Unspecified Quotes

What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?

How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.

I can't wait to get out of the house. I can't wait to get out of here. I've been telling myself this all week. The 'getting out of here' part is unspecified, though. Maybe I simply want to get away from life

There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.

They say that's what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country.

And when she’s alone again, as truly alone in the world as she’s always felt herself to be, she looks at herself in a bamboo-framed mirror. Beautiful face, aglow with the taste of carnal pleasure, disdainful and avid … and above all an indefinable look in which can be sensed unspecified danger, sensuality triumphant and a sort of intoxicating vulgarity. She likes what she sees … around her drifts a great brunette fragrance, scent of happy brunette, in which the idea of others dissolves.

Right before you head out running, it can be hard to remember exactly why you're doing it. You often have to override a nagging sense of futility, lacing up your shoes, telling yourslef that no matter how unlikely it seems right now, after you finish you will be glad you went. It's only afterward that it makes sense, although even then it's hard to rationalize why. You just feel right. After a run, you feel at one with the world, as though some unspecified, innate need has been fulfilled.

Maybe someone who went round skinning and killing people (order as yet unspecified) was not concerned with making the universe a better place. Just a thought. Zero.

Our Narcissistic Mother told us a Big Lie. She told it subliminally if not in actual words. And The Big Lie was this: If we tried hard enough we could win her approval and her love. If we were good enough, or wise enough, or beautiful enough, or that-magical-unspecified-ingredient enough. In other words, if we achieved perfection, she would love us.

It's perhaps significant that God declares His completed Creation "very good" and that Adam is an afterthought, his goodness unspecified.

I think we should all live as if we are dying too – because we are, make no mistake. We should live as if we’re dying at some unspecified but possibly quite soon time. We can’t expect every day to be happy, and there’ll always be sickness and heartache and sadness, but we should never put up with a sad or a boring or a depressing day, just for the sake of it. None of us have time for that, whether we have a hundred days left or a hundred thousand.

unspecified.” I was amused. “So you have the proverbial horse thief in your

One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.

The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.

Mr. Darcy was the perfect example of a man used to being eminently in control, and then within seconds of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, finding himself so at the mercy of his passion for her that he starts doing the very things he condemns and prohibits in everyone else. Terrified by his human vulnerability, Darcy proceeds to do everything to push Lizzie away except accuse her of some unspecified crime and having her carted off.

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

There was no action she could take against the men of undeined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them - nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter.

Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life's task is, and they know when it has been completed. In modern societies, the reproduction of the custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves; they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual's contributions to these changes is unspecifiable in advance. To devote oneself to the business of preserving and reproducing the culture of one's group is to risk one of the most terrible fates in modern societies, obsolescence.

I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, is slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion... Yet I anticipate an apotheosis of some kind, some grand climacteric. I am not speaking here of a posthumous transfiguration. I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.

An up-front enemy is rare now and is actually a blessing. People hardly ever attack you openly anymore, showing their intentions, their desire to destroy you; instead they are political and indirect. Although the world is more competitive than ever, outward aggression is discouraged, so people have learned to go underground, to attack unpredictably and craftily. Many use friendship as a way to mask aggressive desires: they come close to you to do more harm. (A friend knows best how to hurt you.) Or, without actually being friends, they offer assistance and alliance: they may seem supportive, but in the end they’re advancing their own interests at your expense. Then there are those who master moral warfare, playing the victim, making you feel guilty for something unspecified you’ve done. The battlefield is full of these warriors, slippery, evasive, and clever.

Polanyi writes that there exists unspecifiable and unarticulated knowledge among scientists that is not susceptible to language and usually is dismissed in philosophy of science.

Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation.

My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.

A substitute of temptation is unspecified desire of mankind to the aim of success

AAAAAACK UNSPECIFIED CATASTROPHE EVERYTHING IS TERR — ooh, I do need a snack right now,

Bland reflected that the local verdict seemed to be the comfortable and probably agelong one of attributing every tragic occurrence to unspecified foreigners.

He was missing Ivy Maggs. He did not know that there was any such person and he did not remember her as we know remembering, but there was an unspecified lack in his experience.

systematic approach to knowledge building is more productive than an arbitrary skills approach with unspecified topics.31

Only when one speaks hypothetically does technology achieve neutrality: “It could be used for good or it could be used for evil.” Such unspecified references to how it could be used overlook the reality of how it actually and regularly is used. The truth is, technology is “neutral” only when conceived in the abstract, divorced from the social context in which it develops. But since it actually develops only in a social context and since its application is always purposive, then we must ask, Cui bono? Who benefits? And at whose expense?

the United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran.” What form our government’s intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door.

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers-except the Jewish bankers who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World...and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy American in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly.

is not the impact of his freewill upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment.

Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.

[T]he most elaborate code of [law]... would still have left unspecified a hundred ways in which wreckers of Communism could have sidetracked it without ever having to face the essential questions: are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth? have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized community? That is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate" persons who could not answer them satisfactorily.

One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes.

Whenever I find myself somehow fooled into doing one of these talks, it’s on the grounds that some confused soul thinks that I will talk about the digital world and the future. What always happens is that I rant for an unspecified length of time about obscure history and fringe beliefs. So you need to understand that you are now trapped in this room with me and I’ve already been paid. This is my cunning plan.

This would be the worst birthday of his life. Vladimir's best friend Baobab was down in Florida covering his rent, doing unspeakable things with unmentionable people. Mother, roused by the meager achievements of Vladimir's first quarter-century, was officially on the warpath. And, in possibly the worst development yet, 1993 was the Year of the Girlfriend. A downcast, heavyset American girlfriend whose bright orange hair was strewn across his Alphabet City hovel as if cadre of Angora rabbits had visited. A girlfriend whose sickly-sweet incense and musky perfume coated Vladimir's unwashed skin, perhaps to remind him of what he could expect on this, the night of his birthday: Sex. Every week, once a week, they had to have sex, as both he and this large pale woman, this Challah, perceived that without weekly sex their relationship would fold up according to some unspecified law of relationships.

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

Except that now, for having accused Ravi of an unspecified crime he hadn't committed, I was as good as dead. In years subsequent, when he was in the mood to terrorize me, he would whisper to me, "Just wait till we're alone. You're the next goat!

What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal [...] ? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same as always - just to live and be with other people?

Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal - the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always - just to live and be with other people?

It is not that I am a genius or exceptionally gifted, not by any means. Quite the contrary. What Happened (I shall try to explain it) is that every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out. In this case, all others had failed because they had counted on the simple quantitative progression of intelligence and ingenuity, when what was required was an unspecified quantity, but of the appropriate quality, of both. My own intelligence is quite minimal, a fact that I have ascertained at great cost to myself. It has been just barely adequate to keep me afloat in the tempestuous waters of life. Yet, its quality is unique; not because I decided it would be, but rather because that is how it must be.

She’d hoped he’d be her forever guy. She was so tired of starting over with a new man every couple years, only to be abandoned for unspecified reasons. When bad things happened over and over, it was a sign. God was telling you to change. Your attitude, your hair, your address.

And then, in February 1969, “David Lurie” walked into the intake room at an unspecified hospital in Pennsylvania and set off a metaphorical bomb. He finally proved what so many people had long suspected: Psychiatry had too much power and didn’t know what the hell to do with it.

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, recombining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, recombining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.

The notion of freedom could make even peace and order seem oppressive, generate the suspicion of some hidden purpose, some vast deceit, some unspecified crime being perpetrated beyond human ken. That was a generous way of looking at it; the alternative was to acknowledge that humans were intrinsically conflicted, cursed with acquisitive addictions of the spirit.

What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal - the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always - just to live and be with other people?

[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.' [...] The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.

What is your probability of winning twice the New Jersey lottery? One in 17 trillion. Yet it happened to Evelyn Adams, whom the reader might guess should feel particularly chosen by destiny. Using the method we developed above, Harvard’s Percy Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller estimated at 30 to 1 the probability that someone, somewhere, in a totally unspecified way, gets so lucky!

Diary entry, summer 1973. It may be there in a distracted glance out of an open window or in the split second of an absent look when you speak to her, or in the guarded inflections of her voice as she replies, or in the subtle chemistry of touch or smell or the taste of her skin in your mouth, or in some unspecified sixth sense that you can’t name, but when love is over, its signals are louder than disclosure, if only you are willing and open enough to acknowledge them. But of course we shake off these feelings as if they were mere irritations, as if they were unimportant and uninvited guests at a feast. “Not now,” you say, fobbing them off with shallow excuses and feigning more urgent business elsewhere. But they linger long after the party, and skulk in a corner where they plot and fester and return to ask their impertinent questions in the still of night, when she’s sleeping and wearing her child’s face. When she looks so beautiful and vulnerable with her mouth slightly open, and her hair a mess on the pillow, but as you reach to touch her, she turns unconsciously away toward the window, and then the questions start again, and you can’t sleep….

What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal - the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always -- just to live and be with other people?

He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a ‘deeper’, ‘spiritual’ world within him which they cannot understand. You see the idea—the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction. Finally, if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some unspecified way, doing these people ‘good’ by the mere fact of drinking their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so would be ‘priggish’, ‘intolerant’, and (of course) ‘Puritanical’. Meanwhile

Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week.

There are other tricks: the use of generalities like "the man in the street" and the editorial "we" to establish a rapport of disapproval with the reader and at the same time to create a mental lacuna under cover of an insubstantial and unspecified "we." And the technique of the misunderstood word: pack a review with obscure words that send the reader to a dictionary. Soon the reader will feel a vague, slightly queasy revulsion for whatever is under discussion.

The sergeant was just noting that she was a very handsome woman, from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean he would guess, when his eyes unexpectedly burst into flames. This distressed him, and he staggered around, blood-red fire erupting from the sockets, while he explained the degree of agony he was enduring and how much he would appreciate assistance of an unspecified form from those present. Then his head caught fire and his conversation became very scream orientated.

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes,

There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there’s something I haven’t done, something I’ve forgotten, that I’m not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I’m lagging behind the rest. The newspapers may very well be right. But when one takes a careful look at the people passing in the street, one might assume that many others have the same problem too, and haven’t done what they should with their lives either.

They wind up at the kind of Italian restaurant that offers a trough-size bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and a giant basket of bread for a grand total of a dollar fifty. “Meals come with either a glass of red wine of unspecified variety,” Mark says, studying the menu, “or a bowl of ice cream. Wine or ice cream. In what universe is that a reasonable choice? It’s like – football or a haircut. Trombones or a spoon.” “You could get both for an extra seventy-five cents,” Eddie suggests. “That’s not the point. I don’t want either. It’s that the binary of wine and ice cream shouldn’t exist.

That’s why when you read an announcement by a corporation executive or a business proprietor that the average pay of the people who work in his establishment is so much, the figure may mean something and it may not. If the average is a median, you can learn something significant from it: Half the employees make more than that; half make less. But if it is a mean (and believe me it may be that if its nature is unspecified) you may be getting nothing more revealing than the average of one $45,000 income—the proprietor’s—and the salaries of a crew of underpaid workers. “Average annual pay of $5,700” may conceal both the $2,000 salaries and the owner’s profits taken in the form of a whopping salary.

This arm devoid of a hand was for me a great mystery, almost as puzzling as Jesus. I wanted to know how the hand had come off (perhaps she had taken it off herself) and where it was now, and especially whether my own hand could ever come off like that; but I never asked, I must have been afraid of the answers. Going down the steps, I try to remember what the rest of her was like, her face, but I can see only the potent candies, inaccessible in their glass reliquary, and the arm, miraculous in an unspecified way like the toes of saints or the cut-off pieces of early martyrs, the eyes on the plate, the severed breasts, the heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.

The cumulative results of the brain’s chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression); minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus the level of norepinephrine; minus the level of normetanephrine plus the level of metanepherine, the sum of those divided by the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus an unspecified conversion variable; or, as CTP puts it: “D-type score = C1 (MHPG) - C2 (VMA) + C3 (NE) - C4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C0.” The score should come out between one for unipolar and zero for bipolar patients, so if you come up with something else—you’re doing it wrong.

For every one member of the elite, thousands more were illiterate and impoverished subsistence farmers. After the ‘collapse of civilisation’, many of them moved elsewhere, and some may have died, but for the most part their lives probably did not change much. They went on growing crops. Those people were your ancestors and mine—not the palace-dwellers, but the peasants. Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?

What are these evolutionary changes? At the simplest level, the development of exceptionally sophisticated resistance mechanisms in all the bacterial populations of the world. In response to the impact of not me on the bacterial me, bacteria have begun generating tremendously sophisticated behavioral and physical responses. Bacteria have literally begun rearranging their genomes. As those genomes shift, their physical structures alter, sometimes considerably. It has been two and a half billion years since anything approaching this degree of change has occurred in the bacterial populations of Earth. But this kind of response is inevitable in any self-organized system; as Francisco Varela et al. observe, a biological network will reconfigure itself to an unspecified environment in such a way that it both maintains its ongoing dynamics and displays a behaviour that reveals a degree of inductive learning about environmental regularities.5

The Constitutional Convention quickly agreed to the proposal of Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia for a national government of three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. Randolph’s resolution “that a national Judiciary be established” passed unanimously. Debating and defining the powers of Congress in Article I and of the president in Article II consumed much of the delegates’ attention and energy. Central provisions of Article III were the product of compromise and, in its fewer than five hundred words, the article left important questions unresolved. Lacking agreement on a role for lower courts, for example, the delegates simply left it to Congress to decide how to structure them. The number of justices remained unspecified. Article III itself makes no reference to the office of chief justice, to whom the Constitution (in Article I) assigns only one specific duty, that of presiding over a Senate trial in a presidential impeachment.

he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World. . .and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly. Each moment the brassy importunities of the radio seemed to Doremus the more offensive, while the hillside slept in the heavy summer night, and he thought about the mazurka of the fireflies, the rhythm of crickets like the rhythm of the revolving earth itself, the voluptuous breezes that bore away the stink of cigars and sweat and whisky breaths and mint chewing-gum that seemed to come to them from the convention over the sound waves, along with the oratory.

What ensued was a game of Coyote and Roadrunner that dragged on for more than a decade. Sixty letters went back and forth among Beaumont, St. Martin, and various contacts at the American Fur Company who had located St. Martin and tried to broker a return. It was a seller’s market with a fevered buyer. With each new round of communications—St. Martin holding out for more or making excuses, though always politely and with “love to your family”—Beaumont raised his offer: $250 a year, with an additional $50 to relocate the wife and five children (“his live stock,” as Beaumont at one point refers to them). Perhaps a government pension and a piece of land? His final plan was to offer St. Martin $500 a year if he’d leave his family behind, at which point Beaumont planned to unfurl some unspecified trickery: “When I get him alone again into my keeping I will take good care to control him as I please.” But St. Martin—beep, beep!—eluded his grasp. In the end, Beaumont died first. When a colleague, years later, set out to bag the fabled stomach for study and museum display, St. Martin’s survivors sent a cable that must have given pause to the telegraph operator: “Don’t come for autopsy, will be killed.

Former member of CSICOP Marcello Truzzi summed up the history of laboratory parapsychology: As proponents of anomalies produce stronger evidence, critics have sometimes moved the goal posts further away. . . . To convince scientists of what had merely been supported by widespread but weak anecdotal evidence, parapsychologists moved psychical research into the laboratory. When experimental results were presented, designs were criticized. When protocols were improved, a “fraud proof” or “critical experiment” was demanded. When those were put forward, replications were demanded. When those were produced, critics argued that new forms of error might be the cause (such as the “file drawer” error that could result from unpublished negative studies). When meta-analyses were presented to counter that issue, these were discounted as controversial, and ESP was reduced to being some present but unspecified “error some place” in the form of what Ray Hyman called the “dirty test tube argument” (claiming dirt was in the tube making the seeming psi result a mere artifact). And in one instance, when the scoffer found no counter-explanations, he described the result as a “mere anomaly” not to be taken seriously so just belonging on a puzzle page. The goal posts have now been moved into a zone where some critics hold unfalsifiable positions.30

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.

The three main mediaeval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism. Realism, as the word is used in connection with the mediaeval controversy over universals, is the Platonic doctrine that universals or abstract entities have being independently of the mind; the mind may discover them but cannot create them. Logicism, represented by Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Church, and Carnap, condones the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities known and unknown, specifiable and unspecifiable, indiscriminately. Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made. Intuitionism, espoused in modern times in one form or another by Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl, and others, countenances the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities only when those entities are capable of being cooked up individually from ingredients specified in advance. As Fraenkel has put it, logicism holds that classes are discovered while intuitionism holds that they are invented—a fair statement indeed of the old opposition between realism and conceptualism. This opposition is no mere quibble; it makes an essential difference in the amount of classical mathematics to which one is willing to subscribe. Logicists, or realists, are able on their assumptions to get Cantor’s ascending orders of infinity; intuitionists are compelled to stop with the lowest order of infinity, and, as an indirect consequence, to abandon even some of the classical laws of real numbers. The modern controversy between logicism and intuitionism arose, in fact, from disagreements over infinity. Formalism, associated with the name of Hilbert, echoes intuitionism in deploring the logicist’s unbridled recourse to universals. But formalism also finds intuitionism unsatisfactory. This could happen for either of two opposite reasons. The formalist might, like the logicist, object to the crippling of classical mathematics; or he might, like the nominalists of old, object to admitting abstract entities at all, even in the restrained sense of mind-made entities. The upshot is the same: the formalist keeps classical mathematics as a play of insignificant notations. This play of notations can still be of utility—whatever utility it has already shown itself to have as a crutch for physicists and technologists. But utility need not imply significance, in any literal linguistic sense. Nor need the marked success of mathematicians in spinning out theorems, and in finding objective bases for agreement with one another’s results, imply significance. For an adequate basis for agreement among mathematicians can be found simply in the rules which govern the manipulation of the notations—these syntactical rules being, unlike the notations themselves, quite significant and intelligible.

As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely. The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste. Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved. Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end. The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.

It is sometimes argued that Christians cannot be demon-possessed, only oppressed. However these are not terms that actually appear in Scripture, and, indeed, the expression often translated “demon possession” is merely the one Greek word daimonizō (literally, “to demonize”), which leaves unspecified the extent of the devil's power in such an individual. It is certainly true, though, that Scripture gives no grounds for the notion that a person, Christian or otherwise, can be influenced by the devil in the seven ways just noted apart from voluntarily yielding oneself to evil influences

In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.

To hire someone willing to undertake an unspecified task, likely involving violence.

along with the knife I’d been holding in my teeth, and saw you standing alone, looking around the room with big eyes, and I’d never felt so vulnerable. I thought we had a connection. That’s why I invited you on a weekday trip to a compound at an unspecified Middle Eastern

From a commonsense point of view, to assert that that which moves a stone, piece of iron, or a stick, is what heats it, seems like an extreme vanity. But the friction produced when two hard bodies are rubbed together, which either reduces them to fine flying particles or permits the corpuscles of flame contained in them to escape, can finally be analyzed as motion. And the particles, when they encounter our body and penetrate and tear through it, are felt, in their motion and contact, by the living creature, who thus feels those pleasant or unpleasant affections which we call “heat,” “burning,” or “scorching.” Perhaps while this pulverizing and attrition continue, and remain confined to the particles themselves, their motion will be temporary and their operation will be merely that of heating. But once we arrive at the point of ultimate and maximum dissolution into truly indivisible atoms, light itself may be created, with an instantaneous motion or (I should rather say) an instantaneous diffusion and expansion, capable—I do not know if by the atoms’ subtlety, rarity, immateriality, or by different and as yet unspecifiable conditions—capable, I say, of filling vast spaces.

remain confined to the particles themselves, their motion will be temporary and their operation will be merely that of heating. But once we arrive at the point of ultimate and maximum dissolution into truly indivisible atoms, light itself may be created, with an instantaneous motion or (I should rather say) an instantaneous diffusion and expansion, capable—I do not know if by the atoms’ subtlety, rarity, immateriality, or by different and as yet unspecifiable conditions—capable, I say, of filling vast spaces.

Nagler-Rolz helicopter (unspecified type) Two types of ultra-light helicopter were designed by Bruno Nagler. Each of these could be strapped to a man’s back. The first, for which no designation has been reported, has a single rotor, and a small engine enclosed in a fairing is mounted on an extension of the rotor on the opposite side of the hub. The motor drives a shaft which is housed inside the blade and, in turn, through bevel gearing, drives two small propellers in opposite directions. The propellers are located at the centre of pressure, one at the leading-edge and one at the trailing-edge of the blade.     Nagler-Rolz NR

The Andy Griffith Show was anachronistic. The denizens of Mayberry wore clothing of uncertain vintage and hair of indeterminate style and drove cars of unspecified age. Scant mention was made of current affairs or changing times. Telephone calls were placed through a human operator, and no one seemed to own a television set.

Knowing that time is running down, and that you are working against the clock forces you to work with clarity and urgency. The alternative of working for an unspecified amount of time can lead to an unfocused kind of work, where the mind wanders and we don’t apply ourselves as well as we might. Time boxing is a powerful tool, so use it regularly.

Adult infallibility, which seems to me to be an oxymoron, is a regrettable condition, a type of regression, a hardening of the arteries around the heart of ignorance. It frequently manifests itself in an irrational irascibility that is directed at an unspecified “they,” who upon examination turn out to be politicians, professionals, or scientists who have challenged our comfortable assumptions about the world.

Sometimes it felt like Zoe was just waiting out her life now, enduring it, ticking off events and days and months and years, as if she just had to get herself through something unspecified and then things would be better, except she never got through it and it never got better and she would never forgive him. His death was the ultimate 'fuck you'.

That the epic journey of Homo sapiens has taken us from the savannah to space is indisputable, but we do not have one simple, comprehensive account of this multigenerational sojourn—and we never will, no matter how much we excavate. Rather, we have grainy snapshots, faded sketches, souvenirs of mysterious purpose, maps of unspecified scales drawn long after the fact, and stories which change with each storyteller and occasion.

granted him a broad and unspecified authority. In his sunny way, Creel would take that authority and run with it, going to extremes that must be described as alarming. In 1917, the United States remained intensely divided over

Usually the influencer also bangs on about gratitude, or living in the moment, and pretends they’ve suffered from mild anxiety or struggle with some unspecified hardship in order to present as more relatable. The platitudes that gush from these people could overpower the Thames barrier. Watching

The radical unravelling of character is a consequence of Joyce’s rewriting procedures. Initially, Joyce drafted particular characters that are peculiar in being dehistoricized, their social contexts unspecified, as a rule absurd, with an inconsistent mixing of historical allusion. They are carriers of Joyce’s exercises in style, rather than self-consistent entities. They have neither clear origins nor destinies, and float out of the scriptural ether like the ventriloquized voices that issue from the medium Yawn. Over time, rather than becoming more specific, they proliferate, change name, sex, nation, class, period. Any clue to a naturalistic context that might be provided—such as their form of employment, for instance (writer, alchemist, postman, Madame of a brothel, striptease artist, mercenary, innkeeper, General, tailor, policeman) — is quickly qualified and elaborated rapidly in revision, by incorporating some element from another conflicting historical framework. The consequent multiplication of temporal and spatial contexts means that the delineating limits of character blur. It is through revision that character is refracted and multiplied, stretched across incompatible and incongruous realms. Characters begin to overlap. The incongruities produce the comic surrealism of the text, its fast-moving encyclopedism and, by reaching across and embracing wide fields of reference, provide the base to interpret Finnegans Wake as an all-encompassing ‘universal’ myth. But the effects of Joyce’s revisions and the characterization of his revisions also undo this universal myth and explode universality.

Stem cells are the undifferentiated group of cells, they are unspecified and have a great potential for proliferation, differentiation and migration. Stem Cells are vital. They can rise specialized cells for body repair. Moreover, stem cell treatment has witnessed exceptional growth and development in past few years. Their consistency, self-repairing properties and profound healing response have led to the immense popularity of Stem Cell Therapy in South Africa.

Most people have probably met enzymes in school biology as the agents responsible for digesting our food, breaking down the starch of pasta, rice, potatoes into sugar and so on. Many meet them again as they face their washing machine, stained sports clothes in hand, and wonder whether or not to use a ‘biological’ detergent, containing added but unspecified ‘enzymes’ to do mysterious things to the clothes. As it happens, in both contexts the enzymes’ function is very similar, breaking down large chemical molecules into smaller bits that will wash away. People do not generally realize, however, that enzymes have much wider and more diverse roles and that, in effect, they orchestrate the whole of life.

Imagine hearing on CNN that yesterday yet another American town was wiped out by the “Reds.” (Let’s leave the precise identity of the enemy unspecified.) All men were killed, women raped and then also slain, and those children who were not slaughtered immediately were instead carried away to be sold on the organ black market. Or that the Reds again tortured a U.S. serviceman to death, videotaped it, and showed it repeatedly on the Al Reddiyyah channel. Or perhaps an interview with a ransomed captive about her horrible experiences at the hands of the Reds. You would hear a story of this kind once a week throughout your life; and the same state of affairs was in place when your parents and grandparents grew up. Without doubt, any society subjected to such pressures for generations would be transformed.

Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it—an unspecified cause means no cause at all.

Maybe you are at home, at night. Assume you are alone. It is dark and late. An unexpected noise startles you, and you freeze. That is the first transmutation: unknown noise (a pattern) to frozen position. Then your heart rate rises, in preparation for (unspecified) action.3 That is the second transmutation. You are preparing to move. Next, your imagination populates the darkness with whatever might be making the noise.4 That is the third transmutation, part of a complete and practical sequence: embodied responses (freezing and heart-rate increase) and then imagistic, imaginative representation. The latter is part of exploration, which you might extend by overcoming your terror and the freezing associated with it (assuming nothing else too unexpected happens) and investigating the locale, once a part of your friendly house, from where the noise appeared to emanate. You have now engaged in active exploration—a precursor to direct perception (hopefully nothing too dramatic); then to explicit knowledge of the source; and then back to routine and complacent peace, if the noise proves to be nothing of significance.

Sometimes it felt like Zoe was just waiting out her life now, enduring it, ticking off events and days and months and years, as if she just had to get herself through something unspecified and then things would be better except she never got through it and it never got better and she would never forgive him.

She had not realized that grief was so physical. Before Zach died, she thought grief happened in your head. She didn’t know that your whole body ached with it, that it screwed up your digestive system, your menstrual cycle, your sleep patterns, your skin. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. Sometimes it felt like Zoe was just waiting out her life now, enduring it, ticking off events and days and months and years, as if she just had to get herself through something unspecified and then things would be better except she never got through it and it never got better and she would never forgive him. His

That the future’s unspecified terms provide a few recognizable basics, and that I might find, somewhere in me, a tension—the good kind—for tapping into what springs me forward, is, I reason, the hope. The discord, the din, what stays the same, what reappears, what’s underneath, the misremembered and all there is to fathom. Growing up, for a long period that’s not worth mentioning here, I thought the expression was “Play it by year.” As in, take your time. A whole year. More. Whatever you need. There’s no rush.

That the future’s unspecified terms provide a few recognizable basics, and that I might find, somewhere in me, a tension—the good kind—for tapping into what springs me forward, is, I reason, the hope. The discord, the din, what stays the same, what reappears, what’s underneath, the misremembered and all there is to fathom. Growing up, for a long period that’s not worth mentioning here, I thought the expression was “Play it by year.” As in, take your time. A whole year. More. Whatever you need. There’s no rush.” Excerpt From: Durga Chew-Bose. “Too Much and Not the Mood.” Apple Books.

The second assumption is that childhood is—and should be—mostly about preparation for what comes later. It doesn’t matter if you’re miserable now because what you experience as a child isn’t important in its own right. Everything is about the payoff, which doesn’t come until some (unspecified) period during adulthood. School, for example, may be awful for you—it may squelch your excitement about learning—but that’s okay because the purpose of education is to acclimate you to gratuitous unpleasantness.

Disaster-preparation planning is more like training for a marathon than training for a high-jump competition or sprinting event. Marathon runners do not practice by running the full course of twenty-sex miles; rather, they get into shape by running shorter distances and building up their endurance with cross-training. If they have prepared successfully, then they are in optimal condition to run the marathon over its predetermined course and length, assuming a range of weather conditions, predicted or not. This is normal marathon preparation. But imagine preparing for a mystery marathon on undisclosed terrain, of an unspecified length, which could begin at any time.

The shower sprinkled like light rain with the occasional burst of pressure, as though some heavy cloud were passing overhead. Hair and unspecified fuzzes stuck to the stall walls and floor. Which did kind of make it feel like home.

QUERENCIA: The word doesn’t translate. It is used in Spanish to designate that mysterious little area in the bullring that catches the fancy of the fighting bull when he charges in. He imagines it his sanctuary: when parked there, he supposes he cannot be hurt. . . . So it is, borrowing the term, that one can speak of one’s “querencia” to mean that little, unspecified area in life’s arena where one feels safe, serene.

It did not seem real to her, here, under the ground. Thinking of it here, she knew she could have no part in Jim's battle. There was no action she could take against the men of undefined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them — nothing would be heard or answered.