Variant Quotes

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

Insomnia is a variant of Tourette's--the waking brain races, sampling the world after the world has turned away, touching it everywhere, refusing to settle, to join the collective nod. The insomniac brain is a sort of conspiracy theorist as well, believing too much in its own paranoiac importance--as though if it were to blink, then doze, the world might be overrun by some encroaching calamity, which its obsessive musings are somehow fending off.

Democracy has nothing to do with freedom. Democracy is a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.

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.

Fault! Asperger’s isn’t a fault. It’s a variant. It’s potentially a major advantage. Asperger’s syndrome is associated with organization, focus, innovative thinking, and rational detachment.

Asperger's isn't a fault. It's a variant. It's potentially a major advantage.

In every important way we are such secrets from one another, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence. Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live. We take fortuitous resemblances among us to be actual likeness, because those around us have also fallen heir to the same customs, trade in the same coin, acknowledge, more or less, the same notions of decency and sanity. But all that really just allows us to coexist with the inviolable, intraversable, and utterly vast spaces between us.

We might not be able to know what reality is about, but we can’t but be aware of the explicitness of facts. To get a better grip on the intricate nature of the truth and its ambiguity, we have got to scrutinize facts and find out about their codes. But, yet, we can’t ignore that reality is a very intriguing place, since facts may be construed, receive variant contexts and create alternate outcomes, which, in turn, might spark new realities, over again. ("Imbroglio" )

Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like.

So this is the "smug idiot thinks he's funny" face, Kami observed. Not to be confused with other "smug idiot" variants.

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.

Rape and sexual assault ... should be understood not just as a form of forced sex, they should also be understood as as a form of injury to the brain and body, and even as a variant of castration.

I’m not insane, I’m neurologically variant,” she snapped back. “Sticks and stones, asshole.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

Being in love (l’amour fou) a pathological variant of loving. Being in love = addiction, obsession, exclusion of others, insatiable demand for presence, paralysis of other interests and activities. A disease of love, a fever (therefore exalting). One “falls” in love. But this is one disease which, if one must have it, is better to have often rather than infrequently. It’s less mad to fall in love often (less inaccurate for there are many wonderful people in the world) than only two or three times in one’s life. Or maybe it’s better always to be in love with several people at any given time.

And it isn't enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way can we regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence.

The evolutionary algorithm--of variation and selection, repeated--searches for solutions in a world where the problems keep changing, trying all sorts of variants and doing more of what works.

We are all of us daily decaying, after all; the speed is our only variant.

Make no mistake: everything has a variant. Like versions of truth, like versions of love, there are versions of sleep. The deepest sleep is meant only for children and perfect fools. Everyone else must pay each night her restless due.

Perception can be one-sided or variant: "Glass half empty or half full." There usually is more than one way of perceiving. Thoroughly check your inner dialogue.

This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed, weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I had ever had about death, about illness, about probability and luck, about good fortune and bad, about marriage and children and memory, about grief, about the ways in which people do and do not deal with the fact that life ends, about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself. I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.

The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called “engaged withdrawal,”mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community. One need only glance at the historical record to confirm that most successful forms of popular resistance have taken precisely this form. They have not involved challenging power head on (this usually leads to being slaughtered, or if not, turning into some—often even uglier—variant of the very thing one first challenged) but from one or another strategy of slipping away from its grasp, from flight, desertion, the founding of new communities.

If there is such a thing as being conditioned by climate and geography, and I think there is, it is the West that has conditioned me. It has the forms and lights and colors that I respond to in nature and in art. If there is a western speech, I speak it; if there is a western character or personality, I am some variant of it; if there is a western culture in the small-c , anthropological sense, I have not escaped it. It has to have shaped me. I may even have contributed to it in minor ways, for culture is a pyramid to which each of us brings a stone.

When one contemplates the streak of insanity running through human history, it appears highly probable that homo sapiens is a biological freak, the result of some remarkable mistake in the evolutionary process. The ancient doctrine of original sin, variants of which occur independently in the mythologies of diverse cultures, could be a reflection of man's awareness of his own inadequacy, of the intuitive hunch that somewhere along the line of his ascent something has gone wrong.

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.

So you become numb to insults, particularly if you teach yourself to imagine that the person uttering them is a variant of a noisy ape with little personal control. Just keep your composure, smile, focus on analyzing the speaker not the message, and you’ll win the argument. An ad hominem attack against an intellectual, not against an idea, is highly flattering. It indicates that the person does not have anything intelligent to say about your message. The psychologist

Every lifelong couple has their own variants of the butterfly dream!

Beyond customs and norms and wildly variant beliefs, we all generally laugh, cry, and make our way along the dusty road of life in pretty much the same way.

An alarm rings again again. It's still the same again again. Still the season of COVID-19 (variant three and maybe four). Still the season of political instability. Still so much to contend with. Groundhog Day. Groundhog Day Again. Groundhog Day Again Again.

Every argument for God and every attribute ascribed to Him rests on a false metaphysical premise. None can survive for a moment on a correct metaphysics.... Existence exists, and only existence exists. Existence is a primary: it is uncreated, indestructible, eternal. So if you are to postulate something beyond existence—some supernatural realm—you must do it by openly denying reason, dispensing with definitions, proofs, arguments, and saying flatly, “To Hell with argument, I have faith.” That, of course, is a willful rejection of reason. Objectivism advocates reason as man’s sole means of knowledge, and therefore, for the reasons I have already given, it is atheist. It denies any supernatural dimension presented as a contradiction of nature, of existence. This applies not only to God, but also to every variant of the supernatural ever advocated or to be advocated. In other words, we accept reality, and that’s all.

Integrity is the very core of our being. It is who we really are. When all the scaffolding is removed, it is our integrity that both defines us and identifies us. Men of integrity are like the Rock of Gibraltar—steadfast and immovable. Men without it are like the shifting sands on the Sahara Desert—tossed to and fro by every variant wind of life.

You always do that, you know,” Alec said. I swallowed a gummy bear. “Do what?” “Bite their heads off first.” I shrugged. “It’s the nice thing to do. If you could choose, would you rather be eaten alive starting at your feet or would you want it to be over quickly?

He reached out, put his hands on her shoulders and pressed downwards. She fell into a seated position against a fallen tree. "Sit," he said. "Stay." "That's cute," she said. "Tell me to 'heel' and see what happens.

Y padecen la más horrible variante de la soledad: la soledad del que ni siquiera se tiene a sí mismo.

The desert landscape is always at its best in the half-light of dawn or dusk. The sense of distance lacks: a ridge nearby can be a far-off mountain range, each small detail can take on the importance of a major variant on the countryside's repetitious theme. The coming of day promises a change; it is only when the day had fully arrived that the watcher suspects it is the same day returned once again--the same day he has been living for a long time, over and over, still blindingly bright and untarnished by time.

When you are criticizing the philosophy of an epoch, do not chiefly direct your attention to those intellectual positions which its exponents feel it necessary explicitly to defend. There will be some fundamental assumptions which adherents to all the variant systems within the epoch unconsciously presuppose. Such assumptions appear so obvious that people do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them. With these assumptions a certain limited number of types of philosophic systems are possible, and this group of systems constitutes the philosophy of the epoch.

When the first giant bones were found in the 1820s and 1830s, scientists felt obliged to explain the bones as belonging to some oversize variant of a modern species. This was because it was believed that no species could ever become extinct, since God would not allow one of His creations to die. Eventually it became clear that this conception of God was mistaken, and the bones belonged to extinct animals.

Annie held up her hand. “Oh, sorry. One more thing—” She turned to DuBois. “Martin, we have about fifteen minutes of personal time after this lesson and before our next training exercise. Want to meet up in the bathroom down the hall and have sex?” “I find that agreeable,” said DuBois. “Thank you, Dr. Shapiro.” “Okay, cool.” They both looked to me, ready for their lesson. I waited a few seconds to make sure there was no more oversharing, but they seemed content. “Okay, so the Krebs cycle in Astrophage has a variant—wait. Do you call her Dr. Shapiro while having sex?” “Of course. That’s her name.” “I kind of like it,” she said. “I’m sorry I asked,” I said. “Now,

So this is the “smug idiot thinks he’s funny” face, Kami observed. Not to be confused with other “smug idiot” variants. And everyone told me English girls were so sweet, Jared said, and then: Oh, hey.

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.

Vampires are fond of their games. But the games that They play are different than the variants that I'm familiar with. The rules were made to be bent, broken, shattered—and somebody always gets hurt. Always.

To analyze or assess a person's failings or deficiencies,' he declared to himself, 'is useless, not because such blemishes are immovable, but because they affect the mass of beholders in diverse ways. Different minds perceive utterly variant figures in the same being.

[Abusers] blame the world - circumstances, other people - for their defeats, misfortune, misconduct, and failures. The abuser firmly believes that his life is swayed by currents and persons over which he has no influence whatsoever (he has an external locus of control). But there are even subtler variants of this psychological defense mechanism. Not infrequently an abuser will say: "I made a mistake because I am stupid", implying that his deficiencies and inadequacy are things he cannot help having and cannot change. This is also an alloplastic defense because it abrogates responsibility. Many abusers exclaim: "I misbehaved because I completely lost my temper." On the surface, this appears to be an autoplastic defense with the abuser assuming responsibility for his misconduct. But it could be interpreted as an alloplastic defense, depending on whether the abuser believes that he can control his temper.

Just say, 'no', Alex, dear." "You make him sound like a drug.

...I didn't trust you because I liked you. I trusted you because you earned it." -Becky

She looks tan...-ish." "There's a fine line between 'tan', and looking like you just rolled around in a giant bag of Doritos. And Miranda seems to prefer the nacho cheese variety.

Su vida estaba hecha de ruinas encadenadas sin variantes, salvo aquellas marcadas por las estaciones. Sólo existía trabajo y cansancio para ella

Ah non ! C'est un peu court jeune homme On pourrait dire, O Dieu, bien des choses en somme En variant le ton, par exemple, tenez: Agressif: moi monsieur, si j'avais un tel nez Il faudrait sur le champ que je me l'emputasse ! Amical: mais il doit tremper dans votre tasse Pour boire faîtes-vous donc fabriquer un hanap. Descriptif: c'est un roc ! c'est un pic ! c'est un cap ! Que dis-je, c'est un cap ? c'est une péninsule !

Nothing is owed to us in life, not even the innocence of a blue sky. Great art is the art of thankfulness for the abundance of every moment. Writing is a Chinese variant of this thankfulness, a courtesy to life in its cloak of nothing, lined with love.

The best prophylactic for god viruses, especially fundamentalist variants, is science education. The more science is taught or discussed, the fewer tools a god virus has to infect populations.

Cuando uno tiene que estar irremediablemente fijo, es impresionante la movilidad mental que es posible adquirir. Se puede ampliar el presente tanto como se quiera, o lanzarse vertiginosamente hacia el futuro, o dar marcha atrás que es lo más peligroso porque ahí están los recuerdos, todos los recuerdos, los buenos, los regulares y los execrables. Ahí está el amor, o sea estás vos, y las grandes lealtades y también las grandes traiciones. Ahí está lo que uno pudo hacer y no hizo, y también lo que pudo no hacer y sí hizo. La encrucijada en la que el camino elegido fue el erróneo. Y ahí empieza la película, es decir, cómo habría sido la historia si se hubiera tomado el otro rumbo, aquel que entonces se descartó. Generalmente, después de varios rollos uno suspende la proyección y piensa que el camino elegido no fue tan equivocado y que acaso, en igual encrucijada, hoy la elección sería la misma. Con variantes, claro. Con menos ingenuidad, por supuesto. Con más alertas, por las dudas. Pero eso sí manteniendo el rumbo primordial.

What if—poring through Graham’s bank in some future era—the selected “genius specimens” were found to possess the very genes that, in alternative situations, might be identified as disease enabling (or vice versa: What if “disease-causing” gene variants were also genius enabling?)?

What was it with exes? Why were they always twice as attractive after a break-up?

But that would mean it was originally a sideways number eight. That makes no sense at all. Unless..." She paused as understanding dawned. "You think it was the symbol for infinity?" "Yes, but not the usual one. A special variant. Do you see how one line doesn't fully connect in the middle? That's Euler's infinity symbol. Absolutus infinitus." "How is it different from the usual one?" "Back in the eighteenth century, there were certain mathematical calculations no one could perform because they involved series of infinite numbers. The problem with infinity, of course, is that you can't come up with a final answer when the numbers keep increasing forever. But a mathematician named Leonhard Euler found a way to treat infinity as if it were a finite number- and that allowed him to do things in mathematical analysis that had never been done before." Tom inclined his head toward the date stone. "My guess is whoever chiseled that symbol was a mathematician or scientist." "If it were my date stone," Cassandra said dryly, "I'd prefer the entwined hearts. At least I would understand what it means." "No, this is much better than hearts," Tom exclaimed, his expression more earnest than any she'd seen from him before. "Linking their names with Euler's infinity symbol means..." He paused, considering how best to explain it. "The two of them formed a complete unit... a togetherness... that contained infinity. Their marriage had a beginning and end, but every day of it was filled with forever. It's a beautiful concept." He paused before adding awkwardly, "Mathematically speaking.

Psychology’s service to U.S. national security has produced a variant of what the psychiatrist Robert Lifton has called, in his study of Nazi doctors, a “Faustian bargain.” In this case, the price paid has been the American Psychological Association’s collective silence, ethical “numbing,” and, over time, historical amnesia. 3 Indeed, Lifton emphasizes that “the Nazis were not the only ones to involve doctors in evil”; in defense of this argument, he cites the Cold War “role of …American physicians and psychologists employed by the Central Intelligence Agency…for unethical medical and psychological experiments involving drugs and mind manipulation.” 4

When we are thrust out into the world just as we are, we first have to identify with that particular throw of the dice, with that accident organized by the divine computer: to get over our surprise that precisely this (what we see facing us in the mirror) is our self. Without the faith that our face expresses our self, without that basic illusion, that arch-illusion, we can not live or at least we cannot take life seriously. And it isn‘t enough for us to identify with our selves, it is necessary to do so passionately, to the point of life and death. Because only in this way we can regard ourselves not merely as a variant of a human prototype but as a being with its own irreplaceable essence.

He wants to get back together," she finished. "And you said...?" he tried to keep his tone disinterested. "I haven't said anything," she said. "You interrupted me before I could answer him." He congratulated himself on his excellent timing.

Emotions form in the brain, just as crystal-clear, rational thoughts do. They are merely a different form of information processing – more primordial, but not necessarily an inferior variant. In fact, sometimes they provide the wiser counsel.

She's fine," said Declan, defensive. "You're fine, right?" She gave him a look. "Peachy." "See? Both Alex and her astounding wit have made it here intact. Her sense of humour seems to be M.I.A, but I'm pretty sure that was a pre-existing condition.

The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories.

You coming?" She hesitated, weighing her options. Risk running back down the flaming aisles to find another exit? Or trust the guy who'd been stalking her all afternoon? The fire spread to the nearby shelves. The heat was growing unbearable. "You cut me deep," he said. "You'd actually choose a fiery death over the prospect of my company. I have to admit, that stings a bit.

Declan, get your ass out of bed!" A light flicked on and Declan stumbled into view through the open window. He looked to be only half awake and was missing his shirt. Alex, on the other hand, was not missing that shirt in the slightest.

The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This

So far as we have any information about man, we know that he has always and everywhere been under the influence of dominating ideas. Any one who alleges that he is not can immediately be suspected of having exchanged a known form of belief for a variant which is less known both to himself and to others.

You can't tell me you're not cold in those shorts." "Freezing," she admitted, handing Alex her messenger bag as she got to her feet. "But dammit, I look cute and we both know that's what counts." "Naturally.

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.

In a healthy environment, increased threat sensitivity, poor emotion control and enhanced fear memory in MAOA-L [i.e., the “warrior” variant] men might only manifest as variation in temperament within a ‘normal’ or subclinical range. However, these same characteristics in an abusive childhood environment—one typified by persistent uncertainty, unpredictable threat, poor behavioral modeling and social referencing, and inconsistent reinforcement for prosocial decision making—might predispose toward frank aggression and impulsive violence in the adult.

You can't honestly be thinking about going back there," said Alex. "Apparently my brother isn't only lacking in people skills," said Kenzie. "He's also lacking in common sense. Stupidity, however, he appears to have in abundance.

She'd known the guy a grand total of five minutes and he'd already left her a sour first impression. The last thing she ought to be doing right now was ogling his six-pack.

I trust you not to kill, main, or drown me without just provocation.

There are many subtle variants of theistic evolution, but a typical version rests upon the following premises: The universe came into being out of nothingness, approximately 14 billion years ago. Despite massive improbabilities, the properties of the universe appear to have been precisely tuned for life. While the precise mechanism of the origin of life on earth remains unknown, once life arose, the process of evolution and natural selection permitted the development of biological diversity and complexity over very long periods of time. Once evolution got under way, no special supernatural intervention was required. Humans are part of this process, sharing a common ancestor with the great apes. But humans are also unique in ways that defy evolutionary explanation and point to our spiritual nature. This includes the existence of the Moral Law (the knowledge of right and wrong) and the search for God that characterizes all human cultures throughout history.

One stretch of the gene is repeated a variable number of times, and the version with seven repeats (the “7R” form) produces a receptor protein that is sparse in the cortex and relatively unresponsive to dopamine. This is the variant associated with a host of related traits—sensation and novelty seeking, extroversion, alcoholism, promiscuity, less sensitive parenting, financial risk taking, impulsivity, and, probably most consistently, ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder).

You'll want something mid-range. A 5.56 all right?" "I suppose." "AR-15?" "Ugh. AR-15? I'd rather not have my gun break down on me every second week." Besides, every wannabe and their dog had an M16 or M4 variant these days. "G7." "Not accurate enough." "FAL?" "A 7.62? Maybe," I said. "Though I hate the triggers." "As picky as a woman with her shoes," Abraham grumbled. "Hey," I said. "That's insulting." I knew plenty of women who were pickier with their guns than they were with their shoes.

What if you get stranded in the town where pears and winter are variants for one another? Can you eat winter? No. Can you live six months inside a frozen pear? No. But there is a place, I know the place, where you will stand and see pear and winter side by side as walls stand by in silence. Can you punctuate yourself as silence? You will see the edges cut away from you, back into a world, of another kind-- back into real emptiness, some would say. Well, we are objects in a wind that stopped, is my view.

We are entrusted, you must know, with the revision of the English Dictionary. On the evidence of the Liverpool find of Christmas cards, in which occurred such couplets as: Just to hope the day keeps fine For you and your this Christmas time, and: I hope this stocking's in your line When stars shine bright at Christmas-time I hold that "Christmas-time" was often pronounced "Christmas-tine", and that this is a dialect variant of the older "Christmas-tide". Quant denies this, with a warmth that is unusual in him.' 'Quant is right.

We’ve seen parents successfully use a variant of this approach when an infant cries to be fed. Instead of immediately feeding the crying child, the mother lets the child know that the signal has been received but then waits for her or him to quiet down before offering the breast or the bottle. Again, it’s hard to ignore the cries at first, and we realize that to some parents it sounds too cruel to even try. But

Cinderella, until lately, has never been a passive dreamer waiting for rescue. The forerunners of the Ash-girl have all been hardy, active heroines who take their lives into their own hands and work out their own salvations .... Cinderella speaks to all of us in whatever skin we inhabit: the child mistreated, a princess or highborn lady in disguise bearing her trials with patience, fortitude, and determination. Cinderella makes intelligent decisions, for she knows that wishing solves nothing without concomitant action. We have each been that child. (Even boys and men share thatdream, as evidenced by the many Ash-boy variants.) It is the longing of any youngster sent supperless to bed or given less than a full share at Christmas. And of course it is the adolescent dream. To make Cinderella less than she is, an ill-treated but passive princess awaiting her rescue, cheapens our most cherished dreams and makes a mockery of the magic inside us all—the ability to change our own lives, the ability to control our own destinies. [The Walt Disney film] set a new pattern for Cinderella: a helpless, hapless, pitiable, useless heroine who has to be saved time and time again by the talking mice and birds because she is “off in a world of dreams.” It is a Cinderella who is not recognized by her prince until she is magically back in her ball gown, beribboned and bejewelled. Poor Cinderella. Poor us.

Lots of work has examined the genes involved, most broadly showing that variants that produce lowered dopamine signaling (less dopamine in the synapse, fewer dopamine receptors, or lower responsiveness of these receptors) are associated with sensation seeking, risk taking, attentional problems, and extroversion. Such individuals have to seek experiences of greater intensity to compensate for the blunted dopamine signaling.

The association of the wild and the wood also run deep in etymology. The two words are thought to have grown out of the root word wald and the old Teutonic word walthus, meaning 'forest.' Walthus entered Old English in its variant forms of 'weald,' 'wald,' and 'wold,' which were used to designate both 'a wild place' and 'a wooded place,' in which wild creatures -- wolves, foxes, bears -- survived. The wild and wood also graft together in the Latin word silva, which means 'forest,' and from which emerged the idea of 'savage,' with its connotations of fertility....

If the history of the last century taught us the dangers of empowering governments to determine genetic “fitness” (i.e., which person fits within the triangle, and who lives outside it), then the question that confronts our current era is what happens when this power devolves to the individual. It is a question that requires us to balance the desires of the individual— to carve out a life of happiness and achievement, without undue suffering— with the desires of a society that, in the short term, may be interested only in driving down the burden of disease and the expense of disability. And operating silently in the background is a third set of actors: our genes themselves, which reproduce and create new variants oblivious of our desires and compulsions— but, either directly or indirectly, acutely or obliquely, influence our desires and compulsions. Speaking at the Sorbonne in 1975, the cultural historian Michel Foucault once proposed that “a technology of abnormal individuals appears precisely when a regular network of knowledge and power has been established.” Foucault was thinking about a “regular network” of humans. But it could just as easily be a network of genes.

An accurate view of evolution, in all its multifaceted and anarchic glory... We are all evolved creatures who share a common way or perceiving and responding to the world. And yet each of us is unique, the product on an irreproducible set of causal events. Given that we cannot judge people on the basis of their biology or their fitness with respect to some arbitrary criterion of optimality, we have to conclude that all human variants are equally valid. (This conclusion can be derived purely on ethical grounds as well.) None of us is advantaged because of evolution over any other, whether strong or weak, able-bodied or disabled, woman or man, black, white, or any other color. Simply existing as part of the human species, each person automatically has an inherent worth and dignity.

They sailed through the intersection...and only barely missed getting creamed by the cross-traffic. Nate was smiling. "Did you see that?" "Yes, Nathaniel." Kenzie had a white-knuckle grip on the door. "You have a bright future ahead of you as a wheelman for the mob. We're all so proud. Now focus on the road, please.

The most dangerous trap for feminists lies in thinking that our current political options are limited to two: on the one hand, a “progressive” variant of neoliberalism, which diffuses an elitist, corporate version of feminism to cast an emancipatory veneer over a predatory, oligarchic agenda; on the other, a reactionary variant of neoliberalism, which pursues a similar, plutocratic agenda by other means—deploying misogynist and racist tropes to burnish its “populist” credentials. Certainly, these two forces are not identical. But both are mortal enemies of a genuinely emancipatory and majoritarian feminism. Plus, they are mutually enabling: progressive neoliberalism created the conditions for the rise of reactionary populism and is now positioning itself as the go-to alternative to it.

Where are we?" She sat up. "My room at the cabin." "Your room?" He propped himself up on one elbow and shrugged his other shoulder. "Needed someplace soft to land. Besides...Now when you teleport without a destination you've got a fifty-fifty chance of either ending up in the lake, or in my bed. I have to say, I like those odds." "Ha-ha.

A syndrome is small, portable, not weighed down by theory, episodic. You can explain something with it and then discard it. A disposable instrument of cognition. Mine is called Recurrent Detoxification Syndrome. Without the bells and whistles, its description boils down to the insistence of one’s consciousness on returning to certain images, or even the compulsive search for them. It is a variant of the Mean World Syndrome, which has been described fairly exhaustively in neuropsychological studies as a particular type of infection caused by the media. It’s quite a bourgeois ailment, I suppose. Patients spend long hours in front of the TV, thumbing at their remote controls through all the channels till they find the ones with the most horrendous news: wars, epidemics, and disasters. Then, fascinated by what they’re seeing, they can’t tear themselves away. The symptoms themselves

It is a testament to the unsettling beauty of the genome that it can make the real world "stick". Our genes do not keep spitting out stereotypical responses to idiosyncratic environments: if they did, we too would devolve into windup automatons. Hindu philosophers have long described the experience of "being" as a web - jaal. Genes form the threads of the web; the detritus that sticks is what transforms every individual web into a being. There is an exquisite precision in that mad scheme. Genes must carry out programmed responses to environments - otherwise, there would be no conserved form. But they must also leave exactly enough room for the vagaries of chance to stick. We call this intersection "fate". We call our responses to it "choice". An upright organism with opposable thumbs is thus built from a script, but built to go off script. We call one such unique variant of one such organism a "self.

This person is (pick one): 1. on a perilous journey from which we can learn much when he or she returns; 2. possessed by (pick one) a) the gods, b) God (that is, a prophet), c) some bad spirits, demons, or devils, d) the Devil, 3. a witch 4. bewitched (variant of 2); 5. bad, and must be isolated and punished, 6. ill, and must be isolated and treated by (pick one): a) purging and leeches, b) removing the uterus if the person has one, c) electric shock to the brain, d) cold sheets wrapped tight around the body, e) Thorazine or Stelazine; 7. ill, and must spend the next seven years talking about it; 8. a victim of society's low tolerance of deviant behavior; 9. sane in an insane world; 10. on a perilous journey from which he or she may never return.

The letters between Pliny and Trajan amount to one of the most loquacious non-Christian discussions of the new religion to survive. The Christian texts of the third, fourth and fifth centuries CE are some of the most extreme examples ever of the rewriting of history to fit the agenda of the winners. They construct a triumphalist history of Christianity as victorious both against its pagan rivals, despite cruel persecution by the Roman state, and against all the internal variants (‘heresies’, as later Christians defined them), which challenged what came to be Christian orthodoxy.

DSM-5 is not 'the bible of psychiatry' but a practical manual for everyday work. Psychiatric diagnosis is primarily a way of communicating. That function is essential but pragmatic—categories of illness can be useful without necessarily being 'true.' The DSM system is a rough-and-ready classification that brings some degree of order to chaos. It describes categories of disorder that are poorly understood and that will be replaced with time. Moreover, current diagnoses are syndromes that mask the presence of true diseases. They are symptomatic variants of broader processes or arbitrary cut-off points on a continuum.

1. a.Never throw shit at an armed man. b.Never stand next to someone who is throwing shit at an armed man. 2.Never fire a laser at a mirror. 3.Mother Nature doesn't care if you're having fun. 4.F × S = k. The product of Freedom and Security is a constant. To gain more freedom of thought and/or action, you must give up some security, and vice versa. 5.Psi and/or magical powers, if real, are nearly useless. 6.It is easier to destroy than create. 7.Any damn fool can predict the past. 8.History never repeats itself. 9.Ethics change with technology. 10.There Ain't No Justice. (often abbreviated to TANJ) 11.Anarchy is the least stable of social structures. It falls apart at a touch. 12.There is a time and place for tact. And there are times when tact is entirely misplaced. 13.The ways of being human are bounded but infinite. 14.The world's dullest subjects, in order: a.Somebody else's diet. b.How to make money for a worthy cause. c.The Kardashians. 15.The only universal message in science fiction: There exist minds that think as well as you do, but differently. Niven's corollary: The gene-tampered turkey you're talking to isn't necessarily one of them. 16.Fuzzy Pink Niven's Law: Never waste calories. 17.There is no cause so right that one cannot find a fool following it. in variant form in Fallen Angels as "Niven's Law: No cause is so noble that it won't attract fuggheads." 18.No technique works if it isn't used. 19.Not responsible for advice not taken. 20.Old age is not for sissies.

To most people today, the name Snow White evokes visions of dwarfs whistling as they work, and a wide–eyed, fluttery princess singing, "Some day my prince will come." (A friend of mine claims this song is responsible for the problems of a whole generation of American women.) Yet the Snow White theme is one of the darkest and strangest to be found in the fairy tale canon — a chilling tale of murderous rivalry, adolescent sexual ripening, poisoned gifts, blood on snow, witchcraft, and ritual cannibalism. . .in short, not a tale originally intended for children's tender ears. Disney's well–known film version of the story, released in 1937, was ostensibly based on the German tale popularized by the Brothers Grimm. Originally titled "Snow–drop" and published in Kinder–und Hausmarchen in 1812, the Grimms' "Snow White" is a darker, chillier story than the musical Disney cartoon, yet it too had been cleaned up for publication, edited to emphasize the good Protestant values held by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. (...) Variants of Snow White were popular around the world long before the Grimms claimed it for Germany, but their version of the story (along with Walt Disney's) is the one that most people know today. Elements from the story can be traced back to the oldest oral tales of antiquity, but the earliest known written version was published in Italy in 1634.

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE: Ailith: A-lith ("noble war"; "ascending, rising") Andriana: An-dree-ana, or Dree, for "Dri" ("warrior") Asher: Ash-er ("happy one") Azarel: Ah-zah-rell ("helper") Bellona: Bell-oh-na ("warlike") Chaza'el: Chazah-ell ("one who sees") Kapriel: Kah-pree-ell (variant of "warrior") Keallach: Key-lock ("battle") Killian: Kill-ee-un ("little warrior"--though he's not so little in my novel!) Raniero: Rah-near-oh ("wise warrior") Ronan: Row-nun ("little seal"; I know. Not as cool, right? But he was named Duncan at first draft and I had to change it due to publisher request, and "Ronan" sounded like a medieval, cool warrior name to me. I overlooked the real translation in favor of the man he became in my story. And that guy, to my mind, is more like a warrior, with the spray of the sea upon his face as he takes on the storm--which is like a seal!) Tressa: Tre-sah ("late summer") Vidar: Vee-dar ("forest warrior")

McKusick's belief in this paradigm-the focus on disability rather than abnormalcy-was actualized in the treatment of patients in his clinic. Patients with dwarfism, for instance, were treated by an interdisciplinary team of genetic counselors, neurologists, orthopedic surgeons, nurses, and psychiatrists trained to focus on specific disabilities of persons with short stature. Surgical interventions were reserved to correct specific deformities as they arose. The goal was not to restore "normalcy"-but vitality, joy, and function. McKusic had rediscovered the founding principles of modern genetics in the realm of human pathology. In humans as in wild flies, genetic variations abounded. Here too genetic variants, environments, and gene-environment interactions ultimately collaborated to cause phenotypes-except in this case, the "phenotype" in question was disease. Here too some genes had partial penetrance and widely variable expressivity. One gene could cause many diseases, and one disease could be caused by many genes. And here too "fitness" could not be judged in absolutes. Rather the lack of fitness-illness [italicized, sic] in colloquial terms- was defined by the relative mismatch between an organism and environment.

Verbal virtuosities or the gratuitous expense of time or money that is presupposed by material or symbolic appropriation of works of art, or even, at the second power, the self-imposed constraints and restrictions which make up the "asceticism of the privileged" (as Marx said of Seneca) and the refusal of the facile which is the basis of all "pure" aesthetics, are so many repetition of that variant of the master-slave dialectic through which the possessors affirm their possession of their possessions. In so doing, they distance themselves still further from the dispossessed, who, not content with being slaves to necessity in all its forms, are suspected of being possessed by the desire for possession, and so potentially possessed by the possessions they do not, or do not yet, possess.

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.

In the intricate and mutable space-time geometry at the black hole, in-falling matter and energy interacted with the virtualities of the vacuum in ways unknown to the flatter cosmos beyond it. Quasi-stable quantum states appeared, linked according to Schrodinger's wave functions and their own entanglement, more and more of them, intricacy compounding until it amounted to a set of codes. The uncertainty principle wrought mutations; variants perished or flourished; forms competed, cooperated, merged, divided, interacted; the patterns multiplied and diversified; at last, along one fork on a branch of the life tree, thought budded. That life was not organic, animal and vegetable and lesser kingdoms, growing, breathing, drinking, eating, breeding, hunting, hiding; it kindled no fires and wielded no tools; from the beginning, it was a kind of oneness. An original unity differentiated itself into countless avatars, like waves on a sea. They arose and lived individually, coalesced when they chose by twos or threes or multitudes, reemerged as other than they had been, gave themselves and their experiences back to the underlying whole. Evolution, history, lives eerily resembled memes in organic minds. Yet quantum life was not a series of shifting abstractions. Like the organic, it was in and of its environment. It acted to alter its quantum states and those around it: action that manifested itself as electronic, photonic, and nuclear events. Its domain was no more shadowy to it than ours is to us. It strove, it failed, it achieved. They were never sure aboardEnvoy whether they could suppose it loved, hated, yearned, mourned, rejoiced. The gap between was too wide for any language to bridge. Nevertheless they were convinced that it knew something they might as well call emotion, and that that included wondering.

«La imagen de un hombre haciéndose pajas había sido una de sus principales maneras de excitarse. ¿Por qué? Si sus propias sensaciones podían servirle de guía, follar con otra persona nunca salía del todo bien, nunca exactamente como debía. Le había encantado la idea de que fuera así, un hombre ciego con su propio placer. »Y el autoerotismo era el sanctasanctórum, la auténtica definición de lo privado. Un número indeterminado de amantes de tiempos pasados se habían mostrado muy dispuestos a probar todas las variantes típicas y unas cuantas más, pero lo único que esos hombres nunca estaban dispuestos a hacer por voluntad propia —con una memorable excepción— era masturbarse delante de ella. Sin embargo, ése era el descubrimiento inicial del que manaba todo el sexo; era la fuente. »La mayoría de los chicos se habrían masturbado cientos de veces antes de conocer carnalmente a una chica, y es famoso el poder alucinógeno de las pajas de la adolescencia. La torpeza y los titubeos característicos de tantos episodios en que las mujeres pierden la flor deben de ser, en comparación, una decepción a escala mundial. »Incluso en la vida adulta, es casi seguro que muchos hombres siguen experimentando un éxtasis muy superior meneándosela encima del inodoro mientras piensan en una pareja imaginaria, que llevándose a la cama a mujeres de carne y hueso con celulitis y una irritante compulsión a decir “en realidad...” al comienzo de cada frase. Curioso, ¿no? Puesto que lo mismo podía decirse de las mujeres, lo verdaderamente curioso era por qué alguien se tomaba la molestia de follar».

¿SABES QUÉ ES UN "HOT BUTTON"? TEN CUIDADO QUE SABER UTILIZARLOS PUEDE DARTE UN PODER PELIGROSAMENTE PODEROSO... ESTO NO ES FICCIÓN... son generalmente palabras, pero pueden ser también imágenes e incluso aromas o situaciones, que se encuentran asociados con sentimientos y recuerdos muy profundos y fuertes, ya sean buenos o malos. Al activarse el Hot Button, la persona evoca casi involuntariamente estos sentimientos, provocando muchas veces una desestabilización emocional o cambios abruptos de actitud –explicó Augustus mientras Nicolás lo escuchaba atentamente. Todos tenemos en nuestro interior Hot Buttons, algunos evidentes, otros, ocultos en la profundidad de nuestro inconsciente. Al ser “presionados”, disparan automáticamente fuertes emociones. Como dije anteriormente, los Hot Buttons pueden ser a veces positivos y en otras, negativos. Por ejemplo, en el amor solemos encontrar abundantemente de los dos tipos. Un lugar, una foto, un perfume, una canción, una persona, una palabra, un texto, hasta cosas aparentemente insignificantes, a veces te hacen transportar casi inevitablemente a fuertes recuerdos y sensaciones. Uno va caminando por la calle, concentrado en temas laborales y justo escucha sin querer “aquella” canción del primer beso de un GRAN AMOR. Si esta canción te hace acordar a un amor frustrado, posiblemente estemos hablando de un Hot Button negativo; si -en cambio- te recuerda al actual amor, probablemente sea positivo. En ambos casos, es muy probable que a causa del mismo nos cambie el humor del momento, la concentración y hasta incluso actuemos diferente respecto a si no hubiésemos escuchado “esa” canción. Más de uno en estos casos, habrá llegado casi desesperado a su trabajo, y rastreado ese viejo número telefónico que estaba guardado en algún lugar recóndito… Negativos, hay miles también. Muchos se relacionan con complejos y malas experiencias sufridas. El que se quema con leche, ve una vaca y llora, dicen con sabiduría. Los complejos de inferioridad, en todas sus variantes, contienen muchísimos Hot Buttons. Ni que hablar de aquellas personas que tienen problemas con su ego y autoestima. ¡Qué tema el EGO!… Muchas veces, en peleas entre personas cercanas, se suelen decir “verdades” espantosas y crueles, ya que embargadas por su ira, no se contienen, no filtran y no miden entonces sus palabras, ni sus consecuencias. En estas ocasiones, se suele meter el dedo en la llaga y esto suele provocar un aumento estrepitoso de la riña, que muchas veces incluso deriva en secuelas no deseadas… Meter el dedo en la llaga, es sin duda haber apretado un Hot Buttons muy concreto... La cuestión es que si alguien logra identificar tus Hot Buttons, se imaginan lo que pueden provocar en vos si sabe utilizarlos… qué miedo… ¿no?... ¿Vos tenes identificados cuáles son tus Hot Buttons? Contanos… Gonzalo GUMA

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and from, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for...so far as one could judge the people were contented and hopeful. There was no unemployment, and the price of living was still extremely low; you saw very few conspicuously destitute people, and no beggars except the gypsies. Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom. Human beings were trying to behave as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workman. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Sen~or' or 'Don' ort even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos dias'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for. Also, I believed that things were as they appeared, that this was really a workers' State and that the entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed or voluntarily come over to the workers' side; I did not realise that great numbers of well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising themselves as proletarians for the time being.