Variant Book Quotes

Karl Marx said, “The task is not just to understand the world but to change it.” A variant to keep in mind is that if you want to change the world you’d better try to understand it. That doesn’t mean listening to a talk or reading a book, though that’s helpful sometimes. You learn from participating. You learn from others. You learn from the people you’re trying to organize. We all have to gain the understanding and the experience to formulate and implement ideas.

Just keep her away from bookstores, if you can." Bookstores. Thanks, Grayson. That helps. Apparently whoever said, "no harm ever came from reading a book," hadn't met this girl.

The word "cannibal," the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, comes from the word caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh and from whom the word "Caribbean" originated. By virtue of being Caribbean, all "West Indian" people are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage.

As a psycholinguist who once wrote an entire book on the past tense, I can single out my favorite example in the history of the English language. It comes from the first sentence of a Wikipedia entry: Smallpox was an infectious disease caused by either of two virus variants, Variola major and Variola minor. Yes, "smallpox was.

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers

No races, few permitted variant alleles. Anything else arouses hostility,

If we could popularize the understanding that all conclusions from scripture are but interpretations, then all variant readings of a holy book would become a matter of differing human perspectives.

Variant selves haunt the corridors of my brain, people my novels, crowd in like ghosts drawn to blood when friends or strangers tell me secrets, hand me their troubles, sweaters knit of hair and wire.

If we could popularize the understanding that all conclusions from scripture are but interpretations, then all variant readings of a holy book would become a matter of differing human perspectives. That

How? Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance.

If cissexual academics truly believe that transsexual and intersex people can add new perspectives to existing dialogues about gender, then they should stop reinterpreting our experiences and instead support transsexual and intersex intellectual endeavors and works of art. Instead of exploiting our experiences to further their own careers, they should insist that their universities make a point of hiring transsexual and intersex faculty, and that their publishers put out books by gender-variant writers. And they should finally acknowledge the fact that they have no legitimate claim to use transsexual and intersex identities, struggles, and histories for their own purposes.

Then, I saw it—a golden calf exposed as a false idol by two variants of the same goddess-forsaken curse. A bull burned in a fire, ground to powder, and scattered on the sea as she watched with her knees sunk in the blood-stained sand of the seashore.

Thousands and thousands of books are thrown on the market every year presenting some new variant of the personal romance, some tale of the vacillations of the melancholic or the career of the ambitious. The heroine of Proust requires several finely-wrought pages in order to feel that she does not feel anything. It would seem that one might, at least with equal justice, demand attention to a series of collective historic dramas which lifted hundreds of millions of human beings out of nonexistence, transforming the character of nations and intruding forever into the life of all mankind.

Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic orbits of flying rocks (explaining our penchant for baseball). A cavewoman thinking too hard about what matter is ultimately made of might fail to notice the tiger sneaking up behind and get cleaned right out of the gene pool. Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down. We’ve repeatedly tested this prediction, and the results overwhelmingly support Darwin. At high speeds, Einstein realized that time slows down, and curmudgeons on the Swedish Nobel committee found this so weird that they refused to give him the Nobel Prize for his relativity theory. At low temperatures, liquid helium can flow upward. At high temperatures, colliding particles change identity; to me, an electron colliding with a positron and turning into a Z-boson feels about as intuitive as two colliding cars turning into a cruise ship. On microscopic scales, particles schizophrenically appear in two places at once, leading to the quantum conundrums mentioned above. On astronomically large scales… weirdness strikes again: if you intuitively understand all aspects of black holes [then you] should immediately put down this book and publish your findings before someone scoops you on the Nobel Prize for quantum gravity… [also,] the leading theory for what happened [in the early universe] suggests that space isn’t merely really really big, but actually infinite, containing infinitely many exact copies of you, and even more near-copies living out every possible variant of your life in two different types of parallel universes.

Most people will likely encounter Ingeborg’s showy Display variants: the decorative fill and shadow of Block, and the buxom swashes of Fat Italic. These are indeed finely crafted crowd-pleasers, but the typeface’s more important contribution to typography is in the text weights. Michael Hochleitner managed to comfortably combine the neoclassical glamour of Didones, the readability of other Rational typefaces like the Scotch Romans, and the sturdiness of a slab serif. The result is a very original design that is both beautiful and practical. Good for: Books. Magazines. Substance and style.

Intellectual truth alone will not make you free, though it is certainly a necessary preliminary. If this were the case your walls would fall away, since intellectually you understand their rather dubious nature. Since feeling is so often the cohesive with which mind builds, it is feeling itself which must be changed if you would find freedom from your particular plane of existence at your particular time. That is, to some extent a change in feeling will allow you to see variants. Since feeling is a cohesive, to change it completely would hardly be of any advantage since your world of present existence would fall apart.

The Muslim sees the Koran as the perfect and final revelation of Allah. Allah was the revealer, and Mohammed was the receptor. The very words were dictated to him. He, to them, is the last and the greatest prophet. The proof of his supremacy is the beauty of the Koran. It is the book that is considered to be the ultimate expression of perfection and the repository of truth. The difficulty here is manifold. How does one sustain that this written text is perfect? Let us consider just one troublesome aspect, the grammatical flaws that have been demonstrated. Ali Dashti, an Iranian author and a committed Muslim, commented that the errors in the Koran were so many that the grammatical rules had to be altered in order to fit the claim that the Koran was flawless. He gives numerous examples of these in his book, Twenty-Three Years: The Life of the Prophet Mohammed. (The only precaution he took before publishing this book was to direct that it be published posthumously.) A further problem facing the early compilers of the Koran was the number of variant readings of some of the important texts. Now, in recent times, scholars have begun to look at the Koran and have raised some very serious questions regarding its origin and compilation. This has sent many Islamic scholars scrambling for a response.5

How much more would I have longed for and needed to see myself in my books if I’d been disabled, gay, black, non-Christian or something else outside the mainstream message? By this time – the mid-1980s – writers’ and publishers’ consciousnesses of matters of sex, race and representation had started to be raised. The first wave of concern had come in the 1960s and 70s, mainly – or perhaps just most successfully – over the matter of heroines. There were some. But not many. And certainly not enough of the right – feisty, non-domestic, un-Meg Marchish – sort. Efforts needed to be made to overcome the teeny imbalance caused by 300 years of unreflecting patriarchal history. It’s this memory that convinces me of the importance of role models and the rightness of including (or as critics of the practice call it, ‘crowbarring in’) a wide variety of characters with different backgrounds, orientations and everything else into children’s books. If it seems – hell, even if it IS – slightly effortful at times, I suspect that the benefits (even though by their very nature as explosions of inward delight, wordless recognition, relief, succour, sustenance, those benefits are largely hidden) vastly outweigh the alleged cons. And I’m never quite sure what the cons are supposed to be anyway. Criticisms usually boil down to some variant of ‘I am used to A! B makes me uncomfortable! O, take the nasty B away!’ Which really isn’t good enough.

A variant of the amnesic-plot device is the inadvertent return of the amnesiac to home territory, where he is welcomed by a lovely woman, unknown to him, who is evidently his wife. The crucial scene is his being led off to bed. A non-amnesic equivalent is a twin or look-alike who is mistaken for someone else—by a beautiful woman. Invariably she finds him not merely oddly different but somehow better, more attractive, than the original. After a love scene, she looks at him wide-eyed and smiling (you were never like this before!). This version demonstrates that the source of pleasure for the moviegoer is not the amnesia but the certified and risk-free license to leave the old self behind and enter upon a new life, whether by amnesia or mistaken identity.

In the beginning, according to the Doctrine of Hermopolis, there was water, darkness, formlessness, and hidden powers. This is how the ancients understood the primeval Chaos into which the ordered universe was inserted through the actions of the gods. The Hebrew Book of Genesis is merely a variant of pagan Egyptian mythology. The Hebrew God is just Amun, Atum, Ptah or Thoth by another name. He collects all of the powers of the Ogdoad or Ennead into himself, but all the same factors and ingredients are still at play, and there is absolutely no sign of science, mathematics or philosophy. Do you see that the Bible’s Creation myth is of a very familiar nature? If the Book of Genesis were taught alongside Egyptian Creation myths, which long preceded it and set the ground for it, all the believers in the Bible would see that it’s just another story, another myth, and that Yahweh, the Hebrew God is no more real than any of the Egyptian deities. If Yahweh goes, so does his “son” – Jesus Christ! Christianity is just a myth cobbled together from Egyptian, Greek and Persian sources. It’s amazing how Abrahamists are unable to see that their entire religion is in fact derived from the pagan Egyptians.

The men who had inhabited prehistoric Egypt, who had carved the Sphinx and founded the world‘s oldest civilization, were men who had made their exodus from Atlantis to settle on this strip of land that bordered the Nile. And they had left before their ill-fated continent sank to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, a catastrophe which had drained the Sahara and turned it into a desert. The shells which to-day litter the surface of the Sahara in places, as well as the fossil fish which are found among its sands, prove that it was once covered by the waters of a vast ocean. It was a tremendous and astonishing thought that the Sphinx provided a solid, visible and enduring link between the people of to-day and the people of a lost world, the unknown Atlanteans. This great symbol has lost its meaning for the modern world, for whom it is now but an object of local curiosity. What did it mean to the Atlanteans? We must look for some hint of an answer in the few remnants of culture still surviving from peoples whose own histories claimed Atlantean origin. We must probe behind the degenerate rituals of races like the Incas and the Mayas, mounting to the purer worship of their distant ancestors, and we shall find that the loftiest object of their worship was Light, represented by the Sun. Hence they build pyramidal Temples of the Sun throughout ancient America. Such temples were either variants or slightly distorted copies of similar temples which had existed in Atlantis. After Plato went to Egypt and settled for a while in the ancient School of Heliopolis, where he lived and studied during thirteen years, the priest-teachers, usually very guarded with foreigners, favoured the earnest young Greek enquirer with information drawn from their well-preserved secret records. Among other things they told him that a great flat-topped pyramid had stood in the centre of the island of Atlantis, and that on this top there had been build the chief temple of the continent – a sun temple. […] The Sphinx was the revered emblem in stone of a race which looked upon Light as the nearest thing to God in this dense material world. Light is the subtlest, most intangible of things which man can register by means of one of his five senses. It is the most ethereal kind of matter which he knows. It is the most ethereal element science can handle, and even the various kind of invisible rays are but variants of light which vibrate beyond the power of our retinas to grasp. So in the Book of Genesis the first created element was Light, without which nothing else could be created. „The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the Deep,“ wrote Egyptian-trained Moses. „And God said, Let there be Light: and there was Light.“ Not only that, it is also a perfect symbol of that heavenly Light which dawns within the deep places of man‘s soul when he yields heart and mind to God; it is a magnificent memorial to that divine illumination which awaits him secretly even amid the blackest despairs. Man, in turning instinctively to the face and presence of the Sun, turns to the body of his Creator. And from the sun, light is born: from the sun it comes streaming into our world. Without the sun we should remain perpetually in horrible darkness; crops would not grow: mankind would starve, die, and disappear from the face of this planet. If this reverence for Light and for its agent, the sun, was the central tenet of Atlantean religion, so also was it the central tenet of early Egyptian religion. Ra, the sun-god, was first, the father and creator of all the other gods, the Maker of all things, the One, the self-born [...] If the Sphinx were connected with this religion of Light, it would surely have some relationship with the sun.

Re-examine all you have been told,' Whitman tells us, 'and dismiss whatever insults your own soul.' Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally 'like' us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did. But I feel no sense of triumph in my apostasy. It might well be that we simply don’t want or need novels like mine anymore, or any of the kinds of fictions that, in order to exist, must fundamentally disagree with the new theory of 'likeness.' It may be that the whole category of what we used to call fiction is becoming lost to us. And if enough people turn from the concept of fiction as it was once understood, then fighting this transformation will be like going to war against the neologism 'impactful' or mourning the loss of the modal verb 'shall.' As it is with language, so it goes with culture: what is not used or wanted dies. What is needed blooms and spreads.

I will give technology three definitions that we will use throughout the book. The first and most basic one is that a technology is a means to fulfill a human purpose. For some technologies-oil refining-the purpose is explicit. For others- the computer-the purpose may be hazy, multiple, and changing. As a means, a technology may be a method or process or device: a particular speech recognition algorithm, or a filtration process in chemical engineering, or a diesel engine. it may be simple: a roller bearing. Or it may be complicated: a wavelength division multiplexer. It may be material: an electrical generator. Or it may be nonmaterial: a digital compression algorithm. Whichever it is, it is always a means to carry out a human purpose. The second definition I will allow is a plural one: technology as an assemblage of practices and components. This covers technologies such as electronics or biotechnology that are collections or toolboxes of individual technologies and practices. Strictly speaking, we should call these bodies of technology. But this plural usage is widespread, so I will allow it here. I will also allow a third meaning. This is technology as the entire collection of devices and engineering practices available to a culture. Here we are back to the Oxford's collection of mechanical arts, or as Webster's puts it, "The totality of the means employed by a people to provide itself with the objects of material culture." We use this collective meaning when we blame "technology" for speeding up our lives, or talk of "technology" as a hope for mankind. Sometimes this meaning shades off into technology as a collective activity, as in "technology is what Silicon Valley is all about." I will allow this too as a variant of technology's collective meaning. The technology thinker Kevin Kelly calls this totality the "technium," and I like this word. But in this book I prefer to simply use "technology" for this because that reflects common use. The reason we need three meanings is that each points to technology in a different sense, a different category, from the others. Each category comes into being differently and evolves differently. A technology-singular-the steam engine-originates as a new concept and develops by modifying its internal parts. A technology-plural-electronics-comes into being by building around certain phenomena and components and develops by changing its parts and practices. And technology-general, the whole collection of all technologies that have ever existed past and present, originates from the use of natural phenomena and builds up organically with new elements forming by combination from old ones.

The class-dominance approach to political activity is acutely related to our own in an unfortunate terminological sense. By historical accident, the class-dominance conception, in its Marxian variant, has come to be known as the “economic” conception or interpretation of State activity. The Marxian dialectic, with its emphasis on economic position as the fundamental source of class conflict, has caused the perfectly good word “economic” to be used in a wholly misleading manner. So much has this word been misused and abused here, that we have found it expedient to modify the original subtitle of this book from “An Economic Theory of Political Constitutions” to that currently used.

But in the years that followed, science journalists the world over began expressing their disappointment in the contribution that knowledge of our complete DNA sequence had made to medicine. Although decoding our own instruction book is an irrefutable achievement that has made a difference to treatments for several important illnesses, it has not revealed as much as we expected about the causes of many common diseases. Searching for genetic differences in common to people with a particular disease did not throw up straightforward links for as many conditions as had been expected. Often, conditions were weakly linked to tens or hundreds of gene variants, but rarely was it the case that possessing a given gene variant would lead directly to a given disease.

Let every government see to it that each child is implanted with the tools it needs to communicate, calculate, and process data. Let each government make sure that rich and poor alike, dirtborn and outworlder, Terran and Variant, all have equal access to the outernet and its resources. Let them do that, and we will see something the galaxy has never seen before: a time of true equality, unequaled prosperity, and the kind of conceptual innovation that can only take place when every human being is functioning at peak capacity, 100% of the time. New Horizons: Social implications of Cerebral Technology. (Historical Archives, Hellsgate Station)

British anthropologist Robin Dunbar theorized that the number of people an individual can actually trust usually falls between 100 and 230 (a more specific variant was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell as the “Rule of 150” in his book Outliers). This limitation leads to a kind of tribal competitiveness: victory as defined by the squad—the primary unit of allegiance—may not align with victory as defined by the Task Force.

Take for instance a phenomenon called frustrated spontaneous emission. It sounds like an embarrassing sexual complaint that psychotherapy might help with. In fact, it involves the decay of radioactive particles, which ordinarily takes place at a predictably random rate. The exception, however, is when radioactive material is placed in an environment that cannot absorb the photons that are emitted by decay. In that case, decay ceases—the atoms become “frustrated.” How do these atoms “know” to stop decaying until conditions are suitable? According to Wharton, the unpredictable decay of radioactive particles may be determined in part by whatever receives their emitted photons in the future.20 Decay may not really be random at all, in other words. Another quantum mystery that arguably becomes less mysterious in a retrocausal world is the quantum Zeno effect. Usually, the results of measurements are unpredictable—again according to the famous uncertainty believed to govern the quantum kingdom—but there is a loophole. Persistent, rapid probing of reality by repeating the same measurement over and over produces repetition of the same “answer” from the physical world, almost as if it is “stopping time” in some sense (hence the name of the effect, which refers to Zeno’s paradoxes like an arrow that must first get halfway to its target, and then halfway from there, and so on, and thus is never able to reach the target at all).21 If the measurement itself is somehow influencing a particle retrocausally, then repeating the same measurement in the same conditions may effectively be influencing the measured particles the same way in their past, thereby producing the consistent behavior. Retrocausation may also be at the basis of a long-known but, again, hitherto unsatisfyingly explained quirk of light’s behavior: Fermat’s principle of least time. Light always takes the fastest possible path to its destination, which means taking the shortest available path through different media like water or glass. It is the rule that accounts for the refraction of light through lenses, and the reason why an object underwater appears displaced from its true location.22 It is yet another example of a creature in the quantum bestiary that makes little sense unless photons somehow “know” where they are going in order to take the most efficient possible route to get there. If the photon’s angle of deflection when entering a refractive medium is somehow determined by its destination, Fermat’s principle would make much more sense. (We will return to Fermat’s principle later in this book; it plays an important role in Ted Chiang’s short story, “Story of Your Life,” the basis for the wonderful precognition movie Arrival.) And retrocausation could also offer new ways of looking at the double-slit experiment and its myriad variants.

Personalized, precision cancer medicine depends upon two crucial steps: detecting the patient-specific genetic mutation, and delivering a targeted drug for that mutation. We’ve succeeded at step one, having identified thousands of gene variants, far more than we can possibly investigate.

The word “cannibal,” the English variant of the Spanish word canibal, comes from the word caribal, a reference to the native Carib people in the West Indies, who Columbus thought ate human flesh and from whom the word “Caribbean” originated. By virtue of being Caribbean, all “West Indian” people are already, in a purely linguistic sense, born savage.

Probability is not a mere computation of odds on the dice or more complicated variants; it is the acceptance of the lack of certainty in our knowledge and the development of methods for dealing with our ignorance. … Mother Nature does not tell you how many holes there are on the roulette table … In this book, considering that alternative outcomes could have taken place, that the world could have been different, is the core of probabilistic thinking.

I take the book stopped at a fold, deliver myself to its pace, to the breathing of the other storyteller. If I am someone else, it's also because books move men more than journeys or tears. After many pages you end up learning a variant, a different move than the one taken and thought inevitable. I break away from what I am when I learn to treat my own life differently.

While the SLR McLaren was really just a grand tourer, the Stirling Moss edition is a supercar racing variant with no roof or windscreen – which is fairly outra- geous. It also boasted a higher top speed at 220mph.

This book makes the case that an appropriate animal based diet is more nutritionally dense, and thus, healthier than any variants of vegetarianism, including the most extreme form: veganism.

The earliest known copies of Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, and among them the differences were mostly small and insignificant. Taking them as witnesses to the earlier texts from which they were copied, it seemed logical to conclude that these many homogeneous texts must have derived from a common original via a highly accurate scribal tradition. But evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to contradict this conclusion. Among the hundreds of biblical manuscripts discovered there, many of which are more than a thousand years older than anything scholars had ever seen before, we find not uniformity but diversity, including many significant differences. The logical assumption now is that Jewish Scriptures became more uniform and free of variants over time, as scribes gradually established a more or less standard edition.

The technology of the codex did not reach the point of being able to hold anything close to an entire canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures until the fourth century. Nor was there any such thing as a closed canon of those Scriptures until that time. The closing of the canon and the binding of it into a single big book seems to have gone hand in hand. ... The main point I want to make here is that neither Jesus nor his followers nor Paul nor any of the authors of any of the texts now in the New Testament, let alone any Christians who lived during the first three hundred years of Christianity, could possibly have imagined the Bible, a single book containing a closed canon of Jewish and Christian Scriptures. It was both physically and socially impossible. Not only were there just too many different varieties of Christianity with too many different important writings with too many variants in too many different languages; there was simply no medium to bear anything close to that large of a library. It took the twin emergences of a top-down imperial Christianity and a big enough book to make the Bible possible.

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the aim of this book is that you should be future-proofed against new variants of bullshit.

This variant is causing your body’s immune system to attack itself. The body is designed to send white blood cells to attack anything it sees as a threat. That could be bacteria, a virus, or any number of toxins. For example, if you get a cut on your finger, the injury site might be red, sore, swollen—that’s a healthy form of inflammation. We call that acute inflammation. “But sometimes, the immune response causes problems. Examples of that are people with peanut or shellfish allergies. Their bodies perceive those foods to be dangerous when they actually aren’t. Arthritis is another example of inflammation causing harm. In this instance, inflammatory cells attack joint tissue. We call this chronic inflammation.

Other conditions that are associated with chronic inflammation are heart disease, Alzheimer’s, asthma, cancer, and diabetes. It’s not healthy. This variant is causing our cells to secrete a disproportionate number of cytokines, which are proteins that signal our bodies to produce more inflammatory cells.

Early in the pandemic, there was a broad belief in the scientific community that, although there would be some mutations of COVID, they wouldn’t cause a big problem. By early 2021, scientists knew that variants were emerging, but they appeared to be evolving in similar ways, leading some scientists to hope that the world had already seen the worst mutations that the virus was capable of. But the Delta variant proved otherwise—its genome had evolved to make it far more transmissible. The arrival of Delta was a bad surprise, but it convinced everyone that even more variants could show up. As I finish this book, the world is facing a sweeping wave of Omicron, the fastest-spreading variant to date—and in fact the fastest-spreading virus we’ve ever seen.

This book, therefore, will offer a defense of science fiction, and especially of its utopian variant. When Firestone called explicitly for utopian science fiction and then sketched one herself in her (in)famous final chapter, she did so while understanding that utopianism can be dangerous. But she did so, nonetheless, since she understood as well the opposing but greater dangers of not believing that something better is possible at all. Utopian visions don’t have to be about projecting a society deemed to be perfect, and still less about doing so with finality. But they matter – perhaps even are crucially needed – because they disrupt one of the key functions of ideology: that of making the status quo seem that it could not be otherwise. Firestone’s work, as good science fiction, speculates about the possible direction of a future society in order to show that our present one both could and should be better than it is. Fundamentally, I shall argue that despite its blind spots and flaws Firestone’s book is invaluable for feminist politics today.

The term torat moshe and its variants, in several late biblical books such as Ezra, Nehemiah, and Chronicles, refers to the Pentateuch more or less as it now exists, but it is not found in the Pentateuch.

In each instance Jesus advocates grace beyond retribution and expectation. He does not advocate passivity but active generosity that deconstructs the system because of the presence of the kingdom. Surrendering one’s rights for the good of the other manifests the Jesus Creed and its variant, the Golden Rule

A fairy ring, it stated, is very much like a doorway, and in several cultures it is perfectly acceptable to knock. Though most American and American-antecedent ethnicities do not practice such summoning, some bargaining cultures did, or do, practice the art. Alaine skimmed several photographs describing Sicilian stories of joining with fairies to battle witches and the Scottish worship of nature spirits, none of which seemed particularly relevant. She was growing frustrated at the author's apparent disregard for the separation between folktale and true practice when the chapter settled on a long description. Recent research into English witch trials have revealed a connection between bargaining culture and some occult forms of practice in which fairies are ritualistically summoned. Though some equate the practice with the concept of a "witch's familiar"... Here Alaine began to skim again until the author found himself back on track. Interviewees from several small villages recall stories that those bold enough to enter a fairy ring could summon a fairy by placing a silver pin in the center of the ring, repeating an incantation such as "a pin to mark, a pin to bind, a pin to hail" (additional variants found in Appendix E), and circling the interior of ring three times. It remains, of course, impossible to test the veracity of such stories, but the consistency of the methodology across geographical regions is intriguing, down to the practice of carrying a small bunch or braid of mint into the ring. Alaine shut the book on her finger, marking the spot. Impossible to rest, indeed. She opened the book again. It began a long ramble detailing various stories of summoning, but Alaine didn't need the repetition to know the method. A short footnote added that Mint appears to serve in the stories as both attractant and repellant for the fairy creatures, drawing them to the summoner but preventing from being taken unwilling into Fae, unlike tobacco and various types of sage, which are merely deterrents.

Externally motivated change is generally slow in communities where social networks are dense and multiplex, particularly in isolated areas where there are few weak ties to other networks. Conversely, in communities characterized by low-density social networks, change is more rapid because there are large numbers of weak ties between networks, which facilitate the transmission of new variants.

The surprise here is that the social classes just below the top of the hierarchy actually use more of the prestigious (r)-1 variants in formal styles than the classes above them. This unexpected pattern, in which intermediate social classes ‘overreach’ their social superiors, is called hypercorrection in one of its two meanings (see Spotlight on p. 237), and Labov has suggested that it may be indicative of ongoing change from above, i.e. in the direction of an overtly prestigious norm. Such changes, he argues, are most likely to be led not by the highest social class but by the lower middle or upper working classes further down the hierarchy, i.e. precisely those who hypercorrect for the New York (r) variable above. Being acutely aware of their precarious position between the established middle and working classes, these groups are more sensitive to social variation than those in more secure or entrenched class positions.

One variant of what I have been calling the "standard view" is the "safety-valve theory." The claim is sometimes made that women's emotional caregiving does more than secure psychological benefits to individual men: This caregiving is said to shore up the patriarchal system as a whole by helping to stabilize the characteristic institutions of contemporary patriarchal society. These institutions, it is claimed, are marked by hierarchy, hence by unequal access to power, and by impersonality, alienated labor, and abstract instrumental rationality. Now men pay a heavy price for their participation in such a system, even though the system as such allows men generally to exercise more power than women generally. The disclosure of a person's deepest feelings is dangerous under conditions of competition and impersonality: A man runs the risk of displaying fear or vulnerability if he says too much. Hence, men must sacrifice the possibility of frank and intimate ties with one another; they must abandon the possibility of emotional release in one another's company. Instead, they must appear tough, controlled, and self sufficient, in command at all times. Now, so the argument goes, the emotional price men pay for participation in this system would be unacceptable high, were women not there to lower it. Women are largely excluded from the arenas wherein men struggle for prestige; because of this and by virtue of our socialization into patterns of nurturance, women are well situated to repair the emotional damage men inflict on one another. Women's caregiving is said to function as a "safety valve" that allows the release of emotional tensions generated by a fundamentally inhuman system. Without such release, these tensions might explode the set of economic and political relationships wherein they are now uneasily contained. Hence, women are importantly involved in preventing the destabilization of a system in which some men oppress other men and men generally oppress women generally.

In his study of the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon, Hebrew scholar David Wright concluded that the Book of Mormon’s use of “Isaiah derives directly from the KJV text with some secondary modifications by Smith and that it does not derive from an ancient text through translation.”3 He also noted that the variant readings “can be explained as modifications of the KJV text, especially where there are italics,” and that Smith’s alterations of these italicized words often produced “incomplete and conceptually difficult or impossible readings” that were “incompatible with the Hebrew text” of Isaiah.4 New Testament scholar Stan Larson, in his study of the Sermon on the Mount in 3 Nephi 12–14, similarly concluded that the Book of Mormon’s text “originated in the nineteenth century, derived from unacknowledged plagiarism of the KJV,” which “Smith copied [from] the KJV blindly, not showing awareness of translation problems and errors in the KJV.”5 Larson also noted that some alterations were made to italicized words, but that “the Book of Mormon fails to revise places where the KJV text ought to have been printed in italics but is not.”6 Wright observed that the character of the alterations Smith made in his Bible revision are the same as what has been found in the Book of Mormon and that Smith’s 1829 efforts could be considered a “training ground” for his subsequent work on the Bible.7

On a scale of one to ten, how strong is the emotion attached to the memories we’ve been working on?” Curtis Rouanzoin asks one day. The procedure I’ve been going through with him is called EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, which looks at the way trauma is stored in the brain and attempts to properly process it. “If it used to be a ten, now it’s an eight,” I tell him. Lindsay Joy Greene is trained in a therapy called SE, or somatic experiencing, and she’s been locating trauma trapped not in my brain, but in my body, and releasing the stored energy. One day she asks, “On a scale of one to ten, how much anger do you feel when you recall the memories we’ve been discussing?” “If it used to be an eight, now it’s a seven,” I tell her. Olga Stevko practices her own variant of NLP, or neuro-linguistic programming. Where the experientials with Lorraine were about debugging my operating system, her process is about rewriting the original code. For example, she tells me that inside my mother’s words, “Never grow up to make anyone as miserable as your father makes me,” was a hidden command: Never grow up. As she helps me grow up, it brings my trauma down to a six. Greg Cason specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, which takes it to a five. And I don’t know what to call Barbara McNally’s method and her bottomless quiver of techniques, but they work, they’re original, and they bring the emotion associated with those memories to a four. And I do so much more: I beat pillows with baseball bats. I tap on energy meridians. I make shadow maps of my dark side. I try psychodrama. Not all of it works, but none of it hurts.

Some scholars thus suggest that Mahāyāna arose out of a variant on the worship of stūpas and images, that is, the cult of books. One finds in many Mahāyāna sūtras the claim that copying, memorizing or reciting this text will earn one great merit. The theory is that this formula reflects a new form of worship aimed at attracting lay followers and their material support.

Once superintelligent AI has settled another solar system or galaxy, bringing humans there is easy — if humans have succeeded in programming the AI with this goal. All the necessary information about humans can be transmitted at the speed of light, after which the AI can assemble quarks and electrons into the desired humans. This could be done either in a low-tech way by simply transmitting the 2 gigabytes of information needed to specify a person’s DNA and then incubating a baby to be raised by the AI, or the AI could assemble quarks and electrons into full-grown people who would have all the memories scanned from their originals back on Earth. This means that if there’s an intelligence explosion, the key question isn’t if intergalactic settlement is possible, but simply how fast it can proceed. Since all the ideas we've explored above come from humans, they should be viewed as merely lower limits on how fast life can expand; ambitious superintelligent life can probably do a lot better, and it will have a strong incentive to push the limits, since in the race against time and dark energy, every 1% increase in average settlement speed translates into 3% more galaxies colonized. For example, if it takes 20 years to travel 10 light-years to the next star system with a laser-sail system, and then another 10 years to settle it and build new lasers and seed probes there, the settled region will be a sphere growing in all directions at a third of the speed of light on average. In a beautiful and thorough analysis of cosmically expanding civilizations in 2014, the American physicist Jay Olson considered a high-tech alternative to the island-hopping approach, involving two separate types of probes: seed probes and expanders. The seed probes would slow down, land and seed their destination with life. The expanders, on the other hand, would never stop: they'd scoop up matter in flight, perhaps using some improved variant of the ramjet technology, and use this matter both as fuel and as raw material out of which they'd build expanders and copies of themselves. This self-reproducing fleet of expanders would keep gently accelerating to always maintain a constant speed (say half the speed of light) relative to nearby galaxies, and reproduce often enough that the fleet formed an expanding spherical shell with a constant number of expanders per shell area. Last but not least, there’s the sneaky Hail Mary approach to expanding even faster than any of the above methods will permit: using Hans Moravec’s “cosmic spam” scam from chapter 4. By broadcasting a message that tricks naive freshly evolved civilizations into building a superintelligent machine that hijacks them, a civilization can expand essentially at the speed of light, the speed at which their seductive siren song spreads through the cosmos. Since this may be the only way for advanced civilizations to reach most of the galaxies within their future light cone and they have little incentive not to try it, we should be highly suspicious of any transmissions from extraterrestrials! In Carl Sagan’s book Contact, we earthlings used blueprints from aliens to build a machine we didn’t understand — I don’t recommend doing this ... In summary, most scientists and sci-fi authors considering cosmic settlement have in my opinion been overly pessimistic in ignoring the possibility of superintelligence: by limiting attention to human travelers, they've overestimated the difficulty of intergalactic travel, and by limiting attention to technology invented by humans, they've overestimated the time needed to approach the physical limits of what's possible.

In the appendix to Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus, there is a dialogue between the editors of the book and the author: “Why do you believe these core tenets of Christian orthodoxy to be in jeopardy based on the scribal errors you discovered in the biblical manuscripts?” Ehrman’s response is illuminating: “Essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

Nag Hammadi, On the Origin of the World, tells a variant of the same story:  … he boasted continually, saying to (the angels) … “I am God, and no other one exists except me.” But when he said these things, he sinned against all of the immortal ones … when Faith saw the impiety of the chief ruler, she was angry.… she said, “You err, Samael (i.e., “blind god”). An enlightened, immortal humanity [anthropos] exists before you!”3

Enter, therefore, a new and ingenious variant of Ultimatum, this one called Dictator. Once again, a small pool of money is divided between two people. But in this case, only one person gets to make a decision. (Thus the name: the “dictator” is the only player who matters.) The original Dictator experiment went like this. Annika was given $20 and told she could split the money with some anonymous Zelda in one of two ways: (1) right down the middle, with each person getting $10; or (2) with Annika keeping $18 and giving Zelda just $2. Dictator was brilliant in its simplicity. As a one-shot game between two anonymous parties, it seemed to strip out all the complicating factors of real-world altruism. Generosity could not be rewarded, nor could selfishness be punished, because the second player (the one who wasn’t the dictator) had no recourse to punish the dictator if the dictator acted selfishly. The anonymity, meanwhile, eliminated whatever personal feeling the donor might have for the recipient. The typical American, for instance, is bound to feel different toward the victims of Hurricane Katrina than the victims of a Chinese earthquake or an African drought. She is also likely to feel different about a hurricane victim and an AIDS victim. So the Dictator game seemed to go straight to the core of our altruistic impulse. How would you play it? Imagine that you’re the dictator, faced with the choice of giving away half of your $20 or giving just $2. The odds are you would . . . divide the money evenly. That’s what three of every four participants did in the first Dictator experiments. Amazing! Dictator and Ultimatum yielded such compelling results that the games soon caught fire in the academic community. They were conducted hundreds of times in myriad versions and settings, by economists as well as psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. In a landmark study published in book form as Foundations of Human Sociality, a group of preeminent scholars traveled the world to test altruism in fifteen small-scale societies, including Tanzanian hunter-gatherers, the Ache Indians of Paraguay, and Mongols and Kazakhs in western Mongolia. As it turns out, it didn’t matter if the experiment was run in western Mongolia or the South Side of Chicago: people gave. By now the game was usually configured so that the dictator could give any amount (from $0 to $20), rather than being limited to the original two options ($2 or $10). Under this construct, people gave on average about $4, or 20 percent of their money. The message couldn’t have been much clearer: human beings indeed seemed to be hardwired for altruism. Not only was this conclusion uplifting—at the very least, it seemed to indicate that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors were nothing but a nasty anomaly—but it rocked the very foundation of traditional economics. “Over the past decade,” Foundations of Human Sociality claimed, “research in experimental economics has emphatically falsified the textbook representation of Homo economicus.

Standing in front of the shelves in my living room and looking at all these variants of the same dictionary, representing as they do an impressive superfluity of information, it can be tempting to say that the computer renders them obsolete and unnecessary. But what does the computer know fo the comforting weight of a book in one's lap? Or of the excitement that comes from finding a set of books, dirty and tucked away in the back corner of some store? The computer can only reproduce the information in a book, and never the joyful experience of reading it.

As an author writing about software engineering, I am committed to providing the best grounding for any factual claims I make or support. To that end I will: only cite papers that I have in fact personally read refrain from indirect quotation (or other ‘telephone game’ variants) make it clear whenever I’m citing opinion or indirect quotation, as opposed to original research cite page and section numbers when available, and always when citing books whenever possible, cite papers freely available online in full text versions refrain from citing obscure or non peer-reviewed sources check that the data I’m citing actually supports the claim look for contradictory evidence as well as supporting, to avoid confirmation bias only make prudent claims, and present all plausible threats to validity.

Variants that maintain most anomalies are oversampling, detrending, or inverting the price curve.

If the system stays profitable with those variants, but not with randomized prices, you might really have found a solid system.

There are plenty of variants of Krampus runs scattered through Europe, especially in the Alpine regions. In some, the performers are separated from the public by metal fencing and the worst the monsters can do is rattle the railings or swipe at the spectators standing too close. Given the mayhem of Salzburg, I can see why some town councils and attendees prefer to be a little safer and a little more removed from the Krampuses (though if I’m entirely honest, it sounds a lot less fun). In other places, the spectacle is more stage managed, with pyrotechnics, fog effects, and a soundtrack of heavy metal rather than clanking cow bells. In some places, modern additions to the Krampus outfits, like glowing LED eyes, are forbidden, in others they’re happily embraced. Plenty of Krampus groups do house calls as well as the main run (some, joyously, allow for house visits to be booked online on the Krampus group’s website). In other places, the Krampuses take part in a short play with St Nicholas before they rampage through the town.