bronze or yellow flood which finally disembogues through fat flat lowlands, in several devious channels with broad stretches of marsh and lagoon, into the immense purifying laboratory of the untainted salt sea. The remote rill-source is Christ or Mohammed, the mighty river is the Christian or Mohammedan Church; the sea in all cases is the encompassing ocean of death and oblivion, which makes life possible by preserving the earth from putrefaction.

One of the more interesting recent consortiums was the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. It went public in late February 2017, and its founding members include Accenture, BNY Mellon, CME Group, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Thomson Reuters, and UBS. 25 What is most interesting about this alliance is that it aims to marry private industry and Ethereum’s public blockchain. While the consortium will work on software outside of Ethereum’s public blockchain, the intent is for all software to remain interoperable in case companies want to utilize Ethereum’s open network in the future.

Cotton could only think that one thing worse than failing to solve a murder was when you had solved it and the solution was worse than the not knowing

The relationship between art and brain damage is a complex one.

It’s simply to point out that biblical holiness has no inherent connection to oldness, or tradition, or even particularly to rules. It’s an identity, a fundamental self-concept, a core understanding of one’s self and one’s place in the world: I am not my own; I am set apart for God.

When you don’t dare dream about the future, the present is your only refuge.

This is because perfection just doesn’t exist but you put yourself under all this pressure to try and achieve it. Of even more importance, so called perfection is often never required in your daily life. Perfectionism for me was one of the biggest triggers of my procrastination that I had to overcome. I, like I’m sure you do, always want to deliver to the best of my ability. Whether it be in business or at home. Sometimes even when it came to sport. Because of this I would find myself never being happy with what I was producing and always deferring it to later or often scrapping what I had all together because I didn’t think it was good enough.

Only Read/Answer Emails Twice a Day In the past I would have my email client open all day, every day. I would be working on something and then get distracted by the email alert in the bottom of my computer screen and instantly click over to see from who and what it contains. The solution is to only check your emails twice a day. I do it once in the morning and once straight after lunch. The rest of the time I am distraction free. This is not only a technique I use but one that has been suggested by some of the most productive people in the world. Michael Hyatt, Scott Belsky, Leo Babauta to name a few. Try this out for a week. If you are someone like me who receives numerous emails a day, you will immediately see the benefits of using this.

Thomson remarked to a friend that “unless there were a European War to divert the current, we were heading for something very like revolution.” He was not alone in feeling this way. “A good big war just now might do a lot of good in killing Socialist nonsense,” one army officer confided in a letter, “and would probably put a stop to all this labor unrest.

I was reminded of something Oliver Sacks once said: To truly understand someone, to get any hint of one’s depth, you need to lay aside the urge to test and get to know your subject openly, quietly, as they live and think and pursue their own life. There, he said, is where you will find something exceedingly mysterious at work.

The initial temperature difference across the bar, instead of being turned into work, has become “dissipated” heat. It is no longer useful. Thomson stressed that in accordance with the law of energy conservation, no heat is destroyed; but by being distributed differently, by no longer being concentrated in one end of the bar, it has lost its potential to do work. An iron bar equalizing in temperature can therefore be regarded as a heat engine whose efficiency is zero.

As it was, 2nd Battalion Scots Guards found themselves fighting one of the hardest battles, against probably the toughest Argentine unit, the 5th Marine Battalion.

But the moral balance sheet calculated in the safety of a sterile operations room meant absolutely nothing in front of a man who'd gone through the worst sort of hell because of one cold-blooded decision.

In Paris in the 1920s, he bought Beaune by the gallon at a wine cooperative, and would and did drink five or six bottles of red at a meal. He taught Scott Fitzgerald to drink wine direct from the bottle which, he said, was like ‘a girl going swimming without her swimming suit’. In New York he was ‘cockeyed’ he said for ‘several days’ after signing his contract for The Sun Also Rises, probably his first prolonged bout. He was popularly supposed to have invented the Twenties’ phrase ‘Have a drink’; though some, such as Virgil Thomson, accused him of being mean about offering one and Hemingway, in turn, was always liable to accuse acquaintances of free-loading, as he did Ken Tynan in Cuba in the 1950s.

Thomsonism was the most popular layman’s medical movement but hardly the only one. Dozens of what can only be called sects arose across the countryside. A Thomsonian rhyme summed up the attitude: “The nest of college-birds are three, / Law, Physic and Divinity; / And while these three remain combined, / They keep the world oppressed and blind / . . . Now is the

there comes a point when the sink is so cold that all the heat from the furnace becomes work. This is the end of the line. An engine can do no better than turn all the heat it receives into work. Otherwise it would be generating work from nothing in violation of the law of energy conservation. The temperature of the sink at which this occurs is therefore the lowest possible temperature that can exist. Our universe has limits. The speed of light, which nothing can exceed, is one example. Thomson’s lowest possible temperature is another.