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Each phase of the transformation process has distinct milestones, is progressive, and is not revisited.
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Suzy Ross
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There is this quality esteemed within every good writer. She knows…she knows that truth must be un-sheltered within every human transition phase or stable state. It must reflect in every mind untouched by shadows. She knows…she knows what burdens must be carried of the human plight. She knows…
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Dew Platt
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I was ten when I heard the music that ended the first phase of my life and cast me hurtling towards a new horizon. Drenched to the skin, I stood on Dunoon’s pier peering seawards through diagonal rain, looking for the ferry that would take me home. There, on the everwet west coast of Scotland, I heard it: like sonic scalpels, the sounds of electric guitars sliced through the dreich weather. My body hairs pricked up like antennae. To my young ears these amplified guitars sounded angelic, for surely no man-made instrument could produce that tone. The singer couldn't be human. His voice was too clean, too pure, too resonant, as though a robot larynx were piping words through vocal chords of polished silver. The overall effect was intoxicating - a storm of drums, earthquake bass, razor-sharp guitar riffs, and soaring vocals of astonishing clarity. I knew that I was hearing the future.
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Mark Rice (Metallic Dreams)
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For the ten-dimensional universe, however, there are apparemtly millions of ways in which to curl up. To calculate which state the ten-dimensional universe prefers, we need to solve the field theory of strings using the theory of phase transitions, the most difficult problem in quantum theory.
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Michio Kaku (Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the Tenth Dimension)
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Just as people live life out of order, they go through transitions out of order. While some people experience these phases sequentially, others experience them in reverse; others start in the middle and work their way out. Some finish one stage before going on to a new one; others move on to a new phase, then double back to the one they thought they had finished. Many get stuck in one phase for a very long time.
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Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
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Mourning is essential to uncoupling, as it is to any significant leavetaking. Uncoupling is a transition into a different lifestyle, a change of life course which, whether we recognize and admit it in the early phases or not, is going to be made without the other person. We commit ourselves to relationships expecting them to last, however. In leaving behind a significant person who shares a portion of our life, we experience a loss.
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Diane Vaughan (Uncoupling: Turning Points in Intimate Relationships)
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To me, grass is simply a transitional phase for turning sunlight into milk.
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Jasper Fforde (The Woman Who Died a Lot (Thursday Next, #7))
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Pilgrimages of any scale follow the same broad architecture with three phases. The first is the setting of a purpose or intention. This might be healing, marking a loss, asking for forgiveness, exploring a new life phase or transition, or simply reconnecting with joy. It might even be simply the intention of adventure—creating space in which unexpected new thoughts, friendships, or experiences might emerge.
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Casper ter Kuile (The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices)
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Reuben says in many cultures, the wedding ceremony and all of it's rituals are much the same as a funeral: a transition into another phase of life.
It is like dying and being reborn, if you believe in the afterlife. If you don't believe in an afterlife, then you are toast
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Suzanne Finnamore (Otherwise Engaged)
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Midlife dynamically, for both straight and gay males, is often challenging as we face the reality that many of the dreams we had for our lives might not become a reality and unresolved conflicts come to the surface. For us to successfully transition in to the next phase of our lives we must find reconciliation of these issues. And for the gay male there is a sense that the gay self we have tried to keep in the closet or so many years begins to scream out. "Time is running out. When do I get to live?" You can't ignore that voice in the end, you can try and suppress it, and you can try and deny it, you can try and silence it by filling your life with other noises and diverting attention ......but that voice still exists. "Will my entire life be a lie?
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Anthony Venn-Brown OAM (A Life of Unlearning - a journey to find the truth)
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It is important to note that a transitional phase has to be uncomfortable for you to move on to the next stage, lest procrastination stymies you.
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Innocent Mwatsikesimbe (The Vision (Mere Reflections #3))
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Step back in perspective, open your heart and welcome transition into a new phase of life.
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Linda Rawson
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And if you gain weight, lose weight, dye your hair, shave your head, or change in anyway, I want a portrait of it. I want all of you. All your phases, all your transitions.” He
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Briana Michaels (Glitch (Next Level, #1))
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Follow the urge to transition from one phase of your life to the next. Whether this is inside or outside work, it’s time for intentional transformation to take place.
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Robin S. Baker
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We believe that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 culminates the era of the nation-state, a peculiar two-hundred-year phase in history that began with the French Revolution.
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James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
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More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring. The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it.
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Katherine May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)
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Some people fight transition all the way and bewail their fate, while others come to recognize that letting go is not defeat—that it may, in fact, be the start of a whole new and rewarding phase of their lives.
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William Bridges (The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments)
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Once the boon is returned, the hero is free to live and then free to die, or, as I see it, to transition from the second phase in life to the third phase (in which one is free to savor life until one passes away).
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
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The Syntellect Hypothesis which is the main focus of this book, as its title suggests, refers to a phase transition of a complex intelligent system to self-awareness of a living, conscious superorganism when intellectual synergy of its components reaches threshold complexity to become one supermind. This metamorphosis is associated with emergence of higher-order self-awareness and dimensionality of a new consciousness structure. As a bio-species merging with its advanced technology, human-machine civilization is now on the verge of the Syntellect Emergence, becoming one Global Mind.
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Alex M. Vikoulov (The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind's Evolution)
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Life itself consists of phases in which the organism falls out of step with the march of surrounding things and then recovers unison with it—either through effort or by some happy chance. And, in a growing life, the recovery is never mere return to a prior state, for it is enriched by the state of disparity and resistance through which it has successfully passed. If the gap between organism and environment is too wide, the creature dies. If its activity is not enhanced by the temporary alienation, it merely subsists. Life grows when a temporary falling out is a transition to a more extensive balance of the energies of the organism with those of the conditions under which it lives.
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John Dewey
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him.” “Do you have anyone else you’re tight with?” asked Julie. “Used to. Not anymore.” “Because they’re not around anymore?” asked Julie. “Something like that.” “Robie really respects you. I can tell.” “I would imagine there aren’t many who he does respect,” replied Reel. “I bet you’re the same.” “We trained together, Robie and me,” said Reel. “He was the best, Julie. I always thought I was, but I have to admit, he’s better.” “Why?” “The intangibles. On the big stuff we’re equal. Even he would agree with that. It’s the small stuff, though, where I fall behind. Sometimes I let my emotions get the better of me.” “That only means you’re human. I wish Robie would let that happen to him more often. He keeps it all inside.” “Which is exactly what we’re trained to do,” Reel pointed out. “A job isn’t everything, is it? It’s not your whole life.” “Some jobs are. Our jobs are; at least mine used to be.” “And now?” asked Julie. Reel glanced at her as she steered the car through the wet streets and over a bridge into D.C. “Maybe I’m starting a transition phase.” “Into another job, or retiring?” “Retiring? How old do you think I am?” Reel chuckled, but Julie’s expression remained serious. “Robie told me you don’t retire from the sort of work you two do.” Reel glanced at her again. “He did?” Julie nodded. “Well, then it must be true. I’ve never known Will Robie to bullshit.” Julie put a hand on Reel’s arm. “But you can make
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David Baldacci (The Target (Will Robie, #3))
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I had an uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself had evaporated-not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That's the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated.
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Nell Freudenberger (Lost and Wanted)
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More than any other season, winter requires a kind of metronome that ticks away its darkest beats, giving us a melody to follow into spring. The year will move on no matter what, but by paying attention to it, feeling its beat, and noticing the moments of transition—perhaps even taking time to think about what we want from the next phase in the year—we can get the measure of it.
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Katherine May (Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times)
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As a rule, I found that each person is especially good at one of these three phases and especially bad at one. Each of us has a transition superpower, if you will, and a transition kryptonite. Our research suggests that people gravitate to the phase they’re naturally adept at and bog down in the one they’re weakest at. If you’re comfortable saying goodbye, you might knock that off quickly and move on to the next challenge; but if you’re conflict averse and don’t like to disappoint people, you might remain in a situation that’s toxic far longer than you should. The same applies to the messy middle: Some people thrive in chaos; others are paralyzed by it. As for new beginnings, some people embrace the novelty; others dread it—they like things the way they were.
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Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
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Transition, on the other hand, is the process of letting go of the way things used to be and then taking hold of the way they subsequently become. In between the letting go and the taking hold again, there is a chaotic but potentially creative "neutral zone" when things aren't the old way, but aren't really a new way yet either. This three-phase process—ending, neutral zone, beginning again—is transition.
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William Bridges (The Way Of Transition: Embracing Life's Most Difficult Moments)
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The three conditions without which healthy growth does not take place can be taken for granted in the matrix of the womb: nutrition, a physically secure environment and the unbroken relationship with a safe, ever-present maternal organism. The word matrix is derived from the Latin for “womb,” itself derived from the word for “mother.” The womb is mother, and in many respects the mother remains the womb, even following birth. In the womb environment, no action or reaction on the developing infant’s part is required for the provision of any of his needs.
Life in the womb is surely the prototype of life in the Garden of Eden where nothing can possibly be lacking, nothing has to be worked for. If there is no consciousness — we have not yet eaten of the Tree of Knowledge — there is also no deprivation or anxiety. Except in conditions of extreme poverty unusual in the industrialized world, although not unknown, the nutritional needs and shelter requirements of infants are more or less satisfied. The third prime requirement, a secure, safe and not overly stressed emotional atmosphere, is the one most likely to be disrupted in Western societies.
The human infant lacks the capacity to follow or cling to the parent soon after being born, and is neurologically and biochemically underdeveloped in many other ways. The first nine months or so of extrauterine life seem to have been intended by nature as the second part of gestation. The anthropologist Ashley Montagu has called this phase exterogestation, gestation outside the maternal body. During this period, the security of the womb must be provided by the parenting environment. To allow for the maturation of the brain and nervous system that in other species occurs in the uterus, the attachment that was until birth directly physical now needs to be continued on both physical and emotional levels. Physically and psychologically, the parenting environment must contain and hold the infant as securely as she was held in the womb.
For the second nine months of gestation, nature does provide a near-substitute for the direct umbilical connection: breast-feeding. Apart from its irreplaceable nutritional value and the immune protection it gives the infant, breast-feeding serves as a transitional stage from unbroken physical attachment to complete separation from the mother’s body. Now outside the matrix of the womb, the infant is nevertheless held close to the warmth of the maternal body from which nourishment continues to flow.
Breast-feeding also deepens the mother’s feeling of connectedness to the baby, enhancing the emotionally symbiotic bonding relationship. No doubt the decline of breast-feeding, particularly accelerated in North America, has contributed to the emotional insecurities so prevalent in industrialized countries. Even more than breast-feeding, healthy brain development requires emotional security and warmth in the infant’s environment. This security is more than the love and best possible intentions of the parents. It depends also on a less controllable variable: their freedom from stresses that can undermine their psychological equilibrium. A calm and consistent emotional milieu throughout infancy is an essential requirement for the wiring of the neurophysiological circuits of self-regulation. When interfered with, as it often is in our society, brain development is adversely affected.
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Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
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One notion is that perhaps the singularity was the relic of an earlier, collapsed universe—that ours is just one of an eternal cycle of expanding and collapsing universes, like the bladder on an oxygen machine. Others attribute the Big Bang to what they call “a false vacuum” or “a scalar field” or “vacuum energy”—some quality or thing, at any rate, that introduced a measure of instability into the nothingness that was. It seems impossible that you could get something from nothing, but the fact that once there was nothing and now there is a universe is evident proof that you can. It may be that our universe is merely part of many larger universes, some in different dimensions, and that Big Bangs are going on all the time all over the place. Or it may be that space and time had some other forms altogether before the Big Bang—forms too alien for us to imagine—and that the Big Bang represents some sort of transition phase, where the universe went from a form we can’t understand to one we almost can. “These are very
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Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
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First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens' Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.
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Martin Luther King Jr. (Why We Can't Wait)
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I’ve always appreciated authors who explain their points simply, right up front. So here’s the argument in brief: 1. The most important breakthroughs come from loonshots, widely dismissed ideas whose champions are often written off as crazy. 2. Large groups of people are needed to translate those breakthroughs into technologies that win wars, products that save lives, or strategies that change industries. 3. Applying the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better.
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Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
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It’s a fact that a dancer’s career is not forever. Eventually, if you dance hard and you dance often, your body is going to rebel. I do dance hard and often, but I don’t think about that. I know there may come a point where I won’t be able to do what I do now. I know a lot of pros who retire in their thirties. I’ve seen it and wondered, What if…? But I keep it way, way in the back of my mind. Instead, I look for ways to defy age and keep my body strong and limber. I learn as much as I can about nutrition and exercise and I keep moving forward. Life is truly a series of transitions, from one season to another, from one phase to another.
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Derek Hough (Taking the Lead: Lessons from a Life in Motion)
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The present communist movement needs to assimilate its past, to fully grasp what really happened in 1917-21 and how today differs from yesterday. Communist revolution will not promote a further development of production: capital has already accomplished this in a large number of countries. The transitional phase will consist of the immediate communisation of society, which includes armed insurrection: the State's military might cannot be underestimated. Besides, the working class has become such a potential social force that it is vital for capitalism to control it: this is the job of the unions and workers' parties, so one must prepare to confront them.
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Gilles Dauvé (The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement)
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Future Of Humanity - Planetary Civilization
In mythology, the gods lived in the divine splendor of heaven, far above the insignificant affairs of mere mortals.
The Greek gods frolicked in the heavenly domain of Mount Olympus, while the Norse gods who fought for honor and eternal glory would feast in the hallowed halls of Valhalla with the spirits of fallen warriors. But if our destiny is to attain the power of the gods by the end of the century, what will our civilization look like in 2100? Where is all this technological innovation taking our civilization?
All the technological revolutions described here are leading to a single point: the creation of a planetary civilization.
This transition is perhaps the greatest in human history. In fact, the people living today are the most important ever to walk the surface of the planet, since they will determine whether we attain this goal or descend into chaos.
Perhaps 5,000 generations of humans have walked the surface of the earth since we first emerged in Africa about 100,000 years ago, and of them, the ones living in this century will ultimately determine our fate.
Unless there is a natural catastrophe or some calamitous act of folly, it is inevitable that we will enter this phase of our collective history. We can see this most clearly by analyzing the history of energy.
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Michio Kaku (Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100)
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Conscious mind-brain, as an emergent functionality is a systemic emergence – phase transition – in the dynamic state space of the evolving non-linear matter-energy-information complex system that has a diachronic and synchronic account. The conscious mind as an emergent functionality is the self-organising, self-referential, self-learning, dynamically closed, self-realizing potential of a goal-oriented causal dynamics (teleodynamics) of hierarchically nested evolving matter-energy-information complex system (brain) instantiated in a self-propagating recursive constraining of the structure (neuronal) and function (virtual)."
Neither Mind nor Brain. An Interdisciplinary Inquiry.
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CJ Roy
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Five hundred generations ago, the first phase change in the organization of human society began.1 Our ancestors in several regions reluctantly picked up crude implements, sharpened stakes and makeshift hoes, and went to work. As they sowed the first crops, they also laid a new foundation for power in the world. The Agricultural Revolution was the first great economic and social revolution. It started with the expulsion from Eden and moved so slowly that farming had not completely displaced hunting and gathering in all suitable areas of the globe when the twentieth century opened. Experts believe that even in the Near East, where farming first emerged, it was introduced in “a long incremental process” that “may have taken five thousand years or more.
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James Dale Davidson (The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age)
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But it is the nature of narcissistic entitlement to see the situation from only one very subjective point of view that says “My feelings and needs are all that matter, and whatever I want, I should get.” Mutuality and reciprocity are entirely alien concepts, because others exist only to agree, obey, flatter, and comfort – in short, to anticipate and meet my every need. If you cannot make yourself useful in meeting my need, you are of no value and will most likely be treated accordingly, and if you defy my will, prepare to feel my wrath. Hell hath no fury like the Narcissist denied.
Narcissists hold these unreasonable expectations of particularly favorable treatment and automatic compliance because they consider themselves uniquely special. In social situations, you will talk about them or what they are interested in because they are more important, more knowledgeable, or more captivating than anyone else. Any other subject is boring and won’t hold interest, and, in their eyes, they most certainly have a right to be entertained. In personal relationships, their sense of entitlement means that you must attend to their needs but they are under no obligation to listen to or understand you. If you insist that they do, you are “being difficult” or challenging their rights. How dare you put yourself before me? they seem to (or may actually) ask. And if they have real power over you, they feel entitled to use you as they see fit and you must not question their authority. Any failure to comply will be considered an attack on their superiority. Defiance of their will is a narcissistic injury that can trigger rage and self-righteous aggression.
The conviction of entitlement is a holdover from the egocentric stage of early childhood, around the age of one to two, when children experience a natural sense of grandiosity that is an essential part of their development. This is a transitional phase, and soon it becomes necessary for them to integrate their feelings of self-importance and invincibility with an awareness of their real place in the overall scheme of things that includes a respect for others. In some cases, however, the bubble of specialness is never popped, and in others the rupture is too harsh or sudden, as when a parent or caretaker shames excessively or fails to offer soothing in the wake of a shaming experience. Whether overwhelmed with shame or artificially protected from it, children whose infantile fantasies are not gradually transformed into a more balanced view of themselves in relation to others never get over the belief that they are the center of the universe. Such children may become self-absorbed “Entitlement monsters,” socially inept and incapable of the small sacrifices of Self that allow for reciprocity in personal relationships. The undeflated child turns into an arrogant adult who expects others to serve as constant mirrors of his or her wonderfulness. In positions of power, they can be egotistical tyrants who will have their way without regard for anyone else.
Like shame, the rage that follows frustrated entitlement is a primitive emotion that we first learn to manage with the help of attuned parents. The child’s normal narcissistic rages, which intensify during the power struggles of age eighteen to thirty months – those “terrible twos” – require “optimal frustration” that is neither overly humiliating nor threatening to the child’s emerging sense of Self. When children encounter instead a rageful, contemptuous or teasing parent during these moments of intense arousal, the image of the parent’s face is stored in the developing brain and called up at times of future stress to whip them into an aggressive frenzy. Furthermore, the failure of parental attunement during this crucial phase can interfere with the development of brain functions that inhibit aggressive behavior, leaving children with lifelong difficulties controlling aggressive impulses.
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Sandy Hotchkiss (Why Is It Always About You?)
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The trouble is that such categories do not take us much further. They are academic abstractions that do not do justice to the process-character of the observable social data to which they refer. Underlying them is the idea that the tidy division into epochs we usually find in history books best fits the actual course of social development. Each figure who is known through the magnitude of his or her achievement is then allocated to one epoch or the other as its high point. On closer examination, however, it not uncommonly emerges that outstanding achievements occur most frequently at times which could at most be called transitional phases if static concepts of epochs are used. In other words, such achievements arise from the dynamics of the conflict between the canons of older declining classes and newer rising ones.
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Norbert Elias (Mozart: Portrait of a Genius)
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Thus every individual category is subject to contamination, substitution is possible between any sphere and any other: there is a total confusion of types. Sex is no longer located in sex itself, but elsewhere - everywhere else, in fact. Politics is no longer restricted to the political sphere, but infects every sphere economics, science, art, sport ... Sport itself, meanwhile, is no longer located in sport as such, but instead in business, in sex, in politics, in the general style of performance. All these domains are affected by sport's criteria of 'excellence', effort and record-breaking, as by its childish notion of self-transcendence. Each category thus passes through a phase transition during which its essence is diluted in homeopathic doses, infinitesimal relative to the total solution, until it finally disappears, leaving a trace so small as to be indiscernible, like the 'memory of water' .
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Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
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[Bisexuality] is seen as threatening the homosexual/heterosexual and male/female dichotomies, or binarisms, which underpin our gender and sexual identities to such a large extent. In the case of the first three stereotypes, there is a refusal even to acknowledge the existence of bisexuality. It is simply wished out of existence. You can either be homosexual or heterosexual but anything else is just a phase, just playacting, not real. As Udis-Kessler argues [‘Challenging the Stereotypes’, in Rose and Stevens (eds), Bisexual Horizons: Politics, Histories, Lives. 1996. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 45-57], this reflects an ideology of essentialism which dismisses the idea that sexuality may be fluid, not fixed, and that its forms can change over a person’s lifetime. This ideology assumes that there is a ‘true’ sexuality which we are working our way towards and that bisexuality is not really ‘true’ or ‘serious’ because it is a transition towards that other state… As Udis-Kessler points out, transitions are not a rehearsal for life. Life is a series of transitions: points of arrival become new points of departure, and vice versa. So why should we assume that the way we experienced our sexuality ten or twenty years ago is necessarily less ‘true’ or important than the way we experience it now, or that the way we experience it now will necessarily be the same in ten or twenty years time? Obviously this applies not only to bisexuality, but it is an argument which those - including some lesbian and gay activists - who accuse bisexuality of being a sort of ‘false consciousness’ seldom get to grips with… lesbians and gay men, anxious to create safe spaces where they are not subject to homophobic rejection or oppression, may (consciously or unconsciously) seek to exclude bisexuals[…].Unfortunately, as soon as this happens, as with every oppressed or stigmatised group, it can lead to others being oppressed or stigmatised in turn.
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Richard Dunphy (Sexual Politics: An Introduction)
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The moon: in that luminous face one can behold those tired phases that bring only disappointment and no satisfaction; the impulses governing its expression remain patternistic, its cycles of transition easily predictable. With moderated temperament it commands the capricious sea: its diametric opponent, in whose helpless defiance, arises an empty, albeit elegant promise, an ever-changing flicker of reflected light, a simultaneous opening and closing of paths to be traversed, a vacillating hope and disillusionment in whose unsettling direction emerges something one might wish to call, even under the hardened visage of sky, a marginal sense of freedom. To walk upon the decks of ramshackle vessels rising and descending in patterns indeterminate, to lean in ecstasy over their shaky rails to witness the splendor of that which transforms immediately upon being witnessed and which transforms thereby the witness in question: it was these flights of reverie that appealed better to one’s imagination than the lean pragmatism of predictable transition.
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Ashim Shanker (Inward and Toward (Migrations, #3))
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Furthermore, Kauffman felt that it might ultimately be possible to apply these ideas far beyond the economy. "I think these kinds of models are the place for contingency and law at the same time," he says. "The point is that the phase transitions may be lawful, but the specific details are not. So maybe we have the starts of models of historical, unfolding processes for such things as the Industrial Revolution, for example, or the Renaissance as a cultural transformation,a nd why it is that an isolated society, or ethos, can't stay isolated when you start plugging some new ideas into it." You can ask the same thing about the Cambrian explosion: the period some 570 million years ago when a world full of algae and pond scum suddenly burst forth with complex, multicellular creatures in immense profusion. "Why all of a sudden do you get all this diversity?" Kauffman asks. "Maybe you had to get to a critical diversity to then explode. Maybe it's because you've gone from algal mats to something that's a little more trophic and complex, so that there's an explosion of processes acting on processes to make new processes. It's the same thing as in an economy.
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M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
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The study of error is not only in the highest degree prophylactic, but it serves as a stimulating introduction to the study of truth. As our minds become more deeply aware of their own subjectivism, we find a zest in objective method that is not otherwise there. We see vividly, as normally we should not, the enormous mischief and casual cruelty of our prejudices. And the destruction of a prejudice, though painful at first, because of its connection with our self-respect, gives an immense relief and a fine pride when it is successfully done. There is a radical enlargement of the range of attention. As the current categories dissolve, a hard, simple version of the world breaks up. The scene turns vivid and full. There follows an emotional incentive to hearty appreciation of scientific method, which otherwise it is not easy to arouse, and is impossible to sustain. Prejudices are so much easier and more interesting. For if you teach them at first as victories over the superstitions of the mind, and the exhilaration of the chase and of the conquest may carry the pupil over that hard transition from his self-bound experience to the phase where his curiosity has matured, and his reason has acquired passion.
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Walter Lippmann (Public Opinion)
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If dimensions are virtual like the particles in quantum foam are virtual then, entanglement is information that is in more than one location (hologram).
There are no particles, they may be wave packets but the idea of quantum is, a precise ratio of action in relationship to the environment.
Feynman's path integral is not infinite, it is fractal.
If you look at a star many light years away, the photon that hits your eye leaves the star precisely when the timing for the journey will end at your eye because the virtual dimension of the journey is zero distance or zero time. Wheeler said that if your eye is not there to receive the photon then it won't leave the star in the distant past. If the dimension in the direction of travel is zero, you have a different relationship then if it is zero time in terms of the property of the virtual dimensions.
Is a particle really a wave packet?
Could something like a "phase transition" involve dimensions that are more transitory then we imagined.
Example; a photon as a two dimensional sheet is absorbed by an electron so that the photon becomes a part of the geometry of the electron in which the electrons dimensions change in some manner.
Could "scale" have more variation and influence on space and time that our models currently predict?
Could information, scale, and gravity be intimately related?
”
”
R.A. Delmonico
“
Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy—a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial “food” molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set). Moreover, an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn’t matter how much investment got poured into the country. “If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas.” But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation—what some economists have called an “economic takeoff.
”
”
M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
“
The Fossil Record: No Sign of Intermediate
Forms
The clearest evidence that the scenario suggested by
the theory of evolution did not take place is the fossil
record.
According to this theory, every living species has
sprung from a predecessor. A previously existing species
turned into something else over time and all species have
come into being in this way. In other words, this transformation
proceeds gradually over millions of years.
Had this been the case, numerous intermediary species
should have existed and lived within this long transformation
period.
For instance, some half-fish/half-reptiles should have
lived in the past which had acquired some reptilian traits in
addition to the fish traits they already had. Or there should
have existed some reptile-birds, which acquired some bird
traits in addition to the reptilian traits they already had.
Since these would be in a transitional phase, they should
be disabled, defective, crippled living beings. Evolutionists
refer to these imaginary creatures, which they believe to
have lived in the past, as "transitional forms."
If such animals ever really existed, there should be millions
and even billions of them in number and variety. More
importantly, the remains of these strange creatures should
be present in the fossil record. In The Origin of Species,
Darwin explained:
If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties,
linking most closely all of the species of the same group
together must assuredly have existed... Consequently,
evidence of their former existence could be found only
amongst fossil remains.
”
”
Harun Yahya (Those Who Exhaust All Their Pleasures In This Life)
“
Nothing in life stands still. Movement and change are the very essence of life and yet our normal tendency is to believe that everything is fixed and solid. We wish to believe that all we see is real and secure, even though our ordinary experience tells us that nothing remains unchanged and nothing lasts forever. On the contrary, everything in the world around us is constantly falling apart and requires a great deal of maintenance on our part if we wish to hold it together. What happens during this process of change is the great mystery revealed in symbolic form within this book. The state called here the "transitional phase" (Tibetan: "bardo") is the actual moment of change, occurring at the end of one phase and the beginning of the next. It is the state of flux itself, the only state that can really be called "real." It is a condition of great power and potential within which anything could happen. It is the moment between moments. It may seem to span an entire lifetime, like the moment between being born and dying, or it may be imperceptibly short and fleeting, like the moment between one thought and the next. Whatever its duration, however, it is a moment of great opportunity for those who perceive it. Anyone who can do this is called a yogin. Such a person has the power of destiny in their hands. He or she has no need of a priest to guide him towards the clear light of truth, for he sees already the clear light of truth in the intermediate phases that occur between all other states. Refusing to become trapped in the false belief that all about him is fixed and solid, the yogin moves with calm and graceful ease through life, confident that changes are now under his own direction. He becomes the master of change instead of its slave.....Similarly, between any encounter and one's reaction to it, there is an intermediate space that offers choice to those who can see it. One is not obliged to react on the basis of habit or prejudice. The opportunity for a fresh approach is always there in the intermediate state for those who have learned to recognize it. Such recognition is the essential message of this ancient and profound book.
”
”
Stephen Hodge (The Illustrated Tibetan Book of the Dead: A New Reference Manual for the Soul)
“
Most obviously, they agreed, an autocatalytic set was a web of transformations among molecules in precisely the same way that an economy is a web of transformations among goods and services. In a very real sense, in fact, an autocatalytic set was an economy-a submicroscopic economy that extracted raw materials (the primordial "food" molecules) and converted them into useful products (more molecules in the set).
Moreover an autocatalytic set can bootstrap its own evolution in precisely the same way that an economy can, by growing more and more complex over time. This was a point that fascinated Kauffman. If innovations result from new combinations of old technologies, then the number of possible innovations would go up very rapidly as more and more technologies became available. In fact, he argued, once you get beyond a certain threshold of complexity you can expect a kind of phase transition analogous to the ones he had found in his autocatalytic sets. Below that level of complexity you would find countries dependent upon just a few major industries, and their economies would tend to be fragile and stagnant. In that case, it wouldn't matter how much investment got poured into the country. "If all you do is produce bananas, nothing will happen except that you produce more bananas." But if a country ever managed to diversify and increase its complexity above the critical point, then you would expect it to undergo an explosive increase in growth and innovation-what some economists have called an "economic takeoff."
The existence of that phase transition would also help explain why trade is so important to prosperity, Kauffman told Arthur. Suppose you have two different countries, each one of which is subcritical by itself. Their economies are going nowhere. But now suppose they start trading, so that their economies become interlinked into one large economy with a higher complexity. "I expect that trade between such systems will allow the joint system to become supercritical and explode outward."
Finally, an autocatalytic set can undergo exactly the same kinds of evolutionary booms and crashes that an economy does. Injecting one new kind of molecule into the soup could often transform the set utterly, in much the same way that the economy transformed when the horse was replaced by the automobile. This was part of autocatalysis that really captivated Arthur. It had the same qualities that had so fascinated him when he first read about molecular biology: upheaval and change and enormous consequences flowing from trivial-seeming events-and yet with deep law hidden beneath.
”
”
M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
“
The illusion that Nature … adopts the same complexity scale used by people … arises each time we face … configuration [space]…. The second law of Thermodynamics, for example, has been interpreted in many textbooks as though Nature exhibits an incurable tendency to disrupt order.
Nature, of course, could not prefer one state of affairs to any other simply because we found an elegant description to the former, not more than the sequence HHHHHH is preferred to any other sequence in a coin-flipping experiment. The second law implies only that a … system tends to “escape” from any narrow region of phase space toward regions of larger volume.
The illusion of an irreversible trend toward disorder originates with the fact that the volume occupied by states to which people can find concise descriptions … is extremely small compared to the entire space of possibilities. The escape from the [describable] to the [formless] is merely a perceptual distortion of the underlying transition from the narrow to the wider, as people fail to record the much more frequent transitions from the complex to the complex.
”
”
Judea Pearl
“
All forces are multi-dimensional vibrations. The geometry and dynamics of dimensions will become important going forward.
In a hologram, what is the location of the information?
The holomovement is not static and the information is not perfectly distributed.
Space and time are built up from entanglement.
Consciousness is also entangled. The fractal nesting of event horizons
For the photon, the dimensions involved are not the same as they are for the electron. The idea that all behaviors occupy the same spacetime is probably not correct. These forces and fields shape the spacetime they occupy in particular ways. In other words dimensions are dynamic and could also be virtual in some respect.
There is a dynamic tension between space and time.
Could the density of time create the pressure we call gravity?
Does scale have a fractal quality?
The fractal nesting of the relationship between space and time at different scales causes phase transitions as the influence of one force changes with respect to another. From this we get the astonishing variety of behaviors in the material world. I suspect that as the complexity increases, the dynamics of the dimensions is affected.
The photon or electron is not a thing, it is a description of a relationship.
The universe appears to be differentiating into a fractal computational geometry.
Spacetime is fractal in the golden mean.
”
”
R.A. Delmonico
“
Ken Schles: Modern humans think and operate under the percept that knowledge comes from within us, but I see us in a transitional phase where cybernetic knowledge is destroying the boundaries of where memory and knowledge is situated. It’s a crisis in the making. But perhaps there’s always been confusion. Culture, a creation of Mnemosyne, is nor something that can be possessed internally. It can only be experienced outwardly, collectively, in communication with, in participation with. Perhaps, that’s why collectors put such a high price on art: so they can privately imprison an expression of gods.
”
”
Taco Hidde Bakker (The Photograph That Took the Place of a Mountain)
“
Durant la phase de transition qui suit une révolution, le pouvoir repose toujours, l’espace d’un instant, sur une élite qui n’a pas été élue. Il s’agit alors d’organiser le plus vite possible des élections ou un référendum, pour que le compteur de confiance puisse commencer à tourner et qu’une légitimité s’établisse a posteriori. À court terme, une technocratie peut donner une nouvelle impulsion ; à plus long terme, un tel régime n’est pas viable.
”
”
David Van Reybrouck (Contre les élections)
“
In the dictionary under ‘adolescence’ you’ll find a bunch of stuff about transitional periods and developmental phases, and that all may be accurate enough if you’re writing a paper for Health class, but only one word defines ‘adolescence’ and that word is ‘earthquake.
”
”
Daniel Barnett (Poor Things)
“
This curve, which looks like an elongated S, is variously known as the logistic, sigmoid, or S curve. Peruse it closely, because it’s the most important curve in the world. At first the output increases slowly with the input, so slowly it seems constant. Then it starts to change faster, then very fast, then slower and slower until it becomes almost constant again. The transfer curve of a transistor, which relates its input and output voltages, is also an S curve. So both computers and the brain are filled with S curves. But it doesn’t end there. The S curve is the shape of phase transitions of all kinds: the probability of an electron flipping its spin as a function of the applied field, the magnetization of iron, the writing of a bit of memory to a hard disk, an ion channel opening in a cell, ice melting, water evaporating, the inflationary expansion of the early universe, punctuated equilibria in evolution, paradigm shifts in science, the spread of new technologies, white flight from multiethnic neighborhoods, rumors, epidemics, revolutions, the fall of empires, and much more. The Tipping Point could equally well (if less appealingly) be entitled The S Curve. An earthquake is a phase transition in the relative position of two adjacent tectonic plates. A bump in the night is just the sound of the microscopic tectonic plates in your house’s walls shifting, so don’t be scared. Joseph Schumpeter said that the economy evolves by cracks and leaps: S curves are the shape of creative destruction. The effect of financial gains and losses on your happiness follows an S curve, so don’t sweat the big stuff. The probability that a random logical formula is satisfiable—the quintessential NP-complete problem—undergoes a phase transition from almost 1 to almost 0 as the formula’s length increases. Statistical physicists spend their lives studying phase transitions.
”
”
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
“
The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.
”
”
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
“
is this structure that is so marvelously evoked by the Unilever example. What the development of the nozzle reveals, above all, is the power of testing. Even though the biologists knew nothing about the physics of phase transition, they were able to develop an efficient nozzle by trialing lots of different ones, rejecting those that didn’t work and then varying the best nozzle in each generation. It is not coincidental that the biologists chose this strategy: it mirrors how change happens in nature. Evolution is a process that relies on a “failure test” called natural selection. Organisms with greater “fitness” survive and reproduce, with their offspring inheriting their genes subject to a random process known as mutation. It is a system, like the one that created the Unilever nozzle, of trial and error.
”
”
Matthew Syed (Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do)
“
Applying the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams, companies, or any group with a mission provides practical rules for nurturing loonshots faster and better.
”
”
Safi Bahcall (Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries)
“
From a purely mathematical perspective, a power law signifies nothing in particular—it’s just one of many possible kinds of algebraic relationship. But when a physicist sees a power law, his eyes light up. For power laws hint that a system may be organizing itself. They arise at phase transitions, when a system is poised at the brink, teetering between order and chaos. They arise in fractals, when an arbitrarily small piece of a complex shape is a microcosm of the whole.
”
”
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
“
CONSIDERING THAT WE HAVE TO DEAL WITH ENDINGS all our lives, most of us handle them poorly. This is in part because we misunderstand them and take them either too seriously or not seriously enough. We take them too seriously by confusing them with finality—that’s it, all over, never more, finished! We see them as something without sequel, forgetting that they are the first phase of the transition process and a precondition of self-renewal. At the same time, we fail to take them seriously enough. Because they scare us, we try to avoid them.
”
”
William Bridges (Transitions: Making Sense of Life's Changes)
“
The socializing function of finance capital facilitates enormously the
task of overcoming capitalism. Once finance capital has brought the most
importance branches of production under its control, it is enough for
society, through its conscious executive organ - the state conquered by
the working class - to seize finance capital in order to gain immediate
control of these branches of production. Since all other branches of
production depend upon these, control of large-scale industry already
provides the most effective form of social control even without any
further socialization. A society which has control over coal mining, the
iron and steel industry, the machine tool, electricity, and chemical
industries, and runs the transport system, is able, by virtue of its
control of these most important spheres of production, to determine the
distribution of raw materials to other industries and the transport of
their products. Even today, taking possession of six large Berlin banks
would mean taking possession of the most important spheres of
large-scale industry, and would greatly facilitate the initial phases of
socialist policy during the transition period, when capitalist
accounting might still prove useful. There is no need at all to extend
the process of expropriation to the great bulk of peasant farms and
small businesses, because as a result of the seizure of large-scale
industry, upon which they have long been dependent, they would be
indirectly socialized just as industry is directly socialized. It is
therefore possible to allow the process of expropriation to mature
slowly, precisely in those spheres of decentralized production where it
would be a long drawn out and politically dangerous process. In other
words, since finance capital has already achieved expropriation to the
extent required by socialism, it is possible to dispense with a sudden
act of expropriation by the state, and to substitute a gradual process
of socialization through the economic benefits which society will confer.
[pp. 367-368]
”
”
Rudolph Hiferding (Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development (Economic History))
“
PROLETARIAT.
This is the term used by Karl Marx to refer to the working class, and it is defined as the class within capitalism that does not own the means of production, the class that owns nothing other
than its labor power. The proletariat is locked in struggle with the bourgeoisie which owns and controls the means of production, and by extension controls the state. Gradually developing in size, organization, and class consciousness the proletariat, Marx believes, will bring
about revolutionary change, overthrowing capitalism and instituting
communism after a transitional phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat. With the advent of communism and the abolition of private
property the proletariat along with all other classes will disappear.
There are a number of significant problems with Marx’s notion of the proletariat. First, Marx nowhere develops a theory of class and
fails to offer more than a terse definition of the proletariat. This
means that it is very difficult to determine exactly who falls into the
category of proletarian. For example, managers, professionals, intellectuals and housewives/husbands are all propertyless, but it is not
clear if they should be included in the proletariat since they do not
create value and in the case of managers and professionals in particular they may earn vastly more than and see themselves very differently from a more typical member of the proletariat such as a factory
worker. Also, there is the problem of the lack of a revolutionary consciousness emerging in the proletariat, which has led to some Marxists, such as Vladimir Ilich Lenin, arguing for a vanguard party to import revolutionary consciousness into the proletariat, and others, for example the members of the Frankfurt School, taking a more
pessimistic view of the possibility of the proletariat being an agent of
revolution at all.
”
”
Walker David (Historical Dictionary of Marxism (Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements Series))
“
Your Higher Self chose to incarnate on earth for the sole purpose of having the unique experience you’re having now. When your physical body on earth is ready to die, then your Higher Self will leave your body and transition into the next phase of your journey.
”
”
Eric John Campbell (A Manual For Manifesting Your Dream Life: How To Use Your Superpower To Manifest Your Desires)
“
For most people, childhood merges into adulthood, a phase where you are both - a child as well as an adult. But that wasn’t the case with me; my childhood died an untimely death. Maturity sneaked in before time. There was no overlapping; it was a case of one replacing the other without any forewarning, leaving rough edges instead of a smooth transition.
”
”
Alka Dimri Saklani (As Night Falls)
“
Some kind of partial romance can suffice for some people throughout their lives, serving as an end in and of itself. One thinks, for example, of George Bernard Shaw’s celebrated epistolary romances, in which he eschewed an actual meeting with the object of his affection; or of Kafka’s, which suffered serious, ultimately fatal, damage when Kafka gave way to the inevitable insistence upon an occasional meeting in person. For others, partial romance is a transitional phase, serving as a slow induction into love itself.
”
”
Ethel Spector Person (Dreams of Love and Fateful Encounters: The Power of Romantic Passion)
“
The human being's tolerance of even...a positively interpreted chaos, that is chaos as a potential for creative change, is severely limited. In full force, "the dissolution of all values and order" can at best be endured only as a relatively short transition phase.
”
”
Jürgen Kriz (Self-Actualization)
“
On sait ce qui fait tenir physiquement le béton : l'hydratation du ciment transforme ses phases silicatées en silicate de calcium hydraté, dont la structure assure la cohésion des granulats et la résistance du matériau. Mais qu'est-ce qui le fait tenir ontologiquement ?
Dit autrement, c'est quoi le monde du béton ?
Le ciment standardisé le plus commun, dit "Portland", a été mis au point au début du XIXe siècle. Il accompagne l'essor du capitalisme industriel. Hyper modulable, peu onéreux, facile de mise en oeuvre comme à détruire, les qualités du béton de ciment donnent depuis lors aux politiques et aménageurs une grande liberté pour configurer et reconfigurer l'espace. Et cette reconfiguration n'a pas cessé depuis que les humains s'agglomèrent dans les villes, suivant en substance les mouvements de concentration du capital.
Le béton matérialise ce rapport dans des infrastructures dédiées à l'accélération des flux de marchandises, qu'il s'agisse d'information, d'énergie, de biens manufacturés, ou de travailleurs. Frets, entrepôts de stockage, hubs de tri, transporteurs, data centers, fibre optique, plateformes "virtuelles" : les grands réseaux logistiques et informationnels synchronisent les métropoles entre elles sur la cadence du marché. Zébrant les territoires, cette couche dessine une pieuvre logistique faite de routes, ponts, tunnels connectant entrepôts, ports et aéroports. N'ayant que faire des particularités des territoires traversés, au mépris de celles et ceux qui y habitent, la logistique trace tout droit à travers bourgs, champs, zones naturelles et montagnes. Les campagnes sont reléguées aux fonctions de voies de transit d'un côté, et en ressources alimentaires et énergétiques de l'autre.
”
”
Les soulèvements de la terre (Premières secousses)
“
I think it’s better to be aggressive at this point,” he said. “It seems to me that it is both historically and sociologically true that privileged classes do not give up their privileges voluntarily. And they do not give them up without strong resistance.” The interviewer asked if strong resistance would generate more white retaliation. “Well,” King said, “I think that is a necessary phase of the transition.
”
”
Jonathan Eig (King: A Life)
“
That’s an optical phase transition,” said Ilan. “Like the ones you get between warm and cold air layers. But without the air, obviously.” Benjamin nodded. That was what caused fata morganas.
”
”
Brandon Q. Morris (The Disturbance 3: The Truth: Hard Science Fiction)
“
A hallmark of our time is that life is not predictable. It does not unfold in passages, stages, phases, or cycles. It is nonlinear—and getting more so every day. It’s also more manageable, more forgiving of missteps, and more open to personalization, if you know how to navigate the new outbreak of twists and turns.
”
”
Bruce Feiler (Life Is in the Transitions: Mastering Change at Any Age)
“
Moreover, whatever state of being he remembers when he gives up the body at the end, he goes respectively to that state of being, Arjuna, transformed into that state of being.” -The Bhagavad-Gita (8:6) The afterlife is not a place like the world you know around you now. What survives is the inner you. If you are spiritually advanced, you may skip the transition phases I described above and immediately become aware of the divine light of God. (I use the name God although I understand that this emotive word may mean different things to different readers.) Many Eastern religions believe that the last thoughts and words of the dying person will determine the level of spiritual attainment in the next life. So
”
”
Craig Hamilton-Parker (What to Do When You Are Dead: Life After Death, Heaven and the Afterlife)
“
Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge-nature's unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favor of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organization and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterizing a system's behavior. They are the patent signatures of self-organization in complex systems.
”
”
Albert-László Barabási (Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life)
“
Lifebooks typically contain pictures of the child from as young an age as are available, pictures of important people such as birth parents and other caregivers, copies of important letters and documents that marked different phases of the adoption process, and memorabilia associated with his life transitions.
”
”
Mary Hopkins-Best (Toddler Adoption: The Weaver's Craft Revised Edition)
“
What is important to notice here is not the exact times or durations, as those will vary with each family, but rather the rhythm that is in place. There is a clear start to the day; a routine that is always followed, then educational time is started with circle time. The child understands that this first circle time marks the beginning of the instructional period. Clear breaks allow the child to transition from one activity to the next. By having a set number of activities before breaks such as snack time, your child begins to understand the concept of time. Eventually, this will become so second nature even to the youngest child that they will begin to transition by themselves. Allow for a range in flexibility in your routine. The exact minutes on the clock do not matter as much as the rhythm. If your child is losing interest in his or her self-directed activity ten minutes early, you may try to keep them interested a bit longer. However, it is acceptable to acknowledge that your child has gained all that they require from that lesson today and it is time to move on to the next phase. The same is true for extending activities. There is no need to interrupt a child that is engrossed in discovery. Simply let the interest and curiosity be satisfied in its own time and then carry on with the day. This is the beauty of Montessori home school, being able to tailor the experience to each child.
”
”
Sterling Production (Montessori at Home Guide: A Short Guide to a Practical Montessori Homeschool for Children Ages 2-6)
“
More Phase Transitions This principle applies just as much to the spread of infectious diseases or magnetic polarity as to forest fires. It is essentially the same process unfolding.
”
”
Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (Introducing Fractals: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides))
“
To transition from one phase of your life to another takes hard work. Most people give up when they hit their first speed bump. Most of the time those speed bumps are people who have been keeping them from transitioning all along or people from their past. If someone you care about doesn't support you in improving yourself, that is a great indicator it's time move on. Learning to walk away from a toxic relationship takes courage, determination, and a realization that there is a better life waiting for you! Maybe it's time to step outside of your comfort zone, let go, have faith, and surround yourself with people who will support you in your transition to a better life! You deserve to be treated with respect, you are worth it! I am posting this because I see this happen frequently and I want the best for everyone who is struggling!
”
”
Arik Hoover
“
Fractal basin boundaries addressed deep issues in theoretical physics. Phase transitions were matters of threshholds, and Peitgen and Richter looked at one of the best-studied kinds of phase transitions, magnetization and nonmagnetization in materials. Their pictures of such boundaries displayed the peculiarly beautiful complexity that was coming to seem so natural, cauliflower shapes with progressively more tangled knobs and furrows. As they varied the parameters and increased their magnification of details, one picture seemed more and more random, until suddenly, unexpectedly, deep in the heart of a bewildering region, appeared a familiar oblate form, studded with buds: the Mandelbrot set, every tendril and every atom in place. It was another signpost of universality.
”
”
James Gleick (Chaos: Making a New Science)
“
The freezing of water is called a phase transition. The temperature at which this happens is called a critical temperature. A different phase transition is the evaporation of water, at another critical temperature of 100 degrees Celsius: Similarly, iron undergoes a phase transition at its critical temperature of 763 degrees Celsius: At this temperature it loses its magnetization; when cooled below this temperature it will regain its magnetization. The critical temperature of the phase transition at which the Higgs field appears is so high that only at a very early phase of the existence of the universe, fractions of a second after its creation did higher temperatures exist. The Higgs field has pervaded the entire universe ever since, including our container-our so-called Black Box-the temperature of which we have been attempting to lower.
”
”
Henning Genz (Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space)
“
According to Buckmaster, the two were very taken at the time with Kraftwerk’s recently released Radio-Activity. This album caught Kraftwerk at a transitional phase of their career, channelling free-form experimentalism towards more tightly controlled, robotic rhythms that are like the sonic equivalent of a Mondrian painting. Radio-Activity is a clear influence on Low, with its mix of pop hooks, unsettling sound effects, retro-modernism; its introspection and emotional flatness. The theremin-sounding synths of “Always Crashing in the Same Car” and the electronic interludes on “A New Career in a New Town” in particular have a RadioActivity feel to them.
”
”
Hugo Wilcken (Low)
“
During the nineteenth century, corps commander was the highest level of command to still require skills of an operator for success. A corps commander was still able to see a problem develop and to dispatch soldiers or artillery to solve it on the spot. But at the army level of command the dynamics were for the first time different. The army commander was much more distant from the battle and consequently had no ability to act immediately or to control soldiers he could not see. The distance of the army commander from the action slowed responses to orders and created friction such that the commander was obliged to make decisions before the enemy’s actions were observed.
Civil War army commanders were now suddenly required to exhibit a different set of skills. For the first time, they had to think in time and to command the formation by inculcating their intent in the minds of subordinates with whom they could not communicate directly. Very few of the generals were able to make the transition from direct to indirect leadership, particularly in the heat of combat. Most were very talented men who simply were never given the opportunity to learn to lead indirectly. Some, like Generals Meade and Burnside, found themselves forced to make the transition in the midst of battle. General Lee succeeded in part because, as military advisor to Jefferson Davis, he had been able to watch the war firsthand and to form his leadership style before he took command. General Grant was particularly fortunate to have the luck of learning his craft in the Western theater, where the press and the politicians were more distant, and their absence allowed him more time to learn from his mistakes. From the battle of Shiloh to that of Vicksburg, Grant as largely left alone to learn the art of indirect leadership through trial and error and periodic failure without getting fired for his mistakes.
The implications of this phase of military history for the future development of close-combat leaders are at once simple, and self-evident. As the battlefield of the future expands and the battle becomes more chaotic and complex, the line that divides the indirect leader from the direct leader will continue to shift lower down the levels of command. The circumstances of future wars will demand that much younger and less experienced officers be able to practice indirect command. The space that held two Civil War armies of 200,000 men in 1863 would have been controlled by fewer than 1,000 in Desert Storm, and it may well be only a company or platoon position occupied by fewer than 100 soldiers in a decade or two. This means younger commanders will have to command soldiers they cannot see and make decisions without the senior leader’s hand directly on their shoulders. Distance between all the elements that provide support, such as fires and logistics, will demand that young commanders develop the skill to anticipate and think in time. Tomorrow’s tacticians will have to think at the operational level of war. They will have to make the transition from “doers” to thinkers, from commanders who react to what they see to leaders who anticipate what they will see.
To do all this to the exacting standard imposed by future wars, the new leaders must learn the art of commanding by intent very early in their stewardship. The concept of “intent” forms the very essence of decentralized command.
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Robert H. Scales
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Lots of people have a vision, but what we need is a viable transition strategy, my ever-thoughtful friend Herb Barbolet insists. Food advocates (and of course, we’ll be changing that word to problem-solvers) are too removed from sources of power, resources, and public support to be able to implement anything like a comprehensive vision for wholesale change of the food system in anything like the immediate future. But we can move to transition phase.
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Wayne Roberts (Food for City Building: A Field Guide for Planners, Actionists & Entrepreneurs)
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What we find is highly sensitive dependence to initial conditions, producing phase transitions.
Once a critical threshold is passed, the fire spreads outwards, the disease becomes an epidemic, the material magnetic.
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Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon (Introducing Fractal Geometry)
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Religious people of modern societies have then a weaker and more abstract religion than our ancestors had. The modern rest religions are by no means detached from psychological developmental stages but reflect transitional stages. Atheism and agnosticism clearly result from the gradual evolution of the adolescent stage of formal operations. Henceforth, the theology of Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Hans Küng, J. B. Metz, or J. Ratzinger reflects transitional phases of the psychological evolution.
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Anonymous
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SYMMETRY BREAKING
The preferential direction fixed by this spontaneous symmetry breaking will now determine which among the elementary particles will share in the strong interaction and which will not. The gist is that the spontaneous symmetry breaking sees to it that, in addition to gravity, the one unified force that knew no preferential direction in the abstrat space of particle properties is now split into two distinguishable forces-the strong force and the electroweak force.
The symmetry that broke down in this phase transition is what we call GUT symmetry. Formally speaking, GUT symmetry breaking, which permits us to tell the difference between the strong force and the electroweak force, is equivalent to symmetry breaking in the ferromagnet. As one direction in space is spontaneously chosen as a preferential one, a field emerges and, simply by differing from zero, points in some given direction, breaking the previous symmetry. In the ferromagnet, this field is the magnetization; in our cooling universe, it is the Higgs field.
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Henning Genz (Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space)
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The energy that was hidden in the false vacuum is liberated in the course of this phase transition of the universe into the real vacuum; it now becomes normal energy, just like the thermal energy liberated in the process of crystallization of ice in water. The Higgs field takes the place of the ice crystals as the physical vacuum develops in the inflationary model. The energy generated in the inflationary process, which originates in the false vacuum ground state, manifests itself as motion energy in the Higgs field. We might say that it makes the Higgs field shiver. It then produces radiation and massive particles that move about randomly. In this thermalization process, it increases the temperature of the universe; it spreads evenly throughout all space. Inflation ends some 10^-33 after its own Big (or Small!) Bang in the same state the universe would have reached in the hot Big Bang model without inflation. This coincidence is at the basis of our model's success. We believe we can understand all further developments in terms of various theories, some of which are quite speculative, but none of which clash with the inflationary model. The success of the inflationary scenario when compared with that of the hot Big Bang is its implied explanation of the properties of the universe after t = 10^-33 seconds; these properties have to be entered into the hot Big Bang model as unexplained initial conditions.
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Henning Genz (Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space)
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It has introduced me to the role of ritual in mourning—the ceremonies that allow us to shoulder complicated feelings and confront loss; that make room for the seemingly paradoxical act of acknowledging the past as a path toward the future. It gets me thinking about the other ways we mark the crossing of thresholds: birthdays and weddings and baby showers, baptisms and bar mitzvahs and quinceañeras. These rites of passage allow us to migrate from one phase of our lives to another; they keep us from getting lost in transit. They show us a way to honor the space between no longer and not yet. But I have no predetermined rituals. They are mine to create. From a distance of several
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Suleika Jaouad (Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted)
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Change is situational: the move to a new site, a new CEO replaces the founder, the reorganization of the roles on the team, and new technology. Transition, on the other hand, is psychological; it is a three-phase process that people go through as they internalize and come to terms with the details of the new situation that the change brings about.
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William Bridges (Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change)
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Language had a role to play in all this, the written language of course, but especially the spoken form. Some of the most problematic words created unimaginable difficulties, such as ‘gentleman’, ‘lady’ or ‘miss’, to cite only three. These words were rightly considered significant obstacles in the transition to communism. Each communist country had had its own experience of its language, often strange, as in the case of Albania. This little country, generally famous for its failings and backwardness, took an unexpected approach to these three words. Whereas the word ‘gentleman’ disappeared from currency in the very first phase of socialism, like in the Soviet Union, the word ‘lady’ had a certain staying power. But the nicest surprise turned out to be the word ‘miss’. There was a determined effort to replace it, because in Albanian it carried the affectionate connotations of the word ‘mother’, especially in primary schools. Despite the annoyance it caused, it was used by tens of thousands of little children instead of the word ‘teacher’. Efforts to supplant it failed one after another. The children stubbornly continued to call their teachers ‘miss’. It was this army of countless toddlers that proved indomitable, and the word ‘miss’ with its striking
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Ismail Kadare (A Dictator Calls)
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all national armies by a UN military force, is available online today in “Department of State Publication 7277,” after being “unavailable” for decades due to its sensitive nature. Bowing to Rostow’s suggestion of a unilateral American disarmament, Kennedy in 1961 signed Public Law #87-297, calling for the elimination of US national forces and further declaring that “no one may possess a firearm or lethal weapon except police or military personnel.” During the following administrations, this law has been updated 18 times and is still active and “in transition,” according to ex-President George W. Bush and Admiral William Crowe. Its companion document, Publication 7277, released in 1962, describes a two-phase operation reducing the US armed forces to 2.1 million while those of China and the Soviet Union do the same.
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John Scura (Battle Hymn: Revelations of the Sinister Plan for a New World Order)
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Finally, the theory explained why the resistance drops so abruptly at a certain temperature. It’s much the same reason that water freezes suddenly at 0 degrees Celsius. Both processes are phase transitions, victories of self-organization over random jittering. At the freezing point, water molecules calm down just enough to allow their attractive forces to bond them into a crystal. Similarly, at the superconducting transition temperature, the atomic lattice calms down just enough to allow electrons to form Cooper pairs and coalesce into a Bose-Einstein condensate. In both cases, a fraction of a degree drop in temperature makes all the difference.
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Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
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A mutual cancellation: in an article Firestone approvingly cites Kathie Amatniek’s Progression on the stages of women, from traditional womanhood (“beautiful but powerless”), to uppity women, through sisterhood (“Powerful!”), to the final goal, “HUMANHOOD THE ULTIMATE!” The terminal priority of the female sex is not the end point of this revolution and nor is an information revolution, if this implies the subordination of human relations to machine logics. This kind of stance may come as some surprise to those who remember Firestone for her artificial wombs and presume her feminism aligns directly with those later versions of technophile feminism that were resolutely anti-human and explicitly set out to fuse with information technology rather than pass through it. It is tempting to suggest that the kinds of technological fixes for which Firestone is best known are essentially located not in the final phase of this model, but rather pre-figure forms of existence that might be expected to develop in the middle (transitional) stage.
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Mandy Merck (Further Adventures of The Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone (Breaking Feminist Waves))
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The cost of the first phase was astronomical because of 1) inefficient phasing and high real estate costs, 2) powerful unions earning high wages and dictating costly work rules, and 3) regulations and environmental sensitivities.
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Philip Mark Plotch (Last Subway: The Long Wait for the Next Train in New York City)
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Living systems are actually very close to this edge-of-chaos phase transition, where things are much looser and more fluid. And natural selection is not the antagonist of self-organization.
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M. Mitchell Waldrop (Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos)
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Wilhelm Rau has compiled the Vedic references to pottery from the oldest strands of the Black Yajurveda and found that although the potter’s wheel was known, it was hand made pottery that was prescribed for the ritual sphere. This suggests to him that “the more primitive technique persisted in the ritual sphere while in secular life more advanced methods of potting had already been adopted.” Should this assumption be correct, “we can pin down the transition from hand-made to wheel-thrown pottery, as far as the Aryans are concerned, (down) to the earlier phases of Vedic times” (Rau 1974, 141).12 Of relevance to this line of argument is a verse from the Taittīrlya Samhitā (4, 5, 4), stating that what is turned on the wheel is Āsuric and what is made without the wheel is godly (e.g., Kuzmina 1983, 21). According to Rau’s philological investigations, the characteristic of this oldest pottery was that it was made of clay mixed with various materials, some of them organic, resulting in porous pots. These pots were poorly-fired and ranged in size from about 0.24 m to 1.0 m in diameter at the opening and from 0.24 m to 0.40 m in height. Furthermore, they showed a lack of plastic decoration and were unpainted (Rau 1974, 142). Of further relevance is the fact that firing was accomplished by the covered baking method between two layers of raw bricks in a simple open pit. In later times this was done with materials producing red color. Rau advises excavators to be “on the lookout for ceramics of this description among their finds” (142).
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Edwin F. Bryant (The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture: The Indo-Aryan Migration Debate)
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Just take a look around. The whole universe is…let’s say it’s in a transitional phase…” And they pointed to the sky, where the constellations have become unrecognizable, here clotted, there rarefied, the celestial map in upheaval, stars exploding one after the other, while more stars emit a final flicker and die.
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Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler)
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It’s important that the transition happen in phases, with robots working alongside humans. And it’s especially important that the robots who are eliminating those jobs appear likable and unthreatening. “It’s like Mary Poppins,” Hancock says. “A spoonful of sugar makes the robots go down.
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Meghan O'Gieblyn (God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning)
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My hardest labor, however, happened in my head and heart as I made the transition in my spiritual quest from camel to lion. This phase of inner change involves one of the most dramatic paradigm shifts in the human psychological repertoire: the move from what psychologists call an “exogenous locus of control” to an “endogenous locus of control.” It means the process of dropping one’s dependency on external structures and establishing a sort of moral guidance system that comes from within.
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Martha N. Beck (Leaving the Saints: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith)
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Many founder-led companies stumble trying to make the transition from scrappy start-up to a well-managed machine. Entrepreneurs often prefer to trust their instincts rather than the more orderly systems that professional managers use. Entrepreneurs often resist any limits placed on those instincts and the energy that brought their company into existence. But eventually it is those limits that create the foundation for the next phase of growth. The turbulence of starting a firm must at some point permit systems to be implemented that allow other people to help drive the organization forward.
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Stephen A. Schwarzman (What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence)
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Motherhood Chaitanya Hospital
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What are the three phases of male-to-female transition? Step one: Hey, that guy looks a little weird. Step two: Hey, that person looks really weird. Step three: Whoa, that chick is ugly!
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Jennifer Finney Boylan (She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders)
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[...] rites of passage allow us to migrate from one phase of our lives to another; they keep us from getting lost in transit. They show us a way to honor the space between no longer and not yet.
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Suleika Jaouad (Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted)
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The claim made by many environmentalists that neither capitalism nor socialism can solve the crisis because ‘both rely on development’ therefore stands discredited. Though we may have to ration fossil fuel during a transitional phase, socialism does not have to now become a kind of green-primitivism. From ‘degrowth’, to ‘holism’ and ‘green populism’, there are too many variations of this idea to detail here, but suffice to say that they almost always consist of a nebulous fantasy ‘third way’ amounting to a form of social democracy (ie capitalism!). We must admit that the regrettably mixed environmental records of the Soviet Union and China have contributed to the prevalence of these attitudes, although it should be acknowledged that it was impossible to abolish the law of value while the rest of the world remained capitalist. This should be addressed, as natural resources are nationalised and then internationalised, by making natural resources the common patrimony of humanity, owned and controlled by an independent global trust that grants licences to planning agencies on strict conditions and also levies rents and surcharges (that go towards other public services, so as to prevent corruption). But socialist countries in future must take full advantage of the hemp miracle, for full automation is the key to abolishing the law of value and hemp is the key to achieving full automation without turbocharging climate change. The catastrophic prohibition of hemp and cannabis encapsulates Marx’s evaluation that capitalism alienates humanity and nature from one another – so it makes perfect sense that the key plank to socialism’s reversal of this alienation should be to end prohibition.
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Ted Reese (Socialism or Extinction: Climate, Automation and War in the Final Capitalist Breakdown)
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We need to have a clear sense of what is dying, what is growing, and what has yet to be born in this phase of transition. We must move toward the future lacking a clear-cut blueprint of what is to be done and shedding a dogmatic sense of the eternal truth but carrying with us a shared sense of the awareness, values, methods and relationships necessary to navigate these uncharted waters.
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Scott Kurashige (The Next American Revolution: Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century)