Tube Related Quotes

What’s your business, Sir?” “Jus’ call me Gord. Labour relations.” “What’s that?” “I’m a broker, kid. Middlemen need workers an’ wagons t’ bring their recyclings south. I’m the one who supplies ‘em.” “Where are they now?” “Over there, you can just see the wagons under the tubes. The men sleep under ‘em.” “They’re shackled.” “Yup.” “Prisoners?” “Nope. Indentured labour.

In depression this faith in deliverance, in ultimate restoration, is absent. The pain is unrelenting, and what makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come- not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul. So the decision-making of daily life involves not, as in normal affairs, shifting from one annoying situation to another less annoying- or from discomfort to relative comfort, or from boredom to activity- but moving from pain to pain. One does not abandon, even briefly, one’s bed of nails, but is attached to it wherever one goes. And this results in a striking experience- one which I have called, borrowing military terminology, the situation of the walking wounded. For in virtually any other serious sickness, a patient who felt similar devistation would by lying flat in bed, possibly sedated and hooked up to the tubes and wires of life-support systems, but at the very least in a posture of repose and in an isolated setting. His invalidism would be necessary, unquestioned and honorably attained. However, the sufferer from depression has no such option and therefore finds himself, like a walking casualty of war, thrust into the most intolerable social and family situations. There he must, despite the anguish devouring his brain, present a face approximating the one that is associated with ordinary events and companionship. He must try to utter small talk, and be responsive to questions, and knowingly nod and frown and, God help him, even smile. But it is a fierce trial attempting to speak a few simple words.

The conversations had a nightmare flatness, talking dice spilled in the tube metal chairs, human aggregates disintegrating in cosmic inanity, random events in a dying universe where everything is exactly what it appears to be, and no other relation than juxtaposition is possible.

What’s amazing is that things like hashtag design—these essentially ad hoc experiments in digital architecture—have shaped so much of our political discourse. Our world would be different if Anonymous hadn’t been the default username on 4chan, or if every social media platform didn’t center on the personal profile, or if YouTube algorithms didn’t show viewers increasingly extreme content to retain their attention, or if hashtags and retweets simply didn’t exist. It’s because of the hashtag, the retweet, and the profile that solidarity on the internet gets inextricably tangled up with visibility, identity, and self-promotion. It’s telling that the most mainstream gestures of solidarity are pure representation, like viral reposts or avatar photos with cause-related filters, and meanwhile the actual mechanisms through which political solidarity is enacted, like strikes and boycotts, still exist on the fringe.

I have a print - you can buy them at the Victoria and Albert Museum - of a photograph of the village street of Thetford, taken in 1868, in which William Smith is not. The street is empty. There is a grocer's shop and a blacksmith's and a stationary cart and a great spreading tree, but not a single human figure. In fact William Smith - or someone, or several people, dogs too, geese, a man on a horse - passed beneath the tree, went into the grocer's shop, loitered for a moment talking to a friend while the photograph was taken but he is invisible, all of them are invisible. The exposure of the photograph - sixty minutes - was so long that William Smith and everyone else passed through it and away leaving no trace. Not even so much of a mark as those primordial worms that passed through the Cambrian mud of northern Scotland and left the empty tube of their passage in the rock. I like that. I like that very much. A neat image for the relation of man to the physical world. Gone, passed through and away.

So, year after year, Silas Marner had lived in this solitude, his guineas rising in the iron pot, and his life narrowing and hardening itself more and more into a mere pulsation of desire and satisfaction that had no relation to any other being. His life had reduced itself to the functions of weaving and hoarding, without any contemplation of an end towards which the functions tended. The same sort of process has perhaps been undergone by wiser men, when they have been cut off from faith and love—only, instead of a loom and a heap of guineas, they have had some erudite research, some ingenious project, or some well-knit theory. Strangely Marner's face and figure shrank and bent themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has no meaning standing apart.

I have taken the opportunity to update the book and include new theoretical and observational results obtained since the book was first published (on April Fools’ Day, 1988). I have included a new chapter on wormholes and time travel. Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity seems to offer the possibility that we could create and maintain wormholes, little tubes that connect different regions of space-time. If so, we might be able to use them for rapid travel around the galaxy or travel back in time. Of course, we have not seen anyone from the future (or have we?) but I discuss a possible explanation for this

With the explosion of technology over the last 15+ years, we are in the process of a complete paradigm shift in regards to how we communicate in our marketing, public relations and advertising. Social Media has forever changed the way businesses and customers communicate and the beauty of it is that, through your channels, you can reach your audience directly and at lightning speed. Social Media has also changed the way customers make their buying decisions. Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, have made it easy to find and connect with others who share similar interests, to read product reviews and to connect with potential clients. Within these networks there is an amazing and wide open space for your unique voice to be heard. As the web interacts with us in more personal ways and with greater portability, there is no time better than the present to engage with and rally your community.

his is exactly what I mean about rabbit holes. I love them. I don’t find them a waste of time at all. The Internet works like the subconscious - I’m sure somebody’s said that already, it’s so obvious, I just can’t think who it would have been. The point is, this is how dreamwork works: you wake up and think, “Why the hell did I dream that my 2nd grade teacher was masturbating my dental hygienist?” If you were in analysis, you’d probably be able to figure it out if you really wanted to, just like you could probably eventually figure out why YouTube thinks some SpongeBob SquarePants video is related to Natalya Makarova dancing the dying swan. I do like to understand some of the connections, and for others to remain mysterious. This is how I feel about my subconscious as well. And I never really find it a waste of time. If you think about it, you always find something out. Gray seems to be wasting a lot of time, but in his quiet way, he’s figuring out how to deal with the fact that the people we love die. I really don’t think that’s a waste of time. Also, for the record, I really don’t think looking at art (MJ, Pina, Merce) over and over and over, trying to understand what it’s trying to tell you, is a waste of time. I think it may be the most meaningful thing we do. I tell my graduate students this all the time. Don’t let anybody make you feel bad about this.

In 2018, I publicly disclosed that I had experienced psychological abuse by my sisters. Prior to uploading my first YouTube video on this sensitive topic, I had no idea if anyone else would relate. Shortly after my video went live, I received hundreds of comments by strangers who shared similar stories of being bullied, manipulated, gaslit, and abused by their own siblings. Five years later, my videos now have over 163,234K views and thousands of comments.

On the other hand, it has a number of other advantages for power. For one thing, it diverts people, it atomizes people. When you're sitting in front of your tube, you're alone. I mean, there's something about human beings that just makes face-to-face contact very different from banging around on a computer terminal and getting some noise coming back―that's very impersonal, and it breaks down human relations. Well, that's obviously a good result from the point of view of people with power―because it's extremely important to drive human sentiments out of people if you just want them to be passive and obedient and under control. So if you can eliminate things like face-to-face contact and direct interaction, and just turn people into what's caricatured as kind of an M.I.T. nerd―you know, somebody who's got antennae coming out of his head, and is wired into his computer all the time―that's a real advantage, because then you've made them more inhuman, and therefore more controllable.

What do we inherit, and how, and why? The relatively new field of epigenetics studies the impact of environment and experience on genes themselves. How much had the gene pool of the Waldens - that apparently cheerful extended family I had seen singing on YouTube - formed me? I did not come from the line of small, wiry, dark-eyed people of the shtetl, the men swaying over crumbling tombstones, prayer books in their hands. The imprint of pogroms, of the difficulties and sorrows of immigrant life was not mine - at least not in the physical sense. But I had carried these things a long way in my heart. I was of that dusty and doomed Polish village - and I was not. What had I inherited psychologically? What was in my blood? I was made of three people: my mother, my father, Ben Walden. Disparate worlds had been floating and colliding within me all my life.

Living in this niche therefore requires both individual and collective creativity, intensive cooperation, a tolerance for strangers and crowds, and a degree of openness and trust that is entirely unmatched among our closest primate relatives. Compared to fiercely individualistic and relentlessly competitive chimpanzees, for instance, we are like goofy, tail-wagging puppies. We are almost painfully docile, desperately in need of affection and social contact, and wildly vulnerable to exploitation. As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, an anthropologist and primatologist, notes, it is remarkable that hundreds of people will cram themselves shoulder to shoulder into a tiny airplane, obediently fasten their seat belts, eat their packets of stale crackers, watch movies and read magazines and chat politely with their neighbors, and then file peacefully off at the other end. If you packed a similar number of chimpanzees onto a plane, what you’d end up with at the other end is a long metal tube full of blood and dismembered body parts.6 Humans are powerful in groups precisely because we are weak as individuals, pathetically eager to connect with one another, and utterly dependent on the group for survival.

And then now a very strange argument indeed ensues, me v. the Lebanese porter, because it turns out I am putting this guy, who barely speaks English, in a terrible kind of sedulous-service double-bind, a paradox of pampering: viz. the The-Passenger’s-Always-Right-versus-Never-Let-A-Passenger-Carry-His-Own-Bag paradox. Clueless at the time about what this poor little Lebanese man is going through, I wave off both his high-pitched protests and his agonized expression as mere servile courtesy, and I extract the duffel and lug it up the hall to 1009 and slather the old beak with ZnO and go outside to watch the coast of Florida recede cinematically à la F. Conroy. Only later did I understand what I’d done. Only later did I learn that that little Lebanese Deck 10 porter had his head just about chewed off by the (also Lebanese) Deck 10 Head Porter, who’d had his own head chewed off by the Austrian Chief Steward, who’d received confirmed reports that a Deck 10 passenger had been seen carrying his own luggage up the Port hallway of Deck 10 and now demanded rolling Lebanese heads for this clear indication of porterly dereliction, and had reported (the Austrian Chief Steward did) the incident (as is apparently SOP) to an officer in the Guest Relations Dept., a Greek officer with Revo shades and a walkie-talkie and officerial epaulets so complex I never did figure out what his rank was; and this high-ranking Greek guy actually came around to 1009 after Saturday’s supper to apologize on behalf of practically the entire Chandris shipping line and to assure me that ragged-necked Lebanese heads were even at that moment rolling down various corridors in piacular recompense for my having had to carry my own bag. And even though this Greek officer’s English was in lots of ways better than mine, it took me no less than ten minutes to express my own horror and to claim responsibility and to detail the double-bind I’d put the porter in—brandishing at relevant moments the actual tube of ZnO that had caused the whole snafu—ten or more minutes before I could get enough of a promise from the Greek officer that various chewed-off heads would be reattached and employee records unbesmirched to feel comfortable enough to allow the officer to leave; 42 and the whole incident was incredibly frazzling and angst-fraught and filled almost a whole Mead notebook and is here recounted in only its barest psychoskeletal outline.

For example, in the previously mentioned example of my leaving for work in a rush, being short with my wife, and then walking out with no further words, we can see that I am not relating with my experience in a complete way and that this is creating further karma. I am simply not present to the totality of my situation, of my feelings and my interactions with my wife. When I “rush,” I have disengaged; I am in a disembodied state. I am running from the painful feelings of my situation—of having gotten up late, not having left enough time to get ready, fearing being late for work—and from being with my wife, who looks for some basic level of decency and emotional presence from me. In my disembodied state, though the anxiety is coursing through my body, I am only dimly aware of feeling it. The anxiety has me by the throat, and I am trying to deal with it by ignoring it and everything it reflects. I do this by going faster and faster, as if I could outrun the situation and outrun my anxiety. So, driven by my fear, I am skimming the surface of my life, dropping my tube of toothpaste, leaving my pajamas on the floor (for my wife to pick up), stubbing my foot on the bedroom door, spilling my coffee, all capped off by being short with my wife. I am in a state of complete disembodiment and in such a mind of confusion that I am unconsciously acting as if being on time is of more consequence than respecting the tender and open feelings of my wife, my life partner and truest friend.

In this regard, the delicate cell bodies, dendrites, and axons are like the many other fluid-filled tubes within the body. The quality of their function is susceptible to changes in pressure, distortion, viscosity. Their need for constant irrigation is acute: If fresh oxygen is held back from a neuron for merely three to five seconds, it is rendered completely unexcitable.4 And necessary substances must circulate inside the cell as well as around it. If a long dendrite or axon is pinched, closing its length off from the rest of the cell’s fluid, the excitability of the isolated branch quickly decays and eventually the pinched axon or dendrite will atrophy. You can park a truck on top of an electrical wire and it will continue to work nicely. It will work, in fact, until it is completely severed. In contrast there are many intermediate stages of malfunction in a nerve short of this final breakage—or lesion—most of them having to do with the relative effectiveness of the delivery and circulation of nutritional fluids and the adequate flushing of toxins and wastes. These intermediate malfunctions do not normally stop the system; they just make it less efficient. They confuse sensations, cloud thoughts, disturb the precision of our muscular efforts, make us numb in some spots, unaccountably sensitive in others, eliminate responses, force compensations. Insofar as effective bodywork can be of direct benefit to the circulation of bodily fluids, it can help to support the actual metabolic bases of nerve function, and this benefit is above and beyond the question of the value of any actual sensations it may produce.

How is regeneration of the spinal cord in the salamander related to its initial development ? There is now evidence that in the salamander, the steps of progenitor cell-patterning and controlled neurogenesis that naturally regenerate a severed tail largely recapitulate the steps followed during early embryonic development to initially build the central nervous system. For example, ependymal cells are descendants of radial glial cells retained from the earliest developmental stages in regenerating vertebrates. The ependymal tube that gives rise to regenerated spinal cord following salamander tail amputation is very similar in appearance to the early structure of the neural tube of developing amniotes. But how does that recapitulation occur ? By using a transgenic axolotl that expresses green fluorescent proteins (GFPs), they further examined the regenerated spinal cord by replacing a segment of the spinal cord from a typical animal with a piece of the spinal cord from a GFP-expressing animal - that is, one with green fluorescent cells. They found that the implanted cells in the experimental animals regenerated a green spinal cord ! Thus, regeneration may be a more neural stem-cell like, or pluripotent, state as a response to injury.

However, the most interesting property of your spacetime tube isn't its bulk shape, but its internal structure, which is remarkably complex. Whereas the particles that constitute the Moon are stuck together in a rather static arrangement, many of your particles are in constant motion relative to one another. Consider, for example, the particles that make up your red blood cells. As your blood circulates through your body to deliver the oxygen you need, each red blood cell traces out its own unique tube shape through spacetime, corresponding to a complex itinerary through your arteries, capillaries and veins with regular returns to your heart and lungs. These spacetime tubes of different red blood cells are intertwined to form a braid pattern (Figure 11.4, middle panel) which is more elaborate than anything you'll ever see in a hair salon: whereas a classic braid consists of three strands with perhaps thirty thousand hairs each, intertwined in a simple repeating pattern, this spacetime braid consists of trillions of strands (one for each red blood cell), each composed of trillions of hairlike elementary-particle trajectories, intertwined in a complex pattern that never repeats. In other words, if you imagine spending a year giving a friend a truly crazy hairdo, braiding his hair by separately intertwining not strands but all the individual hairs, the pattern you'd get would still be very simple in comparison. Yet the complexity of all this pales in comparison to the patterns of information processing in your brain. As we discussed in Chapter 8 and illustrated in Figure 8.7, your roughly hundred billion neurons are constantly generating electric signals ("firing"), which involves shuffling around billions of trillions of atoms, notably sodium, potassium and calcium ions. The trajectories of these atoms form an extremely elaborate braid through spacetime, whose complex intertwining corresponds to storing and processing information in a way that somehow gives rise to our familiar sensation of self-awareness. There's broad consensus in the scientific community that we still don't understand how this works, so it's fair to say that we humans don't yet fully understand what we are. However, in broad brushstrokes, we might say this: You're a pattern in spacetime. A mathematical pattern. Specifically, you're a braid in spacetime-indeed one of the most elaborate braids known.

Post-Modernism (n.): That period that comes between Modernism (q.v.) and Post-Post-Modernism. Modernists think that Science makes it possible for us to know everything perfectly and objectively, and that therefore all claims to know anything that can't be put into a test tube or under a microscope are illusory. Post-Modernists think that Modernism was wrong and that therefore we can't know anything at all. This is considered a great advance in human knowledge. Modernists think that anyone (except a Scientist) who makes a universal truth claim is a great fool; Post-Modernists think that anyone at all who makes a universal truth claim is a sly devil who is trying to gain power over you. Both are relativists, but while the Modernist is absolutely relative, the Post-Modernist is relatively more relative. The Post-Modernist also uses more jargon, like "metanarrative," "totalizing discourse," "sexual politics," and "hegemonic power structure," words which, when fully "deconstructed," all basically mean "My, look how devilishly clever and up to date I am!

in 2020, Robert F. Anda, the co–principal investigator of the initial ACE study, came out with an article and a YouTube video stating that ACEs were a relatively crude way of measuring childhood trauma.[6] The scores are remarkably helpful epidemiologically—for people to understand the overall significance of childhood trauma on public health. But Anda underlined that ACEs are not a good measure of an individual’s life span or health outcomes. There is a wide level of variation for each score. For example, a person with an ACE score of 1 who had extremely frequent instances of their trauma might be just as traumatized as someone with a score of 6 who witnessed a broader breadth of events but experienced them on a much rarer basis. As the following chart shows, there is a lot of overlap. Clearly, people with higher scores do face genuinely larger risks. But the scores are not hard-and-fast determinants. ACE scores also don’t account for whether a child had good resources, such as adults who provided them with safe and loving relationships or therapists who taught them to manage their stress better. They don’t account for gender variation, as PTSD manifests differently in men and women. In his article, Anda cautioned that using ACE scores as an individual screening tool has several risks, including that ACEs “may stigmatize or lead to discrimination…generate client anxiety about toxic-stress physiology, or misclassify individual risk.”[7]

Social Media Advertising - Different Options & Their Benefits How To Use Social Media Paid Ads Ideally? What is the most effective way to make use of social media ads? Choosing which social media platform to advertise on depends on your target audience. You need to understand which platforms are being used, the type of campaigns that can run on each platform, and what investment you’ll be required to make. Pew Research Center’s report helps give us an idea of the most preferred platform for various demographics. For example, if your product caters to the teenage group, consider advertising on Instagram, TikTok, or Snapchat. If you’re catering to a more B2B client, you can consider LinkedIn. Once you understand where your audience spends the most time, you can narrow down the platforms. However, we’d still advise on A/B testing various platforms. You’d be surprised by how many B2B clients you can find on TikTok! What Are The Most Popular Social Media Ads? Here is a brief rundown of the various social media ad options available. 1. Facebook Ads Facebook Ads are the most successful form of social media advertising. Statistics show that Facebook paid ads have an average conversion rate of 9.21%. They’re easy to set up and track, and allow you to measure campaign performance easily, giving insights into how well your ads are performing. They also offer a wide range of targeting options that help you reach people who might be interested in what you’re selling, which is why they’re so effective at generating sales leads. Facebook Ads are also highly targeted. You can target specific demographics or audiences based on gender, age range, location, and other details such as interests and behaviors or job titles. This helps ensure that only people who are interested in what you’re offering, see your ad on Facebook. 2. Twitter Ads Twitter ads are a great way to reach your target audience, especially if your company already has a presence on the platform. They’re easy to set up and manage so you can focus on other aspects of your business. As of 2022, they have an average conversion rate of 0.77%. Twitter ads also offer simple targeting options that let you get more followers, increase engagement with existing customers and gain new followers interested in what you have to offer. There are multiple ad options to choose from for accomplishing various advertising goals, including promoted ads, follower ads, amplify ads, and takeover ads. Promoted and follower ads have a much wider average cost range than their takeover counterparts. 3. LinkedIn Ads LinkedIn is a professional networking site, so it’s not as casual as other social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. As a result, users are more likely to be interested in what you are promoting on the platform because they’re looking for something related to their professional lives. LinkedIn has an average click-through rate of 0.65%. In addition, the conversion rate for LinkedIn ads is also fairly decent (2.35%). They can have high or low conversion rates depending on factors like interests and demographics. But if your ad is effectively targeted, it will have more chances of enjoying a higher conversion rate. 4. Instagram Ads As a younger demographic, Instagram users make up a great target audience for social media advertising. They are highly engaged in the platform and are more likely to respond to call-to-action than other demographics. 5. YouTube Ads YouTube ads are excellent for marketers with video content to promote their business. Furthermore, the advertising options offered by this platform ensure that you needn't bother with YouTuber fame or even a large number of subscribers on your channel to spread the word on this platform.

Billions of people wake up each day precariously balanced on a rock traveling at 66,627 miles per hour around the sun in a galaxy that is itself moving at 1,342,160 miles per hour in relation to extragalactical frames of reference. Quietly these people make themselves coffee, stare out at the dawn breaking, the dew glistening and, for the most part, barely give the maker of so much mystery a second thought. Their three-pound brains churn through eleven million bits of information per second, and their ten-ounce hearts pump five liters of blood through 100,000 miles of tubing, and yet the great Giver of Life demands neither allegiance, acknowledgment, nor thanks. “The Lord is not slack . . . but is longsuffering toward us, not willing that any should perish’ (2 Pet. 3:9 NKJV).

Here are four examples of Lead Magnets I use: A checklist that can be used to properly perform something I explained in a video. A template for determining, say, a business’s profit margin. An advanced guide that goes further into the details of a subject of one of my videos. A unique book that provides substantial value but is offered for free. For me, it is 11 Side Hustle Ideas to Make $500/Day from Your Phone. The appropriate opt-in incentive depends on your content. Here are other types of examples: A DIY carpenter could offer plans to make a corner table. A marketing YouTuber could offer scripts of what to say on sales phone calls. A landscaping expert might offer recommendations for which kinds of grass to use around the United States. YouTuber Nick True at Mapped Out Money, who makes video tutorials that teach the best practices for using the personal budgeting software YNAB, found that he gets the highest sign-up rates when he offers a checklist that relates to the video. His followers really like having a resource that they can use to put his advice into practice. Jess Dante of Love and London runs a YouTube channel helping viewers plan their trips to London by suggesting lesser-known restaurants and stores to visit. Her superstar opt-in incentive is a free London 101 Guide with everything a first-time visitor needs to know. It’s been downloaded more than 45,000 times. Where you make your call to action will also have an impact on your success building your email list. You can make your call to action in a variety of places or ways inside your videos. One of the best ways is to give a short, relevant tease of the bonus or resource you’re offering within the YouTube video and tell people where they can learn more. CHALLENGE Create a Lead Magnet. It’s time to create your first Lead Magnet using the process we’ve just outlined above. You can use your piece of content from the previous chapter as a base or start something new. Don’t spend more than two hours on the first iteration. If you want to turn it into a big thing later on, great. But start SMALL. Go to MillionDollarWeekend.com to get Lead Magnet templates! (See what I did there?)

with Facebook’s purchase of Instagram following the introduction of the front-facing camera. By 2012, many teen girls would have felt that “everyone” was getting a smartphone and an Instagram account, and everyone was comparing themselves with everyone else. Over the next few years the social media ecosystem became even more enticing with the introduction of ever more powerful “filters” and editing software within Instagram and via external apps such as Facetune. Whether she used filters or not, the reflection each girl saw in the mirror got less and less attractive relative to the girls she saw on her phone. While girls’ social lives moved onto social media platforms, boys burrowed deeper into the virtual world as they engaged in a variety of digital activities, particularly immersive online multiplayer video games, YouTube, Reddit, and hardcore pornography—all of which became available anytime, anywhere, for free, right on their smartphones. With so many new and exciting virtual activities, many adolescents (and adults) lost the ability to be fully present with the people around them, which changed social life for everyone, even for the small minority that did not use these platforms. That is why I refer to the period from 2010 to 2015 as the Great Rewiring of Childhood. Social patterns, role models, emotions, physical activity, and even sleep patterns were fundamentally recast, for adolescents, over the course of just five years. The daily life, consciousness, and social relationships of 13-year-olds with iPhones in 2013 (who were born in 2000) were profoundly different from those of 13-year-olds with flip phones in 2007 (who were born in 1994).

The will to record indelibly, to set down stories in permanent words, seems to me akin to the conviction that we are larger than our biologies. I wonder if our current cultural susceptibility to the charms of materialism - our increasing willingness to see psychology as chemical, identity as genetic, and behavior as the product of bygone exigencies of human evolution - isn't intimately related to the postmodern resurgence of the oral and the eclipse of the written: our incessant telephoning, our ephemeral e-mailing, our steadfast devotion to the flickering tube.

Kaleidoscope Yoga: The universal heart and the individual self. We, as humanity, make up together a mosaic of beautiful colors and shapes that can harmoniously play together in endless combinations. We are an ever-changing play of shape and form. A kaleidoscope consists of a tube (or container), mirrors, pieces of glass (or beads or precious stones), sunlight, and someone to turn it and observe and enjoy the forms. Metaphorically, perhaps the sun represents the divine light, or spark of life, within all of us. The mirrors represent our ability to serve as mirrors for one another and each other’s alignment, reflecting sides of ourselves that we may not have been aware of. The tube (or container) is the practice of community yoga. We, as human beings, are the glass, the beads, the precious stones. The facilitator is the person turning the Kaleidoscope, initiating the changing patterns. And the resulting beauty of the shapes? Well, that’s for everyone to enjoy... Coming into a practice and an energy field of community yoga over and over, is a practice of returning, again and again, to the present moment, to the person in front of you, to the people around you, to your body, to others’ bodies, to your energy, to others’ energy, to your breath, to others’ breath. [...] community yoga practice can help us, in a very real, practical, grounded, felt, somatic way, to identify and be in harmony with all that is around us, which includes all of our fellow human beings.
 We are all multiple selves. We are all infinite. We are all universal selves. We are all unique expressions of the universal heart and universal energy. We are all the universal self. We are all one another. And we are all also unique specific individuals. And to the extent that we practice this, somatically, we become more and more comfortable and fluid with this larger, more cosmic, more inter-related reality. We see and feel and breathe ourselves, more and more, as the open movement of energy, as open somatic possibility. As energy and breath. This is one of the many benefits of a community yoga practice. Kaleidoscope shows us, in a very practical way, how to allow universal patterns of wisdom and interconnectedness to filter through us. [...] One of the most interesting paradoxes I have encountered during my involvement with the community yoga project (and it is one that I have felt again and again, too many times to count) is the paradox that many of the most infinite, universal forms have come to me in a place of absolute solitude, silence, deep aloneness or meditation. And, similarly, conversely and complimentarily, (best not to get stuck on the words) I have often found myself in the midst of a huge crowd or group of people of seamlessly flowing forms, and felt simultaneously, in addition to the group energy, the group shape, and the group awareness, myself as a very cleanly and clearly defined, very particular, individual self. These moments and discoveries and journeys of group awareness, in addition to the sense of cosmic expansion, have also clarified more strongly my sense of a very specific, rooted, personal self. The more deeply I dive into the universal heart, the more clearly I see my own place in it. And the more deeply I tune in and connect with my own true personal self, the more open and available I am to a larger, more universal self. We are both, universal heart and universal self. Individual heart and individual self. We are, or have the capacity for, or however you choose to put it, simultaneous layers of awareness. Learning to feel and navigate and mediate between these different kinds and layers of awareness is one of the great joys of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga, and of life in general. Come join us, and see what that feels like, in your body, again and again. From the Preface of Kaleidoscope Community Yoga: The Art of Connecting: The First 108 Poses

Below are steps on how to build free and quality backlinks: Search niche-related forums and answer questions and concerns with useful information. On your signature, include a link to your website. It is important to just put a link on the signature and not on the post so you will not be tagged as a spammer. Article directories such as Ezinearticles ranks high in Google. Submit niche-related articles to them. On the author’s bio or resource page, add the website link. Create press releases and submit them to popular press release websites such as PRNewswire. Create related content and post it in YouTube (as discussed in Chapter 6). A lot of people watch videos about things they want to know on YouTube. This popular video site has millions of visitors each day. Take advantage of its traffic. Under your video, lead them to your website through a link.

Although earlier computers existed in isolation from the world, requiring their visuals and sound to be generated and live only within their memory, the Amiga was of the world, able to interface with it in all its rich analog glory. It was the first PC with a sufficient screen resolution and color palette as well as memory and processing power to practically store and display full-color photographic representations of the real world, whether they be scanned in from photographs, captured from film or video, or snapped live by a digitizer connected to the machine. It could be used to manipulate video, adding titles, special effects, or other postproduction tricks. And it was also among the first to make practical use of recordings of real-world sound. The seeds of the digital-media future, of digital cameras and Photoshop and MP3 players, are here. The Amiga was the first aesthetically satisfying PC. Although the generation of machines that preceded it were made to do many remarkable things, works produced on them always carried an implied asterisk; “Remarkable,” we say, “. . . for existing on such an absurdly limited platform.” Even the Macintosh, a dramatic leap forward in many ways, nevertheless remained sharply limited by its black-and-white display and its lack of fast animation capabilities. Visuals produced on the Amiga, however, were in full color and could often stand on their own terms, not as art produced under huge technological constraints, but simply as art. And in allowing game programmers to move beyond blocky, garish graphics and crude sound, the Amiga redefined the medium of interactive entertainment as being capable of adult sophistication and artistry. The seeds of the aesthetic future, of computers as everyday artistic tools, ever more attractive computer desktops, and audiovisually rich virtual worlds, are here. The Amiga empowered amateur creators by giving them access to tools heretofore available only to the professional. The platform’s most successful and sustained professional niche was as a video-production workstation, where an Amiga, accompanied by some relatively inexpensive software and hardware peripherals, could give the hobbyist amateur or the frugal professional editing and postproduction capabilities equivalent to equipment costing tens or hundreds of thousands. And much of the graphical and musical creation software available for the machine was truly remarkable. The seeds of the participatory-culture future, of YouTube and Flickr and even the blogosphere, are here. The

Therefore, with these celebrity wannabees, 1) popularity—or the appearance of it—can be measured by how many Facebook friends or Twitter followers one has managed to acquire; 2) fame—however fleeting—can be attained by many through appearing on reality television shows or in videos gone viral on YouTube; even 3) wealth—or the appearance of it—can be attained through the buying of expensive homes, cars, and various adult toys on relatively cheap credit; and, finally, 4) real power is admittedly harder to achieve but not beyond the grasp of those willing to sacrifice ethics and do whatever it takes to attain it. This fourth quality or possession is probably as it has always been, but having easier access to the other three may just put this one within the grasp of more, especially those undeserving of it or who would possibly misuse it. Thankfully, not everyone in this category craves or seeks power. But beware those who do.

The industrial world of pipelines relies heavily on push. Consumers are accessed through specific marketing and communication channels that the business owns or pays for. In a world of scarcity, options were limited, and getting heard often sufficed to get marketers and their messages in front of consumers. In this environment, the traditional advertising and public relations industries focused almost solely on awareness creation—the classic technique for “pushing” a product or service into the consciousness of a potential customer. This model of marketing breaks down in the networked world, where access to marketing and communication channels is democratized—as illustrated, for example, by the viral global popularity of YouTube videos such as PSY’s “Gangnam Style” and Rebecca Black’s “Friday.” In this world of abundance—where both products and the messages about them are virtually unlimited—people are more distracted, as an endless array of competing options is only a click or a swipe away. Thus, creating awareness alone doesn’t drive adoption and usage, and pushing goods and services toward customers is no longer the key to success. Instead, those goods and services must be designed to be so attractive that they naturally pull customers into their orbit. Furthermore, for a platform business, user commitment and active usage, not sign-ups or acquisitions, are the true indicators of customer adoption. That’s why platforms must attract users by structuring incentives for participation—preferably incentives that are organically connected to the interactions made possible by the platform. Traditionally, the marketing function was divorced from the product. In network businesses, marketing needs to be baked into the platform.

Many of today’s best-known tech companies began with completely different futures in mind. YouTube started as a website for people looking for dates; they could post videos and relate a little about themselves. When that formula wasn’t working, its founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, decided that a wider audience might share videos of anything and everything.

As I’ve said throughout this book, networked products tend to start from humble beginnings—rather than big splashy launches—and YouTube was no different. Jawed’s first video is a good example. Steve described the earliest days of content and how it grew: In the earliest days, there was very little content to organize. Getting to the first 1,000 videos was the hardest part of YouTube’s life, and we were just focused on that. Organizing the videos was an afterthought—we just had a list of recent videos that had been uploaded, and you could just browse through those. We had the idea that everyone who uploaded a video would share it with, say, 10 people, and then 5 of them would actually view it, and then at least one would upload another video. After we built some key features—video embedding and real-time transcoding—it started to work.75 In other words, the early days was just about solving the Cold Start Problem, not designing the fancy recommendations algorithms that YouTube is now known for. And even once there were more videos, the attempt at discoverability focused on relatively basic curation—just showing popular videos in different categories and countries. Steve described this to me: Once we got a lot more videos, we had to redesign YouTube to make it easier to discover the best videos. At first, we had a page on YouTube to see just the top 100 videos overall, sorted by day, week, or month. Eventually it was broken out by country. The homepage was the only place where YouTube as a company would have control of things, since we would choose the 10 videos. These were often documentaries, or semi-professionally produced content so that people—particularly advertisers—who came to the YouTube front page would think we had great content. Eventually it made sense to create a categorization system for videos, but in the early years everything was grouped in with each other. Even while the numbers of videos was rapidly growing, so too were all the other forms of content on the site. YouTube wasn’t just the videos, it was also the comments left by viewers: Early in we saw that there were 100x more viewers than creators. Every social product at that time had comments, so we added them to YouTube, which was a way for the viewers to participate, too. It seems naive now, but we were just thinking about raw growth at that time—the raw number of videos, the raw number of comments—so we didn’t think much about the quality. We weren’t thinking about fake news or anything like that. The thought was, just get as many comments as possible out there, and the more controversial the better! Keep in mind that the vast majority of videos had zero comments, so getting feedback for our creators usually made the experience better for them. Of course now we know that once you get to a certain level of engagement, you need a different solution over time.

I walked to the Tube station and got on the train. I was meeting a man for dinner, someone I barely knew. He had got my number from a mutual friend. When I arrived at the restaurant he was already there, waiting. He was reading a book, which he relaxed in his bag before I could see the title. He asked me how I was and I found myself saying that I was very tired, to the extent that I might not have all that much to say for myself. He looked a little disappointed at this news, and asked if I wanted to hang up my coat. I said I would keep it on: I felt cold. There were builders in my house, I added. The doors and windows were constantly open and the heating had been turned off. The house had become like a tomb, a place of dust and chill. It was impossible to eat or sleep or work – there wasn’t even anywhere to sit down. Everywhere I looked I saw skeletons, the skeletons of walls and floors, so that the house felt unshielded, permeable, as though all the things those walls and floors ought normally to keep out were free to enter. I had to go into debt to finance the work – a debt I had no immediate prospect of being able to repay – and so even when it was done I wasn’t sure I would feel entirely comfortable there. My children, I added, were away. I told him the story of the Saluki dogs following the hawk: my current awareness of my children, I said, was similarly acute and gruelling, except that I was trying to keep sight of them on my own. On top of that, I said, there was something in the basement, something that took the form of two people, though I would hesitate to give their names to it. It was more of a force, a power of elemental negativity that seemed somehow related to the power to create. Their hatred of me was so pure, I said, that it almost passed back into love again.

If, for illustration's sake, we call the first “truth” A, (alpha 1), the second one A2 (alpha 2), the third one A3 (alpha 3), we may suppose that a genius appears who has the faculty to surpass all the other relative truths A1, A2, A3, … An and gives us an absolute or final truth, valid in infinity (Ainfinity) say a final definition, that lightning is so … and so … , a kind of energy which flows, let us say, through a glass tube filled with charcoal. Then of course this definition would immediately make obvious what use could be made of it. We could erect glass towers filled with charcoal and so secure an unlimited flow of available free energy and our [pg 051] whole life would be affected in an untold degree. This example explains the importance of correct definitions.

YouTube also contains a treasure trove of lectures by nearly all of finance’s leading lights, strewn throughout its vast wasteland of misinformation. Tread carefully. A few wrong clicks and you’ll wind up with a QAnon conspiracist or a crypto bro. Of the names I’ve mentioned in this book, I’d search for John Bogle, Eugene Fama, Kenneth French, Jonathan Clements, Zvi Bodie, William Sharpe, Burton Malkiel, Charles Ellis, and Jason Zweig. Worthwhile finance podcasts abound. Start with the Economist’s weekly “Money Talks” and NPR’s Planet Money, although most of the latter’s superb coverage revolves around economics and relatively little around investing. Rick Ferri’s Boglehead podcast interviews cover mainly passive investing. Another financial podcast I highly recommend is Barry Ritholtz’s Masters in Business from Bloomberg. Podcasts are a rapidly evolving area. Lest you wear your ears out, you’ll need discretion to curate the burgeoning amount of high-quality audio. Research mutual funds. All the fund companies discussed in this book have sophisticated websites from which basic fund facts, such as fees and expenses, can be obtained, as well as annual and semiannual reports that list and tabulate holdings. If you’re researching a large number of funds, this gets cumbersome. The best way is to visit Morningstar.com. Use the site’s search function to locate the main page for the fund you’re interested in and click the “Expense” and “Portfolio” tabs to find the fund expense ratio and detailed data on the fund holdings. Click the “Performance” tab to see the fund’s return over periods ranging from a single day up to 15 years, and the “Chart” tab to compare the returns of multiple funds over a given interval. ***

We read stories and see YouTube videos about people who, distracted by their smartphones, walk into traffic and off piers into the ocean. Perhaps not surprisingly, a report in 2013 found that pedestrian injuries related to cell phone use more than tripled between 2007 and 2010. And in the first six months of 2015, pedestrian fatalities increased 10 percent, the largest spike in four decades, according to the report. A few years ago, the city of New Haven spray-painted 'LOOK UP' in big yellow letters at crosswalks around the Yale University campus (New York City has taken similar measures). Are admission standards lower these days (probably not), or are these young adults forgetting simple survival skills, overpowered by the pull of their phones?

Instead of hiding bodies in mass graves, corpses were triumphantly displayed, as when the Jalisco New Generation (while still part of El Chapo’s Sinaloa cartel) dumped the thirty-five bodies on an avenue in Veracruz in September 2011. In reply, the Zetas scattered twenty-six corpses in Jalisco and a dozen in Sinaloa. On closer inspection, the bodies were those of ordinary citizens, not criminals: they were workers and students who had been abducted and murdered and displayed in order to strike fear in the heart of anyone who doubted the murderous resolve of the Zetas... In To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler writes about a related series of bizarre and violent episodes that took place in Torreón, in Coahuila state, bordering Texas: “Who would believe, for example, that the warden of a state prison would let convicted killers out at night and loan them official vehicles, automatic assault rifles, and bulletproof vests, so that they could gun down scores of innocent people in a neighboring state and then quickly hop back over the state line and into prison, behind bars, a perfect alibi. Who would believe that a paramilitary drug-trafficking organization formed by ex−Special Forces of the Mexican Army would kidnap a local cop and torture him into confessing all of the above details about the prisoners’ death squad, videotape the confession, execute the cop on camera with a shot to the heart, and then post the video on YouTube? Who could fathom that the federal attorney general would, within hours of the video-taped confession and execution being posted online, arrest the warden, and then a few days later hold a press conference fully acknowledging that the prisoners’ death squad had operated for months, killing ten people in a bar in January 2010, eight people in a bar in May 2010, and seventeen people at a birthday party in July?” Yet all of this actually happened. During April 2012, when El Chapo was at war with the Zetas, fourteen torsos — armless and legless bodies — were found in a car by the side of the road in Nuevo Laredo. Dead Zetas. Some of the torsos were in the trunk, for which there is a specific narco term: encajuelado (“trunked”; therefore, trunks trunked). Soon after, in Michoacán state, the Zetas met their match in the person of Nazario Moreno (called El Más Loco, the Craziest One), leader of the ruthless Templarios, the Knights Templar cartel, whose recruits were required to eat human flesh—their victims’— as part of their initiation rites. When Moreno was gunned down by the Mexican army in 2014, the Zetas flourished, and remain dominant. But there was a posthumous bonus for the Craziest One: he was promoted to sainthood. In and around his birthplace in Apatzingán, shrines and altars were erected to Saint Nazario, the dead capo represented as a holy figure in robes, venerated by credulous Michoacanos.

The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel." Larry shook his head slowly. "I don't follow that." "Well, take an intelligent pre-plague man. Break his TV, and what does he do at night?" "Reads a book," Ralph said. "Goes to see his friends," Stu said. "Plays the stereo," Larry said, grinning. "Sure, all those things," Glen said. "But he's also missing that TV. There's a hole in his life where that TV used to be. In the back of his mind he's still thinking, At nine o'clock I'm going to pull a few beers and watch the Sox on the tube. And when he goes in there and sees that empty cabinet, he feels as disappointed as hell. A part of his accustomed life has been poured out, is it not so?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Our TV went on the fritz once for two weeks and I didn't feel right until it was back." "It makes a bigger hole in his life if he watched a lot of TV, a smaller hole if he only used it a little bit. But something is gone. Now take away all his books, all his friends, and his stereo. Also remove all sustenance except what he can glean along the way. It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego. Your selves, gentlemen--they are turning into a window-glass. Or better yet, empty tumblers." "But what's the point?" Ralph asked. "Why go through all the rigmarole?" Glen said, "If you read your Bible, you'll see that it was pretty traditional for these prophets to go out into the wilderness from time to time--Old Testament Magical Mystery Tours. The timespan given for these jaunts was usually forty days and forty nights, a Hebraic idiom that really means 'no one knows exactly how long he was gone, but it was quite a while.' Does that remind you of anyone?" "Sure. Mother," Ralph said. "Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current. For that matter, your muscles run on tiny charges, too--a chemical called acetylcholine allows the charge to pass when you need to move, and when you want to stop, another chemical, cholinesterase, is manufactured. Cholinesterase destroys acetylcholine, so your nerves become poor conductors again. Good thing, too. Otherwise, once you started scratching your nose, you'd never be able to stop. Okay, the point is this: Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car." They were all listening closely. "Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner ... all of it runs off the battery. A normal life--at least in what used to be Western civilization--was like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?" "Yeah," Ralph said. "Even a big Delco won't ever overcharge when it's sitting in a Cadillac." "Well, what we've done is to strip off the accessories. We're on charge." Ralph said uneasily: "If you put a car battery on charge for too long, she'll explode." "Yes," Glen agreed. "Same with people. The Bible tells us about Isaiah and Job and the others, but it doesn't say how many prophets came back from the wilderness with visions that had crisped their brains. I imagine there were some. But I have a healthy respect for human intelligence and the human psyche, in spite of an occasional throwback like East Texas here--" "Off my case, baldy," Stu growled. "Anyhow, the capacity of the human mind is a lot bigger than the biggest Delco battery. I think it can take a charge almost to infinity. In certain cases, perhaps beyond infinity." They walked in silence for a while, thinking this over. "Are we changing?" Stu asked quietly. "Yes," Glen answered. "Yes, I think we are.

The pathogenesis of otitis media in these individuals may be related to abnormal anatomy causing Eustachian tube dysfunction. Balance testing was abnormal, Eustachian tube function tests revealed dysfunction of tube. Surgery was performed to replace the obstructed tube with a patent one, and an adenoidectomy and bilateral inferior turbinate reduction to relieve the chronic nasal obstruction. Postoperatively balance testing was normal, Eustachian tube function remained dysfunctional, but she had complete resolution of her vertigo following the surgery.

THERE'S ALWAYS A LAX MAN DRAWING REKHAS AROUND YOU. It starts in childhood with your Mom screaming - Re Kha, to your youth, with bullies at school kicking your butt - re kha, to the teacher with the whip - re kha, the batsman hitting your balls for sixes - re kha, to the girlfriend making you eat your words - re kha, to the pizza delivery boy spitting on your pizza - re kha, to the man giving bribe to policeman - re kha, to the dirty deals with ministers - re kha, to channels pushing content down your throat - re kha, to doctors pushing tubes into your throat - re kha, and finally after death, your kids pushing ghee into your dead mouth - re kha! The only place it was relevant was at a relative's wedding. Re Kha! *For those unfamiliar with hindi re kha means 'EAT'' and rekha means 'lines'. Laxman rekha means to draw boundaries around a person.

In 2010, a cognitive neuroscientist named Reza Habib asked twenty-two people to lie inside an MRI and watch a slot machine spin around and around. Half of the participants were “pathological gamblers”—people who had lied to their families about their gambling, missed work to gamble, or had bounced checks at a casino— while the other half were people who gambled socially but didn’t exhibit any problematic behaviors. Everyone was placed on their backs inside a narrow tube and told to watch wheels of lucky 7s, apples, and gold bars spin across a video screen. The slot machine was programmed to deliver three outcomes: a win, a loss, and a “near miss,” in which the slots almost matched up but, at the last moment, failed to align. None of the participants won or lost any money. All they had to do was watch the screen as the MRI recorded their neurological activity. “We were particularly interested in looking at the brain systems involved in habits and addictions,” Habib told me. “What we found was that, neurologically speaking, pathological gamblers got more excited about winning. When the symbols lined up, even though they didn’t actually win any money, the areas in their brains related to emotion and reward were much more active than in non-pathological gamblers. “But what was really interesting were the near misses. To pathological gamblers, near misses looked like wins. Their brains reacted almost the same way. But to a nonpathological gambler, a near miss was like a loss. People without a gambling problem were better at recognizing that a near miss means you still lose.” Two groups saw the exact same event, but from a neurological perspective, they viewed it differently. People with gambling problems got a mental high from the near misses—which, Habib hypothesizes, is probably why they gamble for so much longer than everyone else: because the near miss triggers those habits that prompt them to put down another bet. The nonproblem gamblers, when they saw a near miss, got a dose of apprehension that triggered a different habit, the one that says I should quit before it gets worse.

When people ask us how she became so famous and successful, we say that, outside of her content, the most significant contributing factor to her success is the trust she’s built with her viewers. In the first few years of her YouTube career, when she was relatively unknown, she only spent half of her time creating content. The other half she spent engaging with her audience. In fact, every day, from 10 p.m. until 2 or 3 in the morning, she engaged with her audience directly.

If there’s a product related to your niche—physical, digital, service, or live event—there may be an affiliate program for it.

They failed to realize that in science, gaps are different from those in murder cases. Every important and well-accepted theory has its share of gaps in the supporting data—and this is particularly true of historical scientific theories that rely on evidence such as ancient fossils (in the case of evolution) or other indirect observations, as contrasted with watching chemicals react in a test tube in real time. The theory of gravity, the big bang theory, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory, plate tectonics theory—their histories all consist not simply of eureka moments in the lab, but also of a gradual filling in of gaps, a process that continues to this day. That is the nature of science, which continually tests its theories with new information. With large, explanatory theories such as evolution, the fact that there are gaps in the data is expected—problems arises only when gaps are filled and new information doesn’t fit the theory. Then scientists say that a theory has been “falsified.” This is why ancient Greek mathematicians and naturalists stopped believing the Earth was flat long before cameras were launched into space to photograph the globe—they knew the Earth couldn’t be flat, because the available data did not fit the theory anymore. Ships sailed off in one direction but did not find or fall off an edge. On the other hand, the theory that the Earth is a globe was accepted centuries before it was actually “proved.” That didn’t mean there weren’t gaps—such as why objects on the “bottom” of the globe didn’t fall off into space, as the principles of gravity were not well understood until much later (and gaps in that understanding remain to this day). So gaps in theories are not only real but expected in science—and they do not in themselves disprove or discredit a theory. The board members didn’t grasp that distinction, however, and so they enthusiastically endorsed mentioning “gaps” in the belief that this statement represented a valid criticism of

YouTube: Psychiatrist facing backlash for saying she 'fantasizes about killing white people' by Fox News On April 6, 2021 Dr. Aruna Khilanani, addressing Yale School of Medicine Child Study Center via “Common Sense with Bari Weiss” said: “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f***ing favor. … White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time. … We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain.

YouTube video: "Can a person become Jewish?" By JihadiJew 2:27 … Another question people ask is how is it possible that you have Jews who have no interest in Judaism as a religion who may not even believe in God, are nevertheless are fully Jewish, or considered fully Jewish, and then you have converts who have to commit themselves to this rigorous lifestyle of commandments. The best I can answer that is to kind of think of Jewishness as a kind of national identity. We’re called Am Yisrael – the Jewish People, related to the Arabic word Ummah, people. So as part of this membership you get citizenship. Well, one way you get citizenship is the way I got citizenship in the United States – I was born. I was born in the United States and I received my citizenship not because I knew anything about America, just because I was born here. I don’t need to know anything about America. I don’t need to know the constitution. I don’t need to know American History. I just have to be born here. On the other hand, if I wanted to become a naturalized citizen, I’d have to study the constitution, I’d have to study history and I’d have to commit myself to the ideals of the United States. The same way with converts. In order to become a citizen of the Jewish people, well then you have to commit yourself to the ideals of the Jewish people and you’d have to be willing to observe what the Jewish people are supposed to observe…

Even Mr. Masrani’s announcement of his plans to open a park had been shrouded in mystery. The man had a flair for drama. It started when packages containing amber-handled archaeological tools—the kind that paleontologists use to dig up bones—began arriving. At first, it was journalists, social media influencers, actors, pop stars, the leading professors and minds of the world. Then, as the buzz began to start, the tools began arriving at random people’s doorsteps across the world. Everyone starting talking about it because it was so weird—and the selection of people who got the tools was so broad and varied. The tools came with no note, just a simple card that had the profile of a T. rex skeleton stamped upon it. Two more packages arrived for the lucky recipients over the next few weeks. It became this status thing to post about them. Everyone was trying to trace the company that sent them, but no one could figure it out. The second package contained a compass; carved on the back was that same T. rex stamp. When the third and final package arrived, it caused a sensation. Each person’s box had three clues—a jagged tooth, a curled piece of parchment with the sketch of a gate in spidery ink, and an old-fashioned-looking key, one clearly not made to unlock anything. The speculation this caused throughout the world was unparalleled. What did these objects mean? Did they relate to each other? Was this just some elaborate prank? The first person to discover how to activate the boxes was a farmer’s son in Bolivia. After he disassembled the wooden box the trinkets were sent in, he noticed a strange indentation in the top of the lid and placed his key inside. Once he posted his discovery on YouTube, people across the globe were inserting their key in the notch, activating a hidden hologram chip embedded in the key’s handle. This beamed a message. Two silver words. One date. They’re coming. May 30, 2005 By the time Mr. Masrani held his press conference the next day, the entire world was buzzing about the possibility of a new park and a chance to get close to the dinosaurs. Both of the islands had been restricted for so long, it was the only thing anyone could talk about. It’s one of those things you compare notes on with other people: Where were you when Masrani announced Jurassic World?

At the second hospital he was intubated to save him from suffocation. That is, a flexible tube was inserted deep into his mouth, past his glottis, and down his windpipe into his lungs, to help with breathing. This event represents another important clue toward explaining how SARS spread so effectively through hospitals around the world. Intubation is a simple procedure, at least in theory, but it can be difficult to execute amid the gag reflexes, sputters, and expectorations of the patient. The task was especially hard with Zhou, a portly man, sedated and feverish, and though his disease hadn’t yet been identified, the attending doctors and nurses seem to have had some sense of the danger to which they were being exposed. They knew by then that this atypical pneumonia, this whatever, was more transmissible and more lethal than pneumonias of the common sort. “Each time they began to insert the tube,” according to an account by Thomas Abraham, a veteran foreign correspondent based in Hong Kong, there was “an eruption” of bloody mucus. Abraham continues: It splashed on to the floor, the equipment and the faces and gowns of the medical staff. They knew the mucous [sic] was highly infectious, and in the normal course of things, they would have cleaned themselves up as quickly as possible. But with a critically ill patient kicking and heaving around, a tube half-inserted into his windpipe and mucous and blood spurting out, there was no way any of them could leave. At that hospital, twenty-three doctors and nurses became infected from Zhou, plus eighteen other patients and their relatives. Nineteen members of his own family also got sick. Zhou himself would eventually become known among medical staff in Guangzhou as the Poison King. He survived the illness, though many people who caught it from him—directly, or indirectly down a long chain of contacts—did not.

Article F: Alternobaric Vertigo and Eustachian Tube Dysfunction. Charles D. Bluestone, MD; J. Douglas Swarts, PhD; Joseph M. Furman, MD, PhD; Robert F. Yellon, MD. Case Report: Persistent Alternobaric Vertigo at Ground Level due to Chronic Toynbee phenomenon. Laryngoscope 2012;122(4):868–72. The term “alternobaric vertigo” was coined by Lundgren in 1965 to describe vertigo in deep-sea divers, but also referred to aircraft pilots in 1966. It occurs during ascent and rarely descent and is a result of asymmetrical middle-ear pressures. Classically the vertigo due to this pathogenesis is transient but may last for several minutes. It is frequently associated with nausea and vomiting. It has been reproduced in pressure chamber experiments with some divers and fliers, but has not been reported spontaneously at ground level (Figure F–1). FIGURE F–1. Alternobaric vertigo can occur during ascent in an airplane or when scuba diving. We encountered a 15-year-old female with bilateral tympanostomy tubes who manifested persistent severe vertigo, at ground level, secondary to a unilateral middle-ear pressure of +200 mm H2O elicited by an obstructed tympanostomy tube in the presence of chronic nasal obstruction. She had had long-term tubes placed due to recurrent and chronic otitis media. Physical examination revealed achondroplasia, which is an autosomal dominate disorder characterized by abnormal bone growth, short arms and legs, short stature and a large head, which is associated with otitis media. The pathogenesis of otitis media in these individuals may be related to abnormal anatomy causing Eustachian tube dysfunction. Balance testing was abnormal, Eustachian tube function tests revealed dysfunction of tube. Surgery was performed to replace the obstructed tube with a patent one, and an adenoidectomy and bilateral inferior turbinate reduction to relieve the chronic nasal obstruction. Postoperatively balance testing was normal, Eustachian tube function remained dysfunctional, but she had complete resolution of her vertigo following the surgery. FIGURE F–2. Pathogenesis of alternobaric vertigo due to the “Toynbee phenomenon” One tympanostomy was obstructed and when swallowing, she developed high positive pressure in the middle ear, but in the ear with a patent tube, the pressure did not remain in the middle ear. We believed this was a previously unreported scenario in which closed-nose swallowing insufflated air into her middle ears, resulting in sustained positive middle-ear pressure in the ear with the obstructed tube. Swallowing, when the nose is obstructed, can result in abnormal negative or positive pressures in the middle ear, which has been termed the “Toynbee phenomenon.” We concluded that in patients who have vertigo, consideration should be given to the possibility that nasal obstruction and the “Toynbee phenomenon” are involved (Figure F–2). CHAPTER 7 PATHOLOGY The pathology of the ET may or may not be involved in the pathogenesis of otitis media, whereas the

Picture an overwhelmed, anxious fifteen-year-old. How do you think being told “anxiety is a belief issue”8 would affect her? Because that’s what she would read in Lies Young Women Believe, and our already anxious girl might wonder if she has failed God. That same girl might hear something similar watching “5 Tips for Overcoming Crazy Girl Emotions” on the Girl Defined YouTube channel, run by Bethany Beal and Kristen Clark. In their video, Beal and Clark explain: “If our hearts and thoughts are in a godly place, our emotions will be peaceful. . . . Our emotions are a reflection of what’s going on in our hearts. . . . Our emotions are a dictator of where our heart is.” Listing the fruits of the Spirit, they conclude, “[The fruits of the Spirit] result in awesome emotions. If that’s what’s on the inside, the emotions will be stable on the outside, not like a hurricane. The opposites of the fruits of the Spirit are things like anger, anxiety, worry, things the Bible actually calls sin.”9 Read the Prophets, though, and you won’t exactly see accounts of people who were emotionally placid—but you will see a lot of hurricanes of emotion. Hearing that we need to take every thought captive and confront our depression and worry and focus on gratitude may work wonderfully for the stressed-out thirty-five-year-old who gets a bit grumpy sometimes. But for the fifteen-year-old who feels isolated and alone and wonders how she can get up in the morning? When you’re dealing with all-or-nothing thinking, this advice, when not paired with an acknowledgment of how deep and debilitating depression can be, can cause shame, as we’ve heard from these mothers: • “My daughter asked to stop going to church because of the predominant views taught in youth group about mental health (all depression/anxiety is a spiritual problem). She loves Jesus and seeks to know God/understand how she was made by him uniquely and perfectly. To be told she isn’t yielding to God or knowing who she is in Christ as a result of autism and related anxiety was as un-Christlike as it comes. I stay home on Sundays with her now.” • “My children were told during a chapel service at their Christian school that it was a sin against God to feel anxious or depressed. One of them was in therapy at the time for issues that were in part aggravated by the school environment. My children are no longer at that school.” These moms protected their kids. But it’s an embarrassment to the gospel that our Christian spaces can be so cold and unfeeling toward those in our midst who need the most compassion.