“
River Song: Use the stabilisers!
The Doctor: It doesn't have stabilisers!
River Song: The blue switches!
The Doctor: The blue ones don't do anything, they're just... blue!
River Song: Yes they're blue: they're the blue stabilisers! [presses the button and the TARDIS indeed stabilises] See?
The Doctor: Yeah? Well, it's boring now, isn't it? They're boring-ers! They're blue... boring-ers!
Amy: Doctor, how come she can fly the TARDIS?
The Doctor: You call that flying the TARDIS? [scoffs] Ha!
River Song: Okay, I've mapped the probability vectors, done a foldback on the temporal isometry, charted the ship to its destination and... [presses a button, the cloister bell clangs] parked us right alongside.
The Doctor: Parked us? But we haven't landed!
River Song: Of course we've landed; I just landed her.
The Doctor: But it didn't make the noise.
River Song: What noise?
The Doctor: You know, the... [does an impression of the TARDIS materialisation sound]
River Song: It's not supposed to make that noise. You leave the brakes on.
The Doctor: Yes, well, it's a brilliant noise. I love that noise.
”
”
Steven Moffat
“
Happiness is not a state of being. Happiness is a vector, it is movement.
”
”
Neal Shusterman (Bruiser)
“
I need a dual-vector foil for cleansing.
”
”
Liu Cixin (Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3))
“
Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours
grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves
from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived:
the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string
to be more than itself. For abiding is nowhere.
”
”
Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)
“
Stars were falling across the sky myriad and random, speeding along brief vectors from their origins in night to their destinies in dust and nothingness.
”
”
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
“
Of course, I couldn’t explain this vector calculus concept and so, slightly embarrassed in front of Rahul and the other Bengali students, I told Sanjit just that; he had cornered me, and honesty emerged as my only option. Simultaneous to my humiliating disclosure of the truth, Sanjit gradually inched toward where I was sitting. After hearing my reply, he slowly returned to his teacher stool and whiteboard, his back turned away from the class, the suspense building and his words impending, before turning around and breaking into speech, “Don’t trust your interior monologue. If you are asked something and you know it, then express or demonstrate it. Don’t just nod or say yes because then you are lying to yourself. Any ass can say yes, but not all asses can express it.” I modified my first impression: Sanjit was full of explicit aphorisms. Humbled, those words encouragingly rang between my ears for quite some time.
”
”
Colin Phelan (The Local School)
“
Every person in your company is a vector. Your progress is determined by the sum of all vectors.
”
”
Elon Musk
“
There is a difference between finding trouble in your path and going out of your way searching for it.”
-Jacen Solo
”
”
R.A. Salvatore (Vector Prime (Star Wars: The New Jedi Order, #1))
“
Hey,” Watney said over the radio, “I've got an idea.”
“Of course you do,” Lewis said. “What do you got?”
“I could find something sharp in here and poke a hole in the glove of my EVA suit. I could use the escaping air as a thruster and fly my way to you. The source of thrust would be on my arm, so I'd be able to direct it pretty easily.”
“How does he come up with this shit?” Martinez interjected.
“Hmm,” Lewis said. “Could you get 42 meters per second that way?”
“No idea,” Watney said.
“I can't see you having any control if you did that,” Lewis said. “You'd be eyeballing the intercept and using a thrust vector you can barely control.”
“I admit it's fatally dangerous,” Watney said. “But consider this: I'd get to fly around like Iron Man.”
“We'll keep working on ideas,” Lewis said.
“Iron Man, Commander. Iron Man.
”
”
Andy Weir (The Martian)
“
Start at the beginning,” he said. “Move one step in the direction of your goal. Remember that you can change direction to maneuver around obstacles. You don’t need a plan, you need a vector.
”
”
Cory Doctorow (Homeland (Little Brother, #2))
“
A five-week sand blizzard?" said Deep Thought haughtily. "You ask this of me who have contemplated the very vectors of the atoms in the Big Bang itself? Molest me not with this pocket calculator stuff.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #1))
“
Never seem to have a Death Star lying around when you need one.”
-Han Solo
”
”
R.A. Salvatore (Vector Prime (Star Wars: The New Jedi Order, #1))
“
Happiness is a vector. It can only be defined by the speed at which you're moving away from pain.
”
”
Neal Shusterman
“
The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives' ends.
”
”
Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
“
Vectors never make the same mistake twice,That is why the warrior only risks his heart for something worthwhile.
”
”
Paulo Coelho (Warrior of the Light)
“
Space is never empty. Emotions have vectors and velocity. You can crush a person from a distance. Sometimes the first weapon is the act or art of pulling away.
”
”
Monica Drake (The Folly of Loving Life)
“
Logic and morality made it impossible to accept an illogical and immoral reality; they engendered a rejection of reality which as a rule led the cultivated man rapidly to despair. But the varieties of the man-animal are innumerable, and I saw and have described men of refined culture, especially if young, throw all this overboard, simplify and barbarize themselves, and survive. A simple man, accustomed not to ask questions of himself, was beyond the reach of the useless torment of asking himself why.
The harsher the oppression, the more widespread among the oppressed is the willingness, with all its infinite nuances and motivations, to collaborate: terror, ideological seduction, servile imitation of the victor, myopic desire for any power whatsoever… Certainly, the greatest responsibility lies with the system, the very structure of the totalitarian state; the concurrent guilt on the part of individual big and small collaborators is always difficult to evaluate… they are the vectors and instruments of the system’s guilt… the room for choices (especially moral choices) was reduced to zero
”
”
Primo Levi (The Drowned and the Saved)
“
The Carls were the perfect vector for disagreement because, through all of this, we still knew practically nothing about them. Governments were accused of hiding things because people just couldn’t accept that those in power were exactly as lost as the rest of us. Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance—at worst, an attack.
”
”
Hank Green (An Absolutely Remarkable Thing (The Carls, #1))
“
All work is the avoidance of harder work.
”
”
James Richardson (Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays)
“
Your loyalties are indecisive at best. You know what that makes you, big boy?’
‘Definitely a Gemini.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
Creation takes place in bottlenecks . . . A creator who isn’t grabbed around the throat by a set of impossibilities is no creator. A creator’s someone who creates their own impossibilities, and thereby creates possibilities . . . it’s by banging your head on the wall that you find a way through. You have to work on the wall, because without a set of impossibilities, you won’t have the line of flight, the exit that is creation, the power of falsity that is truth. Your writing has to be liquid or gaseous simply because normal perception and opinion are solid, geometric … You have to open up words, break things open, to free earth’s vectors.
”
”
Gilles Deleuze
“
How much did you read?’ Sophia said.
‘Not much. I found your characters a bit two-dimensional.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
To Han Solo, the galaxy seemed a more dangerous place by far.
”
”
R.A. Salvatore (Vector Prime (Star Wars: The New Jedi Order, #1))
“
My impulse, over the past few years, had been to remove myself from my own life, to watch from the periphery and try to see the vectors, the scaffolding, the systems at play. Psychologists might refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological approach. It was, for me, a way out of unhappiness.
”
”
Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley)
“
...ideas are definitely unstable, they not only CAN be misused, they invite misuse--and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That's because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless.
The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.
There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.
That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister cliches of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to "protect the revolution." That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).
”
”
Tom Robbins (Still Life with Woodpecker)
“
Identity is theft, don’t trust anyone whose state vector hasn’t forked for more than a gigasecond, change is the only constant, et bloody cetera.
”
”
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
“
I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink, wingless flight, dark boat in the dark night, shine without light, pure velocity, as the hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail and the nail is a nail when it meets the wood and the invisible table begins to appear out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking, hand of the mind, hand of the emperor, arm of the empire, void and vessel, sheath and shear, and wider, and deeper, more vast, more sure, through silence, through darkness, a vector, a violence, and even farther, and even worse, between, before, behind, and under, and even stronger, and even further, beyond form, beyond number, I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as winter, as water, a shift in the river, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to the task, a fountain of gravity, space curves around me, I thirst, I hunger, I spark, I burn, force and field, force and counterforce, agent and agency, push to your pull, parabola of will, massless mass and formless form, dreamless dream and nameless name, intent and rapturous, rare and inevitable, I am the thing that is hurtling towards you…
”
”
Richard Siken
“
Auxochrome — Chromophore. Diego. She who wears the color. He who sees the color. Since the year 1922. Until always and forever. Now in 1944. After all the hours lived through. The vectors continue in their original direction. Nothing stops them. With no more knowledge than live emotion. With no other wish than to go on until they meet. Slowly. With great unease, but with the certainty that all is guided by the “golden section.” There is cellular arrangement. There is movement. There is light. All centers are the same. Folly doesn’t exist. We are the same as we were and as we will be. Not counting on idiotic destiny.
”
”
Frida Kahlo
“
In the end, blame didn't shine on an individual. It was a floodlight cast on all of us. And all because we longed for healing and happiness- as if happiness is a state of being. But it's not. Happiness is a vector. It's movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you're moving away from pain.
”
”
Neal Shusterman (Bruiser)
“
The association of multiplication with vector rotation was one of the geometric interpretation's most important elements because it decisively connected the imaginaries with rotary motion. As we'll see, that was a big deal.
”
”
David Stipp (A Most Elegant Equation: Euler's Formula and the Beauty of Mathematics)
“
Nothing like a cheap shot, right?’ He snorted blood from his nose. ‘I’m disappointed. I thought even terrorists had principles.’
‘Can it,’ Nasira said, towering over him with her P90 leveled at his head. ‘If we need patriotic paramoralisms, we’ll give Jack Bauer a call.’
Denton grimaced, pulled himself upright. ‘And if I need overblown alliteration, I’ll give you a call.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
Oh, that turned out nicely,” Lindsey said, hands on her hips as she surveyed it, then smiled at Mallory. “Is your house just covered in glitter now?”
Mallory stepped back, adjusted my sash carefully. “It’s every-freaking-where. It’s probably the perfect vector for worldwide contagion, should any bad guys figure that out.
”
”
Chloe Neill (Blade Bound (Chicagoland Vampires, #13))
“
Truly, more than removing the partition between vectors and values, we would have needed to talk about strengthening crisscrossed lacings: an intertwined kind of understanding that would de-ideologize 'ideologies,' desanctify sanctities, but also mentalize the material bases of systems of inscription, and psychoanalyze not souls but tools. That is, in one and the same gesture, make our mnemo-technic equipment intelligible as mentality and our mental equipment intelligible as technology.
”
”
Régis Debray (Media Manifestos: On the Technological Transmission of Cultural Forms)
“
I can’t see you having any control if you did that,” Lewis said. “You’d be eyeballing the intercept and using a thrust vector you can barely control.” “I admit it’s fatally dangerous,” Watney said. “But consider this: I’d get to fly around like Iron Man.
”
”
Andy Weir (The Martian)
“
...people outdoors here just scuttle in vectors from air conditioning to air conditioning. The sun is a hammer. I can feel one side of my face start to cook. The blue sky is glossy and fat with heat, a few thin cirri sheared to blown strands like hair at the rims.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
Music is the highest art, no question. But literature is a friendlier one. It depends on us more, bores us more quickly, can't go on if we don't, can't stop saying what it means, can't stop giving us something to forgive.
”
”
James Richardson (Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays)
“
It's your life, not your death, that defines you.
”
”
J.J. Brown (Vector a Modern Love Story)
“
How to spell Aedes aegypti,the world's one-stop, viral-disease-transmitting mosquito: T-R-O-U-B-L-E.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
Did the mind break down or did it simply correct? Vectoring away from pain?
”
”
Tim Johnston (Descent)
“
narratives are major vectors of rapid change in culture, in zeitgeist, and in economic behavior.
”
”
Robert J. Shiller (Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events)
“
Musk has talked about having more kids, and it’s on this subject that he delivers some controversial philosophizing vis-à-vis the creator of Beavis and Butt-head. “There’s this point that Mike Judge makes in Idiocracy, which is like smart people, you know, should at least sustain their numbers,” Musk said. “Like, if it’s a negative Darwinian vector, then obviously that’s not a good thing. It should be at least neutral. But if each successive generation of smart people has fewer kids, that’s probably bad, too. I mean, Europe, Japan, Russia, China are all headed for demographic implosion. And the fact of the matter is that basically the wealthier—basically wealth, education, and being secular are all indicative of low birth rate. They all correlate with low birth rate. I’m not saying like only smart people should have kids. I’m just saying that smart people should have kids as well. They should at least maintain—at least be a replacement rate. And the fact of the matter is that I notice that a lot of really smart women have zero or one kid. You’re like, ‘Wow, that’s probably not good.
”
”
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
“
The Ancestors were from Africa and entered into Australia 50,000 years ago. They would have eaten food from indigenous life from their area almost immediately. They harvest most of the day, and eat this food. The AM looks like a food source they already eat in Africa. It is highly likely they did eat it. This is still not enough to say it had connection to religion, but it is enough to say they ate it, in all probability. Forensic DNA shows again that they did eat it, as the retrovirus that was on Amanita Muscaria can only be transferred via consumption by humans and it is known that AM is a vector for this virus. Since they forage daily and consume what they forage it puts the consumption just around the time of 50,000 years ago.
”
”
Leviak B. Kelly (Religion: The Ultimate STD: Living a Spiritual Life without Dogmatics or Cultural Destruction)
“
Now, it’s undeniably true that male writers (including yours truly) are generally and commercially allowed to write about “girl stuff” without being penalized for doing so. In part this is the same old shit it’s always been ... I’ve said before that men who write mostly about men win prizes for revealing the human condition, while women who write about both men and women are filed away as writing “womens’ issues.” Likewise, in fantasy, the imprimatur of a dude somehow makes stuff like romance, relationship drama, introspection, and adorable animal companions magically not girly after all.
In a sense, we male fantasists are allowed to be like money launderers for girl cooties."
[Game of Thrones and Invisible Cootie Vectors (blog post, March 30, 2014)]
”
”
Scott Lynch
“
let’s begin with the word “vector.” It comes from the Latin root vehere, “to carry,” which also gives us words like “vehicle” and “conveyor belt.” To an epidemiologist, a vector is the carrier of a pathogen, like the mosquito that conveys malaria to your bloodstream. To a mathematician, a vector (at least in its simplest form) is a step that carries you from one place to another.
”
”
Steven H. Strogatz (The Joy Of X: A Guided Tour of Math, from One to Infinity)
“
The idea of whole brain emulation - which was, in effect, the liberation from matter, from the physical world - seemed to me an extreme example of the way in which science, or the belief in scientific progress, was replacing religion as the vector of deep cultural desires and delusions.
”
”
Mark O'Connell (To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death)
“
Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..."
Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said:
"Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit."
"Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming:
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to n,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze:
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space
Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways.
Our asymptotes no longer out of phase,
We shall encounter, counting, face to face.
I'll grant thee random access to my heart,
Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love;
And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove,
And in bound partition never part.
For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel,
Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler,
Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers,
Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell?
Cancel me not--for what then shall remain?
Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes,
A root or two, a torus and a node:
The inverse of my verse, a null domain.
Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine!
The product of our scalars is defined!
Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind
Cuts capers like a happy haversine.
I see the eigenvalue in thine eye,
I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh.
Bernoulli would have been content to die,
Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
“
To me the great divide is between the talkative and the quiet. Do they just say everything that's on their minds, even before it's on their minds? Sometimes I think I could just turn up my head like a Walkman so what's going on there could be heard by others. But there would still be a difference. For inside the head they are talking to people like them, and I am talking to someone like me: he is quiet and doesn't much like being talked at; he can't conceal how easily he gets bored.
”
”
James Richardson (Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays)
“
I had built this bubble around us. Around all of us-you, me, Chewie, the kids, Luke, Mara, even Lando. Heck, even the stupid droids. We were all in it, you know. In it and safe, a cozy family. Nothing could hurt us—could really hurt us.”
-Han Solo
”
”
R.A. Salvatore (Vector Prime (Star Wars: The New Jedi Order, #1))
“
The problem with setting out to change the world was that you were never the only one. It was an endless tug-of-war with powerful players pulling—not just against you, but in every direction—so that whatever you did, even if you made progress against all those vectors, at some point you were bound to go sideways.
”
”
Neal Shusterman (The Toll (Arc of a Scythe, #3))
“
Because the thing about viruses is that they're easily manipulated. The DNA they inject doesn't have to be destructive. It can be replaced with almost any kind of DNA you want, and it can be programmed to only replace certain parts of the host's genetic code. In other words, viruses are perfect vectors for genetic engineering.
”
”
Christian Cantrell
“
And better still, reference librarians served well in the role that the internet never did: They were the perfect bouncers at the door of bad information. Or, put differently, they were the best vectors to transmit truth.
”
”
Chuck Wendig (Wanderers (Wanderers, #1))
“
Incredibly, just one mosquito species, Aedes aegypti is responsible for the spread of four known different deadly viral diseases to human beings, yet this mosquito has been allowed to infest densely-populated urban centers.
”
”
T.K. Naliaka
“
This all seemed quaint and amusing, but as the book moved through to the modern day, nothing changed. People still fell to the influence of persuasion techniques, especially when they broadcast information about themselves that allowed identification of their personality type--their true name, basically--and the attack vectors for these techniques were primarily aural and visual. But no one thought of this as magic. It was just falling for a good line or being distracted or clever marketing. Even the words were the same. People still got fascinated and charmed, spellbound and amazed, they forgot themselves, and were carried away. They just didn't think there was anything magical about that anymore.
”
”
Max Barry (Lexicon)
“
...occasionally I like carrying raw steel to remind myself of an important lesson.
The blade's an extension of the hand, the agent--no pun intended--of my will. Most people understand this immediately of edged weapons...
The trick--and few are subtle or sophisticated enough to master it--is to see that this is equally true... by implication, of all machines.
”
”
L. Neil Smith (The Nagasaki Vector (North American Confederacy #4))
“
If it can be used again, it is not wisdom but theory.
”
”
James Richardson (Vectors: Aphorisms & Ten-Second Essays)
“
The pinnacle of power in China is the nine-member Politburo Standing Committee, the tiny body that sets policy for the nation’s 1.4 billion citizens.
”
”
Tom Clancy (Threat Vector (Jack Ryan Jr., #4))
“
A laboring woman, though, while she endured her labor, lay at the center of something truly radiant in four dimensions; every birth everywhere, all the vectors of human evolution and migration originating and terminating at the parting of her legs.
”
”
Michael Chabon (Telegraph Avenue)
“
He found himself thinking of water, how it is never still, how even in our bodies water never relents: ceaselessly vibrating, each electron in each molecule in each cell orbiting, spinning, nine independent vectors of position and force, a rapture of movement.
”
”
Anthony Doerr (About Grace)
“
Speech baffled my machine. Helen made all well-formed sentences. But they were hollow and stuffed--linguistic training bras. She sorted nouns from verbs, but, disembodied, she did not know the difference between thing and process, except as they functioned in clauses. Her predications were all shotgun weddings. Her ideas were as decorative as half-timber beams that bore no building load.
She balked at metaphor. I felt the annoyance of her weighted vectors as they readjusted themselves, trying to accommodate my latest caprice. You're hungry enough to eat a horse. A word from a friend ties your stomach in knots. Embarrassment shrinks you, amazement strikes you dead. Wasn't the miracle enough? Why do humans need to say everything in speech's stockhouse except what they mean?
”
”
Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2)
“
Really", Ruthven had said when the question of his nature had first (awkwardly) arisen, early in their acquaintance, "the easiest thing is to think of me as a large well-dressed mosquito, only with more developed social graces and without the disease-vector aspect.
”
”
Vivian Shaw (Strange Practice (Dr. Greta Helsing, #1))
“
It is believed by many that the military life is one of adventure and excitement. In truth, that life more often consists of long periods of routine, even boredom, with only brief intervals of challenge and danger.
Enemies seldom seek out their opponents. The warrior must become a hunter, searching and stalking with craft and patience. Successes are often achieved by a confluence of small things: stray facts, unwary or overheard conversations, logistical vectors. If the hunter is persistent, the pattern will become visible, and the enemy will be found. Only then will the routine be broken by combat.
It's not supervising, therefore, that those seeking sometimes weary of long and arduous pursuits. They are relieved when the enemy appears of his own accord, standing firm and issuing a challenge.
”
”
Timothy Zahn
“
Each of the five tribes of machine learning has its own master algorithm, a general-purpose learner that you can in principle use to discover knowledge from data in any domain. The symbolists’ master algorithm is inverse deduction, the connectionists’ is backpropagation, the evolutionaries’ is genetic programming, the Bayesians’ is Bayesian inference, and the analogizers’ is the support vector machine.
”
”
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
“
Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings. The trail of the argonauts terminated in ashes as told and in the covergence of such vectors in such a waste wherein the hearts and enterprise of one small nation have been swallowed up and carried off by another the expriest asked if some might not see the hand of a cynical god conducting with what austerity and what mock surprise so lethal a congruence. The posting of witnesses by a third and other path altogether might also be called in evidence as appearing to beggar chance, yet the judge, who had put his horse forward until he was abreast of the speculants, said that in this was expressed the very nature of the witness and that his proximity was no third thing but rather the prime, for what could be said to occur unobserved?
”
”
Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West)
“
Havana, Cuba, in which city yellow fever had not failed to make its yearly appearance during the past one hundred and forty years... Havana was freed from yellow fever within ninety days. Dr. Walter Reed, 1902
”
”
Walter Reed
“
All right,” he said. “Since you asked, Webmind is an emergent quantum-computational system based on a stable null-sigma condensate that resists decoherence thanks to constructive feedback loops.” He turned to the blackboard, scooped up a piece of chalk, and began writing rapidly. “See,” he said, “using Dirac notation, if we let Webmind’s default conscious state be represented by a bra of phi and a ket of psi, then this would be the einselected basis.” His chalk flew across the board again. “Now, we can get the vector basis of the total combined Webmind alpha-state consciousness...
”
”
Robert J. Sawyer (WWW: Watch (WWW, #2))
“
As to the need of improvement there can be no question whilst the reign of Euclid continues. My own idea of a useful course is to begin with arithmetic, and then not Euclid but algebra. Next, not Euclid, but practical geometry, solid as well as plane; not demonstration, but to make acquaintance. Then not Euclid, but elementary vectors, conjoined with algebra, and applied to geometry. Addition first; then the scalar product. Elementary calculus should go on simultaneously, and come into vector algebraic geometry after a bit. Euclid might be an extra course for learned men, like Homer...
”
”
Oliver Heaviside (Electromagnetic Theory (Volume 1))
“
I spent a few more minutes puzzling over the timeline before turning my attention to the notebook’s first page, which contained a pencil drawing of an old-school coin-operated arcade game—one I didn’t recognize. Its control panel featured a single joystick and one unlabeled white button, and its cabinet was entirely black, with no side art or other markings anywhere on it, save for the game’s strange title, which was printed in all capital green letters across its jet black marquee: POLYBIUS. Below his drawing of the game, my father had made the following notations: No copyright or manufacturer info anywhere on game cabinet. Reportedly only seen for 1–2 weeks in July 1981 at MGP. Gameplay was similar to Tempest. Vector graphics. Ten levels? Higher levels caused players to have seizures, hallucinations, and nightmares. In some cases, subject committed murder and/or suicide. “Men in Black” would download scores from the game each night. Possible early military prototype created to train gamers for war? Created by same covert op behind Bradley Trainer?
”
”
Ernest Cline (Armada)
“
Later Michel went up to the priest as he was packing away the tools of the trade. “I was very interested in what you were saying earlier…” The man of God smiled urbanely, then Michel began to talk about the Aspect experiments and the EPR paradox: how two particle, once united, are forever and inseparable whole, “which seems pretty much in keeping with what you were saying about one flesh.” The priest’s smile froze slightly. “What I’m trying to say, “Michel went on enthusiastically, “is that from an ontological point of view, the pair can be assigned a single vector in Hilbert space. Do you see what I mean?
”
”
Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles)
“
We think of agents, traffickers and facilitators as the worst abusers of refugees, but when they set out to extort from their clients, when they cheat them or dispatch them to their deaths, they are only enacting an entrepreneurial version of the disdain which refugees suffer at the hands of far more powerful enemies – those who terrorise them and those who are determined to keep them at arm’s length. Human traffickers are simply vectors of the contempt which exists at the two poles of the asylum seeker’s journey; they take their cue from the attitudes of warlords and dictators, on the one hand, and, on the other, of wealthy states whose citizens have learned to think of generosity as a vice.
[from the London Review of Books Vol. 22 No. 3 · 3 February 2000]
”
”
Jeremy Harding
“
Lack of awareness and precision about consent, obfuscation of vectors of privilege and oppression, and a dearth of embodied experiences of respectful relationship all combine to create confusion. Blame, shame, dissociative compliance, ineffective complaints, and misplaced resentments all are signals of unsafety
”
”
Betty Martin (The Art of Receiving and Giving: The Wheel of Consent)
“
Aedes aegypti, which transmits yellow fever, is one of the feeblest species in its ability for flight and it is at once blown away and destroyed when it gets into a breeze. It therefore seldom wanders from the house in which it was bred.
”
”
William Crawford Gorgas (Sanitation in Panama (Classic Reprint))
“
What we seek in travel is neither discovery nor trade but rather a gentle deterritorialization: we want to be taken over by the journey - in other words, by absence. As our metal vectors transcend meridians, oceans and poles, absence takes on a fleshy quality. The clandestineness of the depths of private life gives way to annihilation by longitude and latitude. But in the end the body tires of not knowing where it is, even if the mind finds this absence exalting, as if it were a quality proper to itself.
Perhaps, after all, what we seek in others is the same gentle deterritorialization that we seek in travel. Instead of one's own desire, instead of discovery, we are tempted by exile in the desire of the other, or by the desire of the other as an ocean to cross. The looks and gestures of lovers already have the distance of exile about them; the language of lovers is an expatriation in words that are afraid to signify; and the bodies of lovers are a tender hologram to eye and hand, offering no resistance and hence susceptible of being crisscrossed, like airspace, by desire. We move around with circumspection on a mental planet of circumvolutions, and from our excesses and passions we bring back the same transparent memories as we do from our travels.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard
“
Recognizing its importance, Aedes aegypti should be studied as a long-term national, regional, and world problem rather than as a temporary local threat to the communities suffering at any given moment from yellow fever, dengue or other aegypti-borne disease. No one can foresee the extent of the future threat of Aedes aegypti to mankind as a vector of known virus diseases, and none can foretell what other virus diseases may yet affect regions where A. aegypti is permitted to remain.
”
”
Fred Lowe Soper (Building the Health Bridge: Selections from the Works of Fred L. Soper)
“
When a body is acted upon by external forces besides its weight it tips over on one side of the base if the (so-called) weight (vector) acts along a line through the so-called center-of-mass that intersects the supporting surface outside the base of the body; in the case of a stable equilibrium, the weight vector points inside the base, in the case of an unstable equilibrium it points exactly toward the tilting edge of the base, "tilting edge of the base" underlined. We always went to far, so Roithamer, so we were always pushing toward the extreme limit. But we never thrust ourselves beyond it. Once I have thrust myself beyond it, it's all over, so Roithamer, "all" underlined. We're always set toward the predetermined moment, "predetermined moment" underlined. When that moment has come, we don't know that it has come, but it is the right moment. We can exist at the heighest degree of intensity as long as we live, so Roithamer (June 7). The end is no process. Clearing.
”
”
Thomas Bernhard (Correction)
“
Rim
are there horizons
where there is no horizontal
where mountains fold space,
hold distance up?
embedded in a canyon
our heads tilt instinctively.
here earth meets sky,
we can reach it; the rim
does not shimmer and recede.
we lean into diagonal lives,
relieved of right angles
eyes, arms, hearts drawn
upward, vectored to ridgelines
keenly aware of the slant
of time, its shape and substance;
it is a wedge; it moves
along ray-stroked slopes;
we pass into it,
are passed over.
”
”
Laurelyn Whitt
“
In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience that afflicts all but psychopaths, estimated fortunately to make up only 1 to 4 percent of the population. The products of the opposing two vectors in natural selection are hardwired in our emotions and reasoning, and cannot be erased. Internal conflict is not a personal irregularity but a timeless human quality. No such conflict exists or can exist in an eagle, fox, or spider, for example, whose traits were born solely of individual selection, or a worker ant, whose social traits were shaped entirely by group selection.
”
”
Edward O. Wilson (The Meaning of Human Existence)
“
Your ability?’ Jay leaned closer, whispering. ‘I think everyone here can do something cool, you know? Like run super fast. Or see people naked!’ He nodded. ‘I want that one.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
The records didn’t fill the void inside. Didn’t fuel it either. There was no closure.’
‘Then where’s the closure?’
She gestured to his pistol. ‘At the end of that barrel.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
There is no such thing as 'one sided love' in nature. Its only that two vectors are separated by barren stretches of time, space and lives.
”
”
Kartikey Singh
“
It is estimated that nearly half a billion people tune in for China Central Television’s seven p.m. news hour. The fact that all local stations in China are ordered by government mandate to carry the program likely has much to do with this high number, but frequent announcements that the president would be making an important national address this evening ensured even higher ratings than normal.
”
”
Tom Clancy (Threat Vector (Jack Ryan Jr., #4))
“
The “rising tide” theory rested on a notion of separate but equal class ladders. And so there was a class of black poor and an equivalent class of white poor, a black middle class and a white middle class, a black elite and a white elite. From this angle, the race problem was merely the result of too many blacks being found at the bottom of their ladder—too many who were poor and too few who were able to make their way to the next rung. If one could simply alter the distribution, the old problem of “race” could be solved. But any investigation into the actual details revealed that the ladders themselves were not equal—that to be a member of the “black race” in America had specific, quantifiable consequences. Not only did poor blacks tend to be much less likely to advance up their ladder, but those who did stood a much greater likelihood of tumbling back. That was because the middle-class rung of the black ladder lacked the financial stability enjoyed by the white ladder. Whites in the middle class often brought with them generational wealth—the home of a deceased parent, a modest inheritance, a gift from a favorite uncle. Blacks in the middle class often brought with them generational debt—an incarcerated father, an evicted niece, a mother forced to take in her sister’s kids. And these conditions, themselves, could not be separated out from the specific injury of racism, one that was not addressed by simply moving up a rung. Racism was not a singular one-dimensional vector but a pandemic, afflicting black communities at every level, regardless of what rung they occupied. From that point forward the case for reparations seemed obvious and the case against it thin. The sins of slavery did not stop with slavery. On the contrary, slavery was but the initial crime in a long tradition of crimes, of plunder even, that could be traced into the present day. And whereas a claim for reparations for slavery rested in the ancestral past, it was now clear that one could make a claim on behalf of those who were very much alive.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy)
“
I love opera. Si. But I am old. No passion in my life, you know? I work, I walk slowly now through my years...but opera! I see, I hear that passion, Eva. Is like the passion of youth. And I live again. I feel something.
”
”
J.J. Brown (Vector a Modern Love Story)
“
My earliest memories are of CP4 — that's a Kähler manifold that looks locally like a vector space with four complex directions, though the global topology's quite different. But I didn't really grow up there; I was moved around a lot when I was young, to keep my perceptions flexible. I only used to spend time in anything remotely like this" — he motioned at the surrounding more-or-less-Euclidean space — for certain special kinds of physics problems. And even most Newtonian mechanics is easier to grasp in a symplectic manifold; having a separate visible coordinate for the position and momentum of every degree of freedom makes things much clearer than when you cram everything together in a single three-dimensional space.
”
”
Greg Egan (Schild's Ladder)
“
assignment in addition to the copy constructor: Click here to view code image Vector& Vector::operator=(const Vector& a) // copy assignment { double* p = new double[a.sz]; for (int i=0; i!=a.sz; ++i) p[i] = a.elem[i]; delete[] elem; // delete old elements elem = p; sz = a.sz; return *this; } The name this is predefined in a member function and points to the object for which the member function is called. 4.6.2. Moving Containers We can control copying by defining
”
”
Bjarne Stroustrup (Tour of C++, A (C++ In-Depth))
“
From the line, watching, three things are striking: (a) what on TV is a brisk crack is here a whooming roar that apparently is what a shotgun really sounds like; (b) trapshooting looks comparatively easy, because now the stocky older guy who's replaced the trim bearded guy at the rail is also blowing these little fluorescent plates away one after the other, so that a steady rain of lumpy orange crud is falling into the Nadir's wake; (c) a clay pigeon, when shot, undergoes a frighteningly familiar-looking midflight peripeteia -- erupting material, changing vector, and plummeting seaward in a corkscrewy way that all eerily recalls footage of the 1986 Challenger disaster.
All the shooters who precede me seem to fire with a kind of casual scorn, and all get eight out of ten or above. But it turns out that, of these six guys, three have military-combat backgrounds, another two are L. L. Bean-model-type brothers who spend weeks every year hunting various fast-flying species with their "Papa" in southern Canada, and the last has got not only his own earmuffs, plus his own shotgun in a special crushed-velvet-lined case, but also his own trapshooting range in his backyard (31) in North Carolina. When it's finally my turn, the earmuffs they give me have somebody else's ear-oil on them and don't fit my head very well. The gun itself is shockingly heavy and stinks of what I'm told is cordite, small pubic spirals of which are still exiting the barrel from the Korea-vet who preceded me and is tied for first with 10/10. The two brothers are the only entrants even near my age; both got scores of 9/10 and are now appraising me coolly from identical prep-school-slouch positions against the starboard rail. The Greek NCOs seem extremely bored. I am handed the heavy gun and told to "be bracing a hip" against the aft rail and then to place the stock of the weapon against, no, not the shoulder of my hold-the-gun arm but the shoulder of my pull-the-trigger arm. (My initial error in this latter regard results in a severely distorted aim that makes the Greek by the catapult do a rather neat drop-and-roll.)
Let's not spend a lot of time drawing this whole incident out. Let me simply say that, yes, my own trapshooting score was noticeably lower than the other entrants' scores, then simply make a few disinterested observations for the benefit of any novice contemplating trapshooting from a 7NC Megaship, and then we'll move on: (1) A certain level of displayed ineptitude with a firearm will cause everyone who knows anything about firearms to converge on you all at the same time with cautions and advice and handy tips. (2) A lot of the advice in (1) boils down to exhortations to "lead" the launched pigeon, but nobody explains whether this means that the gun's barrel should move across the sky with the pigeon or should instead sort of lie in static ambush along some point in the pigeon's projected path. (3) Whatever a "hair trigger" is, a shotgun does not have one. (4) If you've never fired a gun before, the urge to close your eyes at the precise moment of concussion is, for all practical purposes, irresistible. (5) The well-known "kick" of a fired shotgun is no misnomer; it knocks you back several steps with your arms pinwheeling wildly for balance, which when you're holding a still-loaded gun results in mass screaming and ducking and then on the next shot a conspicuous thinning of the crowd in the 9-Aft gallery above. Finally, (6), know that an unshot discus's movement against the vast lapis lazuli dome of the open ocean's sky is sun-like -- i.e., orange and parabolic and right-to-left -- and that its disappearance into the sea is edge-first and splashless and sad.
”
”
David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments)
“
From roadside signs telling us to ‘Stay Alert’, the incessantly doom-laden media commentary, to masks literally keeping the fear in our face, we’ve become afraid of each other. Humans are now vectors of transmission, agents of disease. We have become afraid of our own judgement about how to manage the minutiae of our lives, from who to hug to whether to share a serving spoon. Apparently, we even need guidance about whether we can sit next to a friend on a bench. But perhaps we need to be more afraid of how easily manipulated we can be.
”
”
Laura Dodsworth (A State of Fear: How the UK government weaponised fear during the Covid-19 pandemic)
“
It was women’s individual experiences of victimization that produced our widespread moral and political opposition to it. And at the same time, there was something about the hashtag itself—its design, and the ways of thinking that it affirms and solidifies—that both erased the variety of women’s experiences and made it seem as if the crux of feminism was this articulation of vulnerability itself. A hashtag is specifically designed to remove a statement from context and to position it as part of an enormous singular thought. A woman participating in one of these hashtags becomes visible at an inherently predictable moment of male aggression: the time her boss jumped her, or the night a stranger followed her home. The rest of her life, which is usually far less predictable, remains unseen. Even as women have attempted to use #YesAllWomen and #MeToo to regain control of a narrative, these hashtags have at least partially reified the thing they’re trying to eradicate: the way that womanhood can feel like a story of loss of control. They have made feminist solidarity and shared vulnerability seem inextricable, as if we were incapable of building solidarity around anything else. What we have in common is obviously essential, but it’s the differences between women’s stories—the factors that allow some to survive, and force others under—that illuminate the vectors that lead to a better world. And, because there is no room or requirement in a tweet to add a disclaimer about individual experience, and because hashtags subtly equate disconnected statements in a way that can’t be controlled by those speaking, it has been even easier for #MeToo critics to claim that women must themselves think that going on a bad date is the same as being violently raped.
”
”
Jia Tolentino (Trick Mirror)
“
The poet discovers that what men value as substances have a higher value as symbols; that Nature is the immense shadow of man. A man's action is only a picture-book of his creed. He does after what he believes. Your condition, your employment, is the fable of you. The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form. Indeed, good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in nature by giving it a human volition. We are advertised that there is nothing to which man is not related; that everything is convertible into every other. The staff in his hand is the radius vector of the sun. The chemistry of this is the chemistry of that. Whatever one act we do, whatever one thing we learn, we are doing and learning all things,—marching in the direction of universal power. Every healthy mind is a true Alexander or Sesostris, building a universal monarchy.
”
”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“
In this sense many apparently immoral beliefs are actually factual errors based on incorrect causal theories. Today we hold that it is immoral to burn women as witches, but the reason our European ancestors in the Middle Ages strapped women on a pyre and torched them was because they believed that witches caused crop failures, weather anomalies, diseases, and various other maladies and misfortunes. Now that we have a scientific understanding of agriculture, climate, disease, and other causal vectors—including the role of chance—the witch theory of causality has fallen into disuse; what was a seemingly moral matter was actually a factual mistake.
”
”
Michael Shermer (The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom)
“
There is a mathematical underpinning that you must first acquire, mastery of each mathematical subdiscipline leading you to the threshold of the next. In turn you must learn arithmetic, Euclidian geometry, high school algebra, differential and integral calculus, ordinary and partial differential equations, vector calculus, certain special functions of mathematical physics, matrix algebra, and group theory. For most physics students, this might occupy them from, say, third grade to early graduate school—roughly 15 years. Such a course of study does not actually involve learning any quantum mechanics, but merely establishing the mathematical framework required to approach it deeply.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
Amateurs are fond of advising that all practical measures should be postponed pending carrying out detailed researches upon the habits of anophelines, the parasite rate of localities, the effect of minor works, and so on. In my opinion, this is a fundamental mistake. It implies the sacrifice of life and health on a large scale while researches which may have little real value and which may be continued indefinitely are being attempted… In practical life we observe that the best practical discoveries are obtained during the execution of practical work and that long academic discussions are apt to lead to nothing but academic profit. Action and investigation together do more than either of these alone.
”
”
Ronald Ross (Researches on malaria)
“
That arrogance of yours is such an endearing asset.'
'Why, thank you. It was either that or get my nipple pierced.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
Every parasite needs a host," Jay said.
"Every Queen needs an empire," McLoughlin said.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia
“
Another way is via genetic engineering. Here the germ is inserted into plasmid that has been manipulated by scientists. This type of plasmid is circular segments of DNA extracted from bacteria to serve as a vector. Scientists can add multiple genes and whatever genes they want into this plasmid. In case of vaccines, this includes a genetic piece of the vaccine germ and normally a gene for antibiotic resistance. This means that when the toxic gene is cultured inside the yeast, it has been designed with a new genetic code that makes it resistant to the antibiotic it’s coded for. The gene-plasmid combo is inserted into a yeast cell to be replicated. When the yeast replicates, the DNA from the plasmid is reproduced as a part of the yeast DNA. Once enough cells have been replicated, the genetic material in the new and improved yeast cell is extracted and put into the vaccine. Examples of this vaccine are the acellular pertussis and hepatitis B vaccines. One thing that doesn’t seem to concern scientists is the fact that the manmade genetic combination becomes the vaccine component. This mixture of intended and unintended genetic information may cause our immune system to overreact. This can be especially complicated for a child with compromised immune system. Another concern is that this new genetic code can become integrated with our own genetic material. Yeast, for instance, is very much like human DNA. It shares about one third of our proteins.
”
”
James Morcan (Vaccine Science Revisited: Are Childhood Immunizations As Safe As Claimed? (The Underground Knowledge Series, #8))
“
Crowdists love “competition” of a fixed nature, where a single vector determines the winner. They do not like real life competition, including evolution, as it assesses the individual as a whole and does not simply rank individuals by ability. For this reason crowds love both sports events and free market capitalism, as each allow people to gain power according to a linear system. The more time you put into the system with the sole goal of making profit, excluding all else, the more likely it is that you can get wealth – and it can happen to anyone! That is the promise that makes crowds flock to these ideas. It is like the dream of being a rock star, or a baseball hero, or a billionaire: what makes it attractive is the idea that anyone can do it, if they simply devote themselves to a linear path of ascension – one that is controlled by the whims of the crowd. The crowd decides who is a baseball hero, or what to buy and thus who to make rich. Control without control.
”
”
Brett Stevens (Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity)
“
Eva walked along the wall that held all of Michael's books. Shelves of science texts - physics, astronomy, a full set of Darwin's writings, new works in biomedical genetics - these were at the bottom, and books on philosophy and religion at the top. A row of poetry books caught her eye. Rumi, Whitman, Neruda - impossible to comprehend what he might be looking for in the poets' works he collected. Love possibly, but not love the way she understood it. She couldn't wait until she would no longer have to study, but Michael - he loved to study even when he wasn't a student.
”
”
J.J. Brown (Vector a Modern Love Story)
“
Finally, the medium is the message not only signifies the end of the message, but also the end of the medium. There are no more media in the literal sense of the word (I'm speaking particularly of electronic mass media) - that is, of a mediating power between one reality and another, between one state of the real and another. Neither in content, nor in form. Strictly, this is what implosion signifies. The absorption of one pole into another, the short-circuiting between poles of every differential system of meaning, the erasure of distinct terms and oppositions, including that of the medium and of the real - thus the impossibility of any mediation, of any dialectical intervention between the two or from one to the other. Circularity of all media effects. Hence the impossibility of meaning in the literal sense of a unilateral vector that goes from one pole to another. One must envisage this critical but original situation at its very limit: it is the only one left us. It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.
”
”
Jean Baudrillard (Simulacra and Simulation)
“
People like us run the world not just by chance but because we’re the only ones capable of doing it. We know your flaws. We know you better than you know yourselves. Our sense of honor compels us to take command, to guide the weak through times as dark as these. And our sense of humor compels us to enjoy it.
”
”
Nathan M. Farrugia (The Chimera Vector (The Fifth Column, #1))
“
As far as Serge can tell, Sophie only takes breakfast, and doesn’t even seem to eat that: each time he visits her lab over the next few days he sees sandwiches piled up virtually untouched beside glasses of lemonade that, no more than sipped at, are growing viscid bubbles on their surface like Aphrophora spumaria. Above these, on the wall, the texts, charts and diagrams are growing, spreading. Serge reads, for example, a report on the branchiae of Cercopidida, which are, apparently, “extremely tenuous, appearing like clusters of filaments forming lamellate appendages,” and scrutinises the architecture of Vespa germanica nests: their subterranean shafts and alleyways, their space-filled envelopes and alveolae … Bizarrely, Sophie’s started interspersing among these texts and images the headlines she’s torn from each day’s newspapers. These clippings seem to be caught up in her strange associative web: they, too, have certain words and letters highlighted and joined to ones among the scientific notes that, Serge presumes, must correspond to them in some way or another. One of these reads “Serbia Unsatisfied by London Treaty”; another, “Riot at Paris Ballet.” Serge can see no logical connection between these events and Sophie’s studies; yet colours and lines connect them. Arching over all of these in giant letters, each one occupying a whole sheet of paper, crayon-shaded and conjoined by lines that run over the wall itself to other terms and letter-sequences among the sprawling mesh, is the word Hymenoptera. “Hymenoptera?” Serge reads. “What’s that? It sounds quite rude.” “Sting in the tail,” she answers somewhat cryptically. “The groups contain the common ancestor, but not all the descendants. Paraphyletic: it’s all connected.” She stares at her expanded chart for a long while, lost in its vectors and relays—then, registering his continued presence with a slight twitch of her head, tells him to leave once more.
”
”
Tom McCarthy (C)
“
The main ones are the symbolists, connectionists, evolutionaries, Bayesians, and analogizers. Each tribe has a set of core beliefs, and a particular problem that it cares most about. It has found a solution to that problem, based on ideas from its allied fields of science, and it has a master algorithm that embodies it. For symbolists, all intelligence can be reduced to manipulating symbols, in the same way that a mathematician solves equations by replacing expressions by other expressions. Symbolists understand that you can’t learn from scratch: you need some initial knowledge to go with the data. They’ve figured out how to incorporate preexisting knowledge into learning, and how to combine different pieces of knowledge on the fly in order to solve new problems. Their master algorithm is inverse deduction, which figures out what knowledge is missing in order to make a deduction go through, and then makes it as general as possible. For connectionists, learning is what the brain does, and so what we need to do is reverse engineer it. The brain learns by adjusting the strengths of connections between neurons, and the crucial problem is figuring out which connections are to blame for which errors and changing them accordingly. The connectionists’ master algorithm is backpropagation, which compares a system’s output with the desired one and then successively changes the connections in layer after layer of neurons so as to bring the output closer to what it should be. Evolutionaries believe that the mother of all learning is natural selection. If it made us, it can make anything, and all we need to do is simulate it on the computer. The key problem that evolutionaries solve is learning structure: not just adjusting parameters, like backpropagation does, but creating the brain that those adjustments can then fine-tune. The evolutionaries’ master algorithm is genetic programming, which mates and evolves computer programs in the same way that nature mates and evolves organisms. Bayesians are concerned above all with uncertainty. All learned knowledge is uncertain, and learning itself is a form of uncertain inference. The problem then becomes how to deal with noisy, incomplete, and even contradictory information without falling apart. The solution is probabilistic inference, and the master algorithm is Bayes’ theorem and its derivates. Bayes’ theorem tells us how to incorporate new evidence into our beliefs, and probabilistic inference algorithms do that as efficiently as possible. For analogizers, the key to learning is recognizing similarities between situations and thereby inferring other similarities. If two patients have similar symptoms, perhaps they have the same disease. The key problem is judging how similar two things are. The analogizers’ master algorithm is the support vector machine, which figures out which experiences to remember and how to combine them to make new predictions.
”
”
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)