Virtual Travel Quotes

Shapeshifting requires the ability to transcend your attachments, in particular your ego attachments to identity and who you are. If you can get over your attachment to labeling yourself and your cherishing of your identity, you can be virtually anybody. You can slip in and out of different shells, even different animal forms or deity forms.

Wherever I am, if I've got a book with me, I have a place I can go and be happy." [Harry Potter Beyond the Page: A Virtual Author Visit with J.K. Rowling (Scholastic / Stacks webcast, October 11, 2012)]

You must remember that there was virtually no air travel in the early 1930s. Africa was two weeks away from England by boat and it took you about five weeks to get to China. These were distant and magic lands and nobody went to them just for a holiday. You went there to work. Nowadays you can go anywhere in the world in a few hours and nothing is fabulous anymore.

Thom pulled nervously at his ‘Kings’ t-shirt. The Kings are a brutal West African gang that he follows onscreen. Such ‘tourist shows’, as I understand they are called, have become wildly popular in recent years, as global unrest makes actual travel less popular. Armoured imaging teams, using tiny remote drone cameras known as ‘flies’, take the viewer inside the violent, gang-controlled regions of Nigeria and Cameroon. Using a touch screen, viewers (or ‘zoners’ as they are sometimes called) can follow the action from multiple angles while cheering on their favourite gang.

In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships’ motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other’s songs or messages. So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals, burping at each other? But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.

It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. And if I look at it that way, I think I can see the value of a wedding. If you’re my best friend and the only way I get to have dinner with you is by traveling thousands of miles, selecting a chicken or fish option, and wearing a dress in the same shade of lavender as six other girls, I will do that.

One of the things that everybody knows about space travel but never mentions is its aphrodisiac quality.

In the United States we think we have at our disposal virtually everything—and I emphasize the word “think.” We have big houses and cars, good medical treatment, jets, trains and monorails; we have computers, good communications, many comforts and conveniences. But where have they gotten us? We have an abundance of material things, but a successful society produces happy people, and I think we produce more miserable people than almost anyplace on earth. I’ve traveled all over the world, and I’ve never seen people who are quite as unhappy as they are in the United States. We have plenty, but we have nothing, and we always want more. In the pursuit of material success as our culture measures it, we have given up everything. We have lost the capacity to produce people who are joyful. The pursuit of the material has become our reason for living, not enjoyment of living itself.

The day of the full moon, when the moon is neither increasing nor decreasing, the Babylonians called Sa-bat, meaning "heart-rest." It was believed that on this day, the woman in the moon, Ishtar, as the moon goddess was known in Babylon, was menstruating, for in Babylon, as in virtually every ancient and primitive society, there had been since the earliest times a taboo against a woman working, preparing food, or traveling when she was passing her monthly blood. On Sa-bat, from which comes our Sabbath, men as well as women were commanded to rest, for when the moon menstruated, the taboo was on everyone. Originally (and naturally) observed once a month, the Sabbath was later to be incorporated by the Christians into their Creation myth and made conveniently weekly. So nowadays hard-minded men with hard muscles and hard hats are relieved from their jobs on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation.

Things are either devolving toward, or evolving from, nothingness. As dusk approaches in the hinterlands, a traveler ponders shelter for the night. He notices tall rushes growing everywhere, so he bundles an armful together as they stand in the field, and knots them at the top. Presto, a living grass hut. The next morning, before embarking on another day's journey, he unknots the rushes and presto, the hut de-constructs, disappears, and becomes a virtually indistinguishable part of the larger field of rushes once again. The original wilderness seems to be restored, but minute traces of the shelter remain. A slight twist or bend in a reed here and there. There is also the memory of the hut in the mind of the traveler — and in the mind of the reader reading this description. Wabi-sabi, in its purest, most idealized form, is precisely about these delicate traces, this faint evidence, at the borders of nothingness.

Roads remain the essential network of the non-virtual world. They are the infrastructure upon which almost all other infrastructure depends. They are the paths of human endeavor.

When the Basque whalers applied to cod the salting techniques they were using on whale, they discovered a particularly good marriage because the cod is virtually without fat, and so if salted and dried well, would rarely spoil. It would outlast whale, which is red meat, and it would outlast herring, a fatty fish that became a popular salted item of the northern countries in the Middle Ages.

Separating fact and fiction in Inca history is impossible, because virtually all the sources available are Spanish accounts of stories that had already been vetted by the Inca emperors to highlight their own heroic roles. Imagine a history of modern Iraq written by Dick Cheney and based on authorized biographies of Sadam Hussein published in Arabic, and you'll get some idea of what historians face.

His heat, his erotic pull—she could feel it. A weird, pulsing, virtual pull tugging at her skin, her nerve endings. Made her want to…touch. Made her want. The more she resisted the urge, the stronger it became. It would be a relief, really. To just…touch. One little touch. Just one.

Haley wondered to herself as she packed a sample of virtually every over-the-counter medication she was allowed to take into her travel bag. Insect

To the human eye, stars move very slowly. Considering their relative motion, at this moment she and I might be looking up at virtually the same sight. She in 1896, me in 1971.

It is hard to know how someone else will travel, and Freddy and Less, at first, were at odds. Though a virtual water bug in our adventures, in ordinary travel Less was always a hermit crab in a borrowed shell: he liked to get to know a street, and a café, and a restaurant, and be called by name by the waiters, and owners, and coat-check girl, so that when he left, he could think of it fondly as another home.

What’s your status now?” the legislator asked them. “I’m undocumented,” one Brazilian student answered, bewildered. “Why don’t you start the process to become a citizen?” he continued. “I can’t,” she explained. “Why not?” he asked, revealing his profound ignorance of immigration law. Just as the law forbids most residents of the Third World to travel here—by requiring visas, but refusing to grant them—it also forbids virtually all people who are undocumented to regularize their status.

The larger provincial towns and cities in particular are dominated by a few merchant families who own virtually all the wealth. In Exeter, for instance, 2 percent of the population own 40 percent of the taxable property, and just 7 percent own two-thirds of it.

Cash has disappeared so quickly from Chinese cities that it even “disrupted” crime. In March 2017, a pair of Chinese cousins made headlines with a hapless string of robberies. The pair had traveled to Hangzhou, a wealthy city and home to Alibaba, with the goal of making a couple of lucrative scores and then skipping town. Armed with two knives, the cousins robbed three consecutive convenience stores only to find that the owners had almost no cash to hand over—virtually all their customers were now paying directly with their phones. Their crime spree netted them around $125 each—not even enough to cover their travel to and from Hangzhou—when police picked them up. Local media reported rumors that upon arrest one of the brothers cried out, “How is there no cash left in Hangzhou?

I was absolutely thunderstruck by the extraordinary reality of the man I found in the Gospels. I discovered a man who was almost continuously frustrated. His frustration leaps out of virtually every page: "What do I have to say to you? How many times do I have to say it? What do I have to do to get through to you?" I also discovered a man who was frequently sad, and sometimes depressed, frequently anxious and scared ... A man who was terribly, terribly lonely, yet often desperately needed to be alone. I discovered a man so incredibly real that no one could have made Him up.

In 1970, Alix Kates Shulman, a wife, mother, and writer who had joined the Women's Liberation Movement in New York, wrote a poignant account of how the initial equality and companionship of her marriage had deteriorated once she had children. "[N]ow I was restricted to the company of two demanding preschoolers and to the four walls of an apartment. It seemed unfair that while my husband's life had changed little when the children were born, domestic life had become the only life I had." His job became even more demanding, requiring late nights and travel out of town. Meanwhile it was virtually impossible for her to work at home. "I had no time for myself; the children were always there." Neither she nor her husband was happy with the situation, so they did something radical, which received considerable media coverage: they wrote up a marriage agreement... In it they asserted that "each member of the family has an equal right to his/her own time, work, values and choices... The ability to earn more money is already a privilege which must not be compounded by enabling the larger earner to buy out of his/her duties and put the burden on the one who earns less, or on someone hired from outside." The agreement insisted that domestic jobs be shared fifty-fifty and, get this girls, "If one party works overtime in any domestic job, she/he must be compensated by equal work by the other." The agreement then listed a complete job breakdown... in other worde, the agreement acknowledged the physical and the emotional/mental work involved in parenting and valued both. At the end of the article, Shulman noted how much happier she and her husband were as a result of the agreement. In the two years after its inception, Shulman wrote three children's books, a biography and a novel. But listen, too, to what it meant to her husband, who was now actually seeing his children every day. After the agreement had been in effect for four months, "our daughter said one day to my husband, 'You know, Daddy, I used to love Mommy more than you, but now I love you both the same.

When Paul heard the word dikaiosune, he immediately interpreted it in the light of the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.15 For the prophets, justice had meant social equality; they had denounced rulers who failed to treat the pauper, the widow, and the foreigner with equity and respect. From what Paul had seen in his travels, Roman law had failed to implement justice in this sense; it favored only the privileged few and had virtually enslaved the vast majority of the population.

If men create intelligent machines, or fantasize about them, it is either because they secretly despair of their own intelligence or because they are in danger of succumbing to the weight of a monstrous and useless intelligence which they seek to exorcize by transferring it to machines, where they can play with it and make fun of it. By entrusting this burdensome intelligence to machines we are released from any responsibility to knowledge, much as entrusting power to politicians allows us to disdain any aspiration of our own to power. If men dream of machines that are unique, that are endowed with genius, it is because they despair of their own uniqueness, or because they prefer to do without it - to enjoy it by proxy, so to speak, thanks to machines. What such machines offer is the spectacle of thought, and in manipulating them people devote themselves more to the spectacle of thought than to thought itself. It is not for nothing that they are described as 'virtual', for they put thought on hold indefinitely, tying its emergence to the achievement of a complete knowledge. The act of thinking itself is thus put off for ever. Indeed, the question of thought can no more be raised than the question of the freedom of future generations, who will pass through life as we travel through the air, strapped into their seats. These Men of Artificial Intelligence will traverse their own mental space bound hand and foot to their computers. Immobile in front of his computer, Virtual Man makes love via the screen and gives lessons by means of the teleconference. He is a physical - and no doubt also a mental cripple. That is the price he pays for being operational. Just as eyeglasses and contact lenses will arguably one day evolve into implanted prostheses for a species that has lost its sight, it is similarly to be feared that artificial intelligence and the hardware that supports it will become a mental prosthesis for a species without the capacity for thought. Artificial intelligence is devoid of intelligence because it is devoid of artifice.

On our way down, we passed a two-story villa, hidden in a thicket of Chinese parasol trees, magnolia, and pines. It looked almost like a random pile of stones against the background of the rocks. It struck me as an unusually lovely place, and I snapped my last shot. Suddenly a man materialized out of nowhere and asked me in a low but commanding voice to hand over my camera. He wore civilian clothes, but I noticed he had a pistol. He opened the camera and exposed my entire roll of film. Then he disappeared, as if into the earth. Some tourists standing next to me whispered that this was one of Mao's summer villas. I felt another pang of revulsion toward Mao, not so much for his privilege, but for the hypocrisy of allowing himself luxury while telling his people that even comfort was bad for them. After we were safely out of earshot of the invisible guard, and I was bemoaning the loss of my thirty-six pictures, Jin-ming gave me a grin: "See where goggling at holy places gets you!" We left Lushan by bus. Like every bus in China, it was packed, and we had to crane our necks desperately trying to breathe. Virtually no new buses had been built since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, during which time the urban population had increased by several tens of millions. After a few minutes, we suddenly stopped. The front door was forced open, and an authoritative-looking man in plainclothes squeezed in. "Get down! Get down!" he barked. "Some American guests are coming this way. It is harmful to the prestige of our motherland for them to see all these messy heads!" We tried to crouch down, but the bus was too crowded. The man shouted, "It is the duty of everyone to safeguard the honor of our motherland! We must present an orderly and dignified appearance! Get down! Bend your knees!" Suddenly I heard Jin-ming's booming voice: "Doesn'T Chairman Mao instruct us never to bend our knees to American imperialists?" This was asking for trouble. Humor was not appreciated. The man shot a stern glance in our direction, but said nothing. He gave the bus another quick scan, and hurried off. He did not want the "American guests' to witness a scene. Any sign of discord had to be hidden from foreigners. Wherever we went as we traveled down the Yangtze we saw the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution: temples smashed, statues toppled, and old towns wrecked. Litfie evidence remained of China's ancient civilization. But the loss went even deeper than this. Not only had China destroyed most of its beautiful things, it had lost its appreciation of them, and was unable to make new ones. Except for the much-scarred but still stunning landscape, China had become an ugly country.

The metaverse is, par excellence, the ultimate ANTI-travel dystopia. Well, at least on paper. Cambridge Dictionary defines travel as "to make a journey, usually over a long distance." In the metaverse, au contraire, there are no distances at all. The central concept of space is nonsensical in a virtual environment. That's why most people in our industry are still skeptical of its practical applications: if you erase one essential part (the distance) from the travel equation, only the journey remains. And so does the question: is traveling without moving, still traveling? Or is it something else?

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 15 billion miles across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it—99.9 percent of the mass of the solar system—went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they traveled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of miles across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.5 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet. Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot. The theory, incidentally, is almost always presented as a recent one, but in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard. The only recent thing about it is people paying any attention to it. When Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane, and sulfur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently, and life might never have gotten a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites, and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later people began to wonder how it had all happened. And it is there that our story next takes us.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 – went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less22, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet.

Corn is what feeds the steer that becomes the steak. Corn feeds the chicken and the pig, the turkey, and the lamb, the catfish and the tilapia and, increasingly, even the salmon, a carnivore by nature that the fish farmers are reengineering to tolerate corn. The eggs are made of corn. The milk and cheese and yogurt, which once came from dairy cows that grazed on grass, now typically comes from Holsteins that spend their working lives indoors tethered to machines, eating corn. Head over to the processed foods and you find ever more intricate manifestations of corn. A chicken nugget, for example, piles up corn upon corn: what chicken it contains consists of corn, of course, but so do most of a nugget's other constituents, including the modified corn starch that glues the things together, the corn flour in the batter that coats it, and the corn oil in which it gets fried. Much less obviously, the leavenings and lecithin, the mono-, di-, and triglycerides, the attractive gold coloring, and even the citric acid that keeps the nugget "fresh" can all be derived from corn. To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

The techno-political thriller and the romance novel serve as antidotes to the imagination rather than stimulants to it. For this reason they make for ideal reading in airports and airplanes. They effectively shut down the imagination by doing all its work for it. They leave the spirit or the soul—and ambiguity, for that matter—out of the equation. By shutting down the imagination, genre novels perform a useful service to the anxious air traveler by reducing his or her ability to speculate. For the most part, people on airplanes, and here I include myself, would rather not use their speculative imaginations at all; one consequence of this situation is that great poetry is virtually unreadable during turbulence, when the snack cart has been put away and the seat belts fastened. Enough anxiety is associated with air travel without Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus making it worse.

Philosophy is the theory of multiplicities, each of which is composed of actual and virtual elements. Purely actual objects do not exist. Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images. This cloud is composed of a series of more or less extensive coexisting circuits, along which the virtual images are distributed, and around which they run. These virtuals vary in kind as well as in their degree of proximity from the actual particles by which they are both emitted and absorbed. They are called virtual in so far as their emission and absorption, creation and destruction, occur in a period of time shorter than the shortest continuous period imaginable; it is this very brevity that keeps them subject to a principle of uncertainty or indetermination. The virtuals, encircling the actual, perpetually renew themselves by emitting yet others, with which they are in turn surrounded and which go on in turn to react upon the actual: ‘in the heart of the cloud of the virtual there is a virtual of a yet higher order ... every virtual particle surrounds itself with a virtual cosmos and each in its turn does likewise indefinitely.’ It is the dramatic identity of their dynamics that makes a perception resemble a particle: an actual perception surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images, distributed on increasingly remote, increasingly large, moving circuits, which both make and unmake each other. These are memories of different sorts, but they are still called virtual images in that their speed or brevity subjects them too to a principle of the unconsciousness. It is by virtue of their mutual inextricability that virtual images are able to react upon actual objects. From this perspective, the virtual images delimit a continuum, whether one takes all of the circles together or each individually, a spatium determined in each case by the maximum of time imaginable. The varyingly dense layers of the actual object correspond to these, more or less extensive, circles of virtual images. These layers, whilst themselves virtual, and upon which the actual object becomes itself virtual, constitute the total impetus of the object. The plane of immanence, upon which the dissolution of the actual object itself occurs, is itself constituted when both object and image are virtual. But the process of actualization undergone by the actual is one which has as great an effect on the image as it does on the object. The continuum of virtual images is fragmented and the spatium cut up according to whether the temporal decompositions are regular or irregular. The total impetus of the virtual object splits into forces corresponding to the partial continuum, and the speeds traversing the cut-up spatium. The virtual is never independent of the singularities which cut it up and divide it out on the plane of immanence. As Leibniz has shown, force is as much a virtual in the process of being actualized as the space through which it travels. The plane is therefore divided into a multiplicity of planes according to the cuts in the continuum, and to the divisions of force which mark the actualization of the virtual. But all the planes merge into one following the path which leads to the actual. The plane of immanence includes both the virtual and its actualization simultaneously, without there being any assignable limit between the two. The actual is the complement or the product, the object of actualization, which has nothing but virtual as its subject. Actualization belongs to the virtual. The actualization of the virtual is singularity whereas the actual itself is individuality constituted. The actual falls from the plane like a fruit, whist the actualization relates it back to the plane as if to that which turns the object back into a subject.

Like Barry before him, Diop complained that Chinese projects were negotiated with a total lack of transparency. “If we are paying for big projects we want them to include real transfer of technology and of expertise, but the Chinese bring all their own workers, and the few Guineans are reduced to the role of task boys. In one case we had here, a Chinese company was hired to build a bridge and they did most of their work at night, and they wouldn’t let anyone onto their site. Between the groundbreaking and inauguration ceremonies, they give out no information at all, nothing.” Diop said that his group and others in the civil society coalition had repeatedly tried to speak with Chinese contractors and Chinese diplomats to impress upon them the need to reconsider their approach to things in Guinea, but had been either patronized or turned away. “You go to see them and they say go see your minister, or go see your president, he’s the one who approved these arrangements.” I heard very similar language from disgruntled civil society figures virtually everywhere I traveled.

It was also a lot easier for online teachers to hold their students’ attention, because here in the OASIS, the classrooms were like holodecks. Teachers could take their students on a virtual field trip every day, without ever leaving the school grounds. During our World History lesson that morning, Mr. Avenovich loaded up a stand-alone simulation so that our class could witness the discovery of King Tut’s tomb by archaeologists in Egypt in AD 1922. (The day before, we’d visited the same spot in 1334 BC and had seen Tutankhamun’s empire in all its glory.) In my next class, Biology, we traveled through a human heart and watched it pumping from the inside, just like in that old movie Fantastic Voyage. In Art class we toured the Louvre while all of our avatars wore silly berets. In my Astronomy class we visited each of Jupiter’s moons. We stood on the volcanic surface of Io while our teacher explained how the moon had originally formed. As our teacher spoke to us, Jupiter loomed behind her, filling half the sky, its Great Red Spot churning slowly just over her left shoulder. Then she snapped her fingers and we were standing on Europa, discussing the possibility of extraterrestrial life beneath the moon’s icy crust.

Consider this oddly neglected fact: the West was acquired, conquested, and largely consolidated into the nation coincident with the greatest breakthrough in the history of human communication. The breakthrough was the telegraph. The great advances that followed it, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet, were all elaborations on its essential contribution. The telegraph separated the person from the message. Before it, with a few exceptions such as a sephamore and carrier pigeons, information moved only as fast as people did. By the nineteenth century, people were certainly moving a lot faster, and indeed a second revolution, that of transportation, was equally critical in creating the West, but before the telegraph a message still had to move with a person, either as a document or in somebody’s head. The telegraph liberated information. Now it could travel virtually at the speed of light. The railroad carried people and things, including letters, ten to fifteen times faster than the next most rapid form of movement. The telegraph accelerated communication more than forty million times. A single dot of Morse code traveled from Kansas City to Denver faster than the click it produced moved from the receiver to the telegrapher’s eardrum.

If dimensions are virtual like the particles in quantum foam are virtual then, entanglement is information that is in more than one location (hologram). There are no particles, they may be wave packets but the idea of quantum is, a precise ratio of action in relationship to the environment. Feynman's path integral is not infinite, it is fractal. If you look at a star many light years away, the photon that hits your eye leaves the star precisely when the timing for the journey will end at your eye because the virtual dimension of the journey is zero distance or zero time. Wheeler said that if your eye is not there to receive the photon then it won't leave the star in the distant past. If the dimension in the direction of travel is zero, you have a different relationship then if it is zero time in terms of the property of the virtual dimensions. Is a particle really a wave packet? Could something like a "phase transition" involve dimensions that are more transitory then we imagined. Example; a photon as a two dimensional sheet is absorbed by an electron so that the photon becomes a part of the geometry of the electron in which the electrons dimensions change in some manner. Could "scale" have more variation and influence on space and time that our models currently predict? Could information, scale, and gravity be intimately related?

memoir A Ride in the Neon Sun. Here’s what she says about traveling: Some people travel with firm ideas for a journey, following in the footsteps of an intrepid ancestor whose exotic exploits were happened upon in a dusty, cobweb-laced attic containing immovable trunks full of sepia-curled daguerreotypes and age-discoloured letters redolent of bygone days. Others travel for anthropological, botanical, archaeological, geological, and other logical reasons. Some are smitten by a specific country brewed from childhood dreams. For others, travel is a challenge, a release, an escape, a shaking off of the shackles, and even if they don’t know where they will end up they usually know where they will begin. The very hardest part of writing this book was that I was unable to stop working on it. I kept reading even after the initial manuscript was turned in, discovering new titles and authors whose works I just couldn’t bear to leave out. I even envisioned myself watching the book being printed and shouting periodically, “Stop the presses!” so that I could add yet another section or title. But of course the day actually came when I knew I had to stop or there would never be an end to the project.And here is the result, in your hands right now. So, before your next trip—either virtual or actual—grab a pen and begin making notes about the titles that sound good to you. And enjoy the journeys. I’d love to hear from you. My email address is nancy@nancypearl .com.

About 4.6 billion years ago, a great swirl of gas and dust some 24 billion kilometres across accumulated in space where we are now and began to aggregate. Virtually all of it – 99.9 per cent of the mass of the solar system21 – went to make the Sun. Out of the floating material that was left over, two microscopic grains floated close enough together to be joined by electrostatic forces. This was the moment of conception for our planet. All over the inchoate solar system, the same was happening. Colliding dust grains formed larger and larger clumps. Eventually the clumps grew large enough to be called planetesimals. As these endlessly bumped and collided, they fractured or split or recombined in endless random permutations, but in every encounter there was a winner, and some of the winners grew big enough to dominate the orbit around which they travelled. It all happened remarkably quickly. To grow from a tiny cluster of grains to a baby planet some hundreds of kilometres across is thought to have taken only a few tens of thousands of years. In just 200 million years, possibly less22, the Earth was essentially formed, though still molten and subject to constant bombardment from all the debris that remained floating about. At this point, about 4.4 billion years ago, an object the size of Mars crashed into the Earth, blowing out enough material to form a companion sphere, the Moon. Within weeks, it is thought, the flung material had reassembled itself into a single clump, and within a year it had formed into the spherical rock that companions us yet. Most of the lunar material, it is thought, came from the Earth’s crust, not its core23, which is why the Moon has so little iron while we have a lot. The theory, incidentally, is almost always presented as a recent one, but in fact it was first proposed in the 1940s by Reginald Daly of Harvard24. The only recent thing about it is people paying any attention to it. When the Earth was only about a third of its eventual size, it was probably already beginning to form an atmosphere, mostly of carbon dioxide, nitrogen, methane and sulphur. Hardly the sort of stuff that we would associate with life, and yet from this noxious stew life formed. Carbon dioxide is a powerful greenhouse gas. This was a good thing, because the Sun was significantly dimmer back then. Had we not had the benefit of a greenhouse effect, the Earth might well have frozen over permanently25, and life might never have got a toehold. But somehow life did. For the next 500 million years the young Earth continued to be pelted relentlessly by comets, meteorites and other galactic debris, which brought water to fill the oceans and the components necessary for the successful formation of life. It was a singularly hostile environment, and yet somehow life got going. Some tiny bag of chemicals twitched and became animate. We were on our way. Four billion years later, people began to wonder how it had all happened. And it is there that our story next takes us.

We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way. In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.

sobered, nodded awkwardly, and acted like he wanted to speak, but didn’t. He turned to a laptop, gave it a command. The screens on the wall displayed what looked at first glance like a collage of images. At center was a photograph Acadia had recently taken of Alex Cross’s house from across Fifth Street. Dotted lines traveled from various windows in the house out to pictures of Dr. Alex, his wife, his grandmother, his daughter, and his younger son. Set off to one side was a framed picture of Damon, Alex Cross’s older son, seventeen and a student at a prep school in western Massachusetts. Digital lines went out from each portrait, linked to images of schools, police stations, churches, grocery stores, and various friends. There were also lines connecting each member of Cross’s family to calendar and clock icons. “He uses mind-mapping software and an Xbox 360 with Kinect to make it work,” Acadia explained. “It’s interactive, Marcus. Just stand in front of the camera and point to what you want.” Intrigued now, Sunday stepped in front of the screens and the Kinect camera. He pointed at the photograph of Cross. The screen instantly jumped to a virtual diary of the detective’s recent life, everything from photographs of Bree Stone, to his kids, to his white Chevy sedan and his best friend, John Sampson, and Sampson’s wife, Billie. Sunday pointed at the calendar, and the screens showed a chronological account of everything he had seen Cross do in the prior month.

DENGUE FEVER (BREAKBONE FEVER) Dengue fever is a viral infection found throughout Central America. In Costa Rica outbreaks involving thousands of people occur every year. Dengue is transmitted by aedes mosquitoes, which often bite during the daytime and are usually found close to human habitations, often indoors. They breed primarily in artificial water containers such as jars, barrels, cans, plastic containers and discarded tires. Dengue is especially common in densely populated, urban environments. Dengue usually causes flulike symptoms including fever, muscle aches, joint pains, headaches, nausea and vomiting, often followed by a rash. Most cases resolve uneventfully in a few days. Severe cases usually occur in children under the age of 15 who are experiencing their second dengue infection. There is no treatment for dengue fever except taking analgesics such as acetaminophen/paracetamol (Tylenol) and drinking plenty of fluids. Severe cases may require hospitalization for intravenous fluids and supportive care. There is no vaccine. The key to prevention is taking insect-protection measures. HEPATITIS A Hepatitis A is the second-most-common travel-related infection (after traveler’s diarrhea). It’s a viral infection of the liver that is usually acquired by ingestion of contaminated water, food or ice, though it may also be acquired by direct contact with infected persons. Symptoms may include fever, malaise, jaundice, nausea, vomiting and abdominal pain. Most cases resolve without complications, though hepatitis A occasionally causes severe liver damage. There is no treatment. The vaccine for hepatitis A is extremely safe and highly effective. You should get vaccinated before you go to Costa Rica. Because the safety of hepatitis A vaccine has not been established for pregnant women or children under the age of two, they should instead be given a gammaglobulin injection. LEISHMANIASIS Leishmaniasis occurs in the mountains and jungles of all Central American countries. The infection is transmitted by sand flies, which are about one-third the size of mosquitoes. Most cases occur in newly cleared forest or areas of secondary growth. The highest incidence is in Puerto Viejo de Talamanca. It causes slow-growing ulcers over exposed parts of the body There is no vaccine. RABIES Rabies is a viral infection of the brain and spinal cord that is almost always fatal. The rabies virus is carried in the saliva of infected animals and is typically transmitted through an animal bite, though contamination of any break in the skin with infected saliva may result in rabies. Rabies occurs in all Central American countries. However, in Costa Rica only two cases have been reported over the last 30 years. TYPHOID Typhoid fever is caused by ingestion of food or water contaminated by a species of salmonella known as Salmonella typhi . Fever occurs in virtually all cases. Other symptoms may include headache, malaise, muscle aches, dizziness, loss of appetite, nausea and abdominal pain. A pretrip vaccination for typoid is recommended, but not required. It’s usually given orally, and is also available as an injection. TRAVELER’S DIARRHEA Tap water is safe and of a high quality in Costa Rica, but when you’re far off the beaten path it’s best to avoid tap water unless it has been boiled, filtered or chemically disinfected (iodine tablets). To prevent diarrhea, be wary of dairy products that might contain unpasteurized milk; and be highly selective when eating food from street vendors.

A good historian of science will note that laypeople and scholars present at the birth of electricity, the railroad, the telephone, the television, and most of the other major innovations uttered similar pronouncements. But, as it inevitably turns out, our theories and techniques almost always can accommodate the new phenomena, be they global air travel or digital avatars in virtual worlds. In fact, shedding light on the similarities and differences with what has gone before – theoretically and substantively – is very often our objective as scholars and scientific thinkers.

Your passions are what you care most deeply about, have the highest expectations for, have powerful and compelling feelings about, or that give your life meaning. They may include your job, team, company, family, sports, school, hobbies, communities, faith, travel, investing, gaming, gadgets, or virtually any other subject or activity. Perseverance is persistence in purpose, ideas, or tasks in the face of obstacles or discouragement. Passion (an attitude) and persistence (a behavior) usually go together. But

Pack your bags and explore the most amazing places around Istanbul, Madrid or any other destination around the world with your virtual travel guide.

They weren't people that liked change. They were the kind of people that would have tied change to a chair with dental floss if they could in order to avoid it. They were the type of people who desired to live in their virtual bubbles and grew to resent anyone that challenged that world.

Virtually everything of any value in North Korea originates in China, and it mostly reaches the DPRK via Dandong. North Korean officials and businessmen, like the men I met on the train from Beijing, coming cap in hand on state-sponsored shopping trips are everywhere. Easily spotted by their badges proclaiming their loyalty to the various Kims, at night they haunt the Korean restaurants and karaoke bars within view of the DPRK itself. During the day, they congregate on the street by the border post beneath the bridge that leads to North Korea. From the early morning to the late afternoon, the line of trucks waiting to cross into the DPRK tails back down the road. There are warehouses and wholesale shops all along it and a constant procession of North Koreans going in and out of them. They buy spark plugs and coils of wire, generators and tyres, household appliances and kitchenware. The goods are destined for North Korea’s armed forces, more than a million strong, for the few industrial concerns still working, or for the Pyongyang elite.

Part of what makes credit cards work is that they simplify transactions for both buyers and sellers. Concentrating on just a few cards further simplifies matters on both sides of the market. Thus ever since the big shakeout, no new credit cards have joined the ranks of the majors; the barrier to market entry has proved to be too great. That said, in recent years the Internet revolution has opened the door to competition from wholly new directions—including new kinds of payment services, such as PayPal; an international network of automatic teller machines to challenge old standbys such as traveler’s checks; and maybe even new types of “virtual money” such as Bitcoin. As I write this in 2014, Apple has announced a new payment system on the latest iPhones, and we can reasonably expect that it and/or other new payment systems that make use of mobile devices will become commonplace.

THINK OF THE WAY a stretch of grass becomes a road. At first, the stretch is bumpy and difficult to drive over. A crew comes along and flattens the surface, making it easier to navigate. Then, someone pours gravel. Then tar. Then a layer of asphalt. A steamroller smooths it; someone paints lines. The final surface is something an automobile can traverse quickly. Gravel stabilizes, tar solidifies, asphalt reinforces, and now we don’t need to build our cars to drive over bumpy grass. And we can get from Philadelphia to Chicago in a single day. That’s what computer programming is like. Like a highway, computers are layers on layers of code that make them increasingly easy to use. Computer scientists call this abstraction. A microchip—the brain of a computer, if you will—is made of millions of little transistors, each of whose job is to turn on or off, either letting electricity flow or not. Like tiny light switches, a bunch of transistors in a computer might combine to say, “add these two numbers,” or “make this part of the screen glow.” In the early days, scientists built giant boards of transistors, and manually switched them on and off as they experimented with making computers do interesting things. It was hard work (and one of the reasons early computers were enormous). Eventually, scientists got sick of flipping switches and poured a layer of virtual gravel that let them control the transistors by punching in 1s and 0s. 1 meant “on” and 0 meant “off.” This abstracted the scientists from the physical switches. They called the 1s and 0s machine language. Still, the work was agonizing. It took lots of 1s and 0s to do just about anything. And strings of numbers are really hard to stare at for hours. So, scientists created another abstraction layer, one that could translate more scrutable instructions into a lot of 1s and 0s. This was called assembly language and it made it possible that a machine language instruction that looks like this: 10110000 01100001 could be written more like this: MOV AL, 61h which looks a little less robotic. Scientists could write this code more easily. Though if you’re like me, it still doesn’t look fun. Soon, scientists engineered more layers, including a popular language called C, on top of assembly language, so they could type in instructions like this: printf(“Hello World”); C translates that into assembly language, which translates into 1s and 0s, which translates into little transistors popping open and closed, which eventually turn on little dots on a computer screen to display the words, “Hello World.” With abstraction, scientists built layers of road which made computer travel faster. It made the act of using computers faster. And new generations of computer programmers didn’t need to be actual scientists. They could use high-level language to make computers do interesting things.* When you fire up a computer, open up a Web browser, and buy a copy of this book online for a friend (please do!), you’re working within a program, a layer that translates your actions into code that another layer, called an operating system (like Windows or Linux or MacOS), can interpret. That operating system is probably built on something like C, which translates to Assembly, which translates to machine language, which flips on and off a gaggle of transistors. (Phew.) So, why am I telling you this? In the same way that driving on pavement makes a road trip faster, and layers of code let you work on a computer faster, hackers like DHH find and build layers of abstraction in business and life that allow them to multiply their effort. I call these layers platforms.

A great deal of the information embedded in a work of art is not – yet at least – accessible just by looking at an image of it while sitting at home. The deepest and richest experiences are not virtual but physical: they involve looking at real things and talking to real people.

Skinwalkers were almost always male and wore the pelt of a sacred animal so that they could subvert that animal’s powers to kill people in the community. They could travel impossibly fast across the desert and their eyes glowed like coals and they could supposedly paralyze you with a single look. They were thought to attack remote homesteads at night and kill people and sometimes eat their bodies. People were still scared of skinwalkers when I lived on the Navajo Reservation in 1983, and frankly, by the time I left, I was too. Virtually every culture in the world has its version of the skinwalker myth. In Europe, for example, they are called werewolves (literally “man-wolf” in Old English). The myth addresses a fundamental fear in human society: that you can defend against external enemies but still remain vulnerable to one lone madman in your midst. Anglo-American culture doesn’t recognize the skinwalker threat but has its own version. Starting in the early 1980s, the frequency of rampage shootings in the United States began to rise more and more rapidly until it doubled around 2006.

I could hear all three of them saying the word kitab. What was that? “Book!” Shani told me. “My language, their language, same.” The word for “book” was virtually identical in each of their home languages. In Arabic, it was kitab; in Tajik, kitob. In Turkish, it was kitap, Jakleen pointed out, and in Farsi, Shani hastened to add, the word was kitab, just like Arabic. Initially, I thought this kind of convergence existed only in the Middle East, but as I spent more time with students from Africa, I came to realize I was wrong. Dilli told me that in Kunama, the word for “book” was kitaba, and Methusella said in Swahili it was kitabu. That was the moment when I finally grasped my own arrogance as an English speaker. I mean, the arrogance harbored by someone who knew only European languages, which rendered the well- laced interconnectedness of the rest of the world invisible. I was starting to see it, though— the centuries- old ties that bound Africa and the Middle East, born of hundreds of years of trade and travel and conquest and marriage. Once the students grasped that I would exclaim with delight if they found a word that had moved through many of their countries, they started flocking to me to share loanwords and cognates. More than one- third of Swahili comes from Arabic, meaning the links between those two languages are as powerful as those between English and Spanish. But it was also possible to chart the reach of Arabic across the entire African continent, into Kunama and Tigrinya as well.

The Simulation Singularity is the axis point in time where subjective dimensionality steps up one dimension. Think about it: If you could make multiple copies of yourself and set them out on different adventures in ultra-realistic virtual worlds and merge them later in order to have memories of all those adventures, if you could travel to artificially-recreated pasts or imaginary futures, if you could incorporate others’ high-definition memories into your own, wouldn’t that give you expanded dimensionality?

In a book called Adventures in Error, Vilhjalmer Stefansson recalls his efforts to track down virtually every report of a wolf killing a human being between 1923 and 1936. Reports from the Caucasus, the Near East, Canada, and Alaska all proved to be either fiction or gross exaggeration. Furthermore, Stefansson could not substantiate a single report of wolves traveling in packs larger than about thirty. In 1945 it was reported that no incident of wolf attack brought to the attention of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in the preceding twenty-five years could be substantiated.

She was a remarkable woman and her courage must be immense to have defied her family and traveled virtually alone

If I could do it all over again, and relieve my vision in the twenty-first century, I would become a microbial ecologist. Ten billion bacteria live in a gram of ordinary soil, a mere pinch held in between thumb and forefinger. They represent thousands of species, almost none of which are known to science. Into that world I would go with the aid of modern microscopy and molecular analysis. I would cut my way through clonal forests sprawled across grains of sand, travel in an imagined submarine through drops of water proportionately the size of lakes, and track predators and prey in order to discover new life ways and alien food webs. All this, and I need venture no farther than ten paces outside my laboratory building. The jaguars, ants, and orchids would still occupy distant forests in all their splendor, but now they would be joined by an even stranger and vastly more complex living world virtually without end. For one more turn around I would keep alive the little boy of Paradise Beach who found wonder in a scyphozoan jellyfish and a barely glimpsed monster of the deep.

Coach Bobby put up his fists like a boxer. I did likewise, though my stance was far less rigid. I kept my knees flexed, bounced a bit. Bobby was a very big guy and local-neighborhood tough and used to intimidating opponents. But he was out of his league. A few quick facts about fighting. One, the cardinal rule: You never really know how it is going to go. Anyone can land a lucky blow. Overconfidence is always a mistake. But the truth was, Coach Bobby had virtually no chance. I don’t say this to sound immodest or repetitive. Despite what the parents in those rickety stands want to believe with their private coaches and overly aggressive third-grade travel league schedules, athletes are mostly created in the womb. Yes, you need the hunger and the training and the practice, but the difference, the big difference, is natural ability. Nature over nurture every time. I had been gifted with ridiculously quick reflexes and hand-eye coordination. That’s not bragging. It’s like your hair color or your height or your hearing. It just is. And I’m not even talking here about the years of training I did to improve my body and to learn how to fight. But that’s there too. Coach

Aztec peasants, Babylonian shepherds, Athenian stonemasons, and Carolingian merchants spoke different languages,2 wore different clothing, and prayed to different deities, but they all ate the same amount of food, lived the same number of years, traveled no farther—or faster—from their homes, and buried just as many of their children. Because while they made a lot more children—worldwide population grew a hundredfold between 5000 BCE and 1600 CE, from 5 to 500 million—they didn’t make much of anything else. The best estimates for human productivity (a necessarily vague number) calculate annual per capita GDP, expressed in constant 1990 U.S. dollars, fluctuating between $400 and $550 for seven thousand years. The worldwide per capita GDP in 800 BCE3—$543—is virtually identical to the number in 1600. The average person of William Shakespeare’s time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer’s.

virtually the entire senior staff and cabinet of the Trump presidency, past and present, had traveled through the stages of adventure, challenge, frustration, battle, self-justification, and doubt, before finally having to confront the very real likelihood that the president they worked for—whose presidency they bore some official responsibility for—didn’t have the wherewithal to adequately function in his job.

Where does scale come from? Scale is nature repeating the same step over and over. Complexity increases over time. The more complexity, the more information. The idea of virtual dimensions is that action, in relation to it's source, chooses a direction and depending on the action, creates the path it travels through, there is no empty stage that was there before the action. When a photon takes off in some particular direction a two dimensional virtual sheet is created for the wave to travel through. An interruption can create a one dimensional time-like line perpendicular to the sheet (the collapse of the wave function) to occur. The motion is transferred from these various virtual dimensions in discrete or quantum-like ratios. All of the relationships are discrete but not necessarily the scale. The curvature of space and time are variations of scale.

In case you don’t know, there’s virtually no security with private jet travel. No scanners for bags or body searches. I guess the smart guys at Homeland Security figure rich people have little interest in blowing up their own jets en route. Anyway, you could literally pack a hundred pounds of pure heroin and fly anywhere domestically.

Reality (with capital "R") is just a form of consensus among individuals. It's only real what is considered to be real according to an arbitrary agreement amongst us. Esse est percipi. So, is traveling to a virtual destination still traveling? Well, it all depends on what we agree upon. And nothing has meaning per se.

The metaverse is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It will unlikely replace traveling tout-court, but it will definitely play a role in it, especially in the early, top-funnel touchpoints of the traveler's journey. Currently, we pick a hotel founding our decision based on photos, videos, and reviews only, while the metaverse could provide a more immersive experience, and allow us to immerse in a destination, book a hotel room or a restaurant table while sitting at our couch, and -eventually- live the experience in the physical world. It's what I call "travel research on steroids." No static image, 2D video, or website will ever be able to deliver a comparable experience. It's the next level of the "try before you buy" concept. And, quite frankly, we're just scratching the surface.

Il Cambridge Dictionary definisce l’atto di viaggiare come “muoversi, di solito su una lunga distanza”. Nel metaverso, tuttavia, il concetto stesso di spazio non ha senso. Ecco perché la maggior parte degli addetti ai lavori è ancora scettica sulle applicazioni pratiche del metaverso in ambito turistico. Se si rimuove una parte essenziale (la distanza) dall’equazione travel, rimane solo il movimento. E resta, quindi, anche la domanda cruciale: viaggiare senza muoversi è ancora viaggiare?

The metaverse is far from being just VR. The metaverse, conceptually, is not Fornite, Minecraft, or The Sims. It's not an Instagram filter that turns you into a unicorn. It's not a Black Mirror episode, either. It's a new way to interact with reality(ies), being real-life, AR, VR, or MR. But, more interesting, the metaverse can (and probably will) be a fully functioning economy. How this will affect travel is still largely unknown, and even though I can foresee some of the Metaverse applications, the "hows and whys" are still nebulous.

Want to visit the Ciudad Perdida, Atlantis, or Ancient Rome? You can travel back in time and experience something you can no longer do in the physical world (aka the "meat space"). Wanna check another planet out? Yup. Inspect your meeting room two weeks before the actual congress? Sure! Can the metaverse help persons with reduced mobility (PRM) take that trip they always dreamt of? You bet. The "embodied internet" is virgin territory for the hospitality industry (for any industry, for that matter), and we're still in the embryo stage of the technology.

Dopo un quarto di secolo passato nel settore dell’Hospitality e del Travel, io non punto a diventare Ministro del Turismo. Punto a diventarne il Tyler Durden…

once you become a patient—vulnerable, scared, passive—then you need a doctor, a real doctor-person—calm, authoritative, wise. And since all of us, even the youngest, healthiest, fiercest hacker will, in the end, be in that place—which to discover we must travel to—we all need a system that incorporates both: the virtual and the real, the digital and the analog, the Fast and the Slow. And I believe we will have it.

Digital tools, on the other hand, shrink us down to a small set of options. Virtually all music software is made in the United States or Europe. These programs all tend to do the same thing, in varying amounts, and that thing defaults to a narrow concept of what music can or should be. It matters because more and more music is being made using this tiny number of systems. Software tools are never neutral. They reinforce their builders’ blind spots and biases and, once widely distributed, play an active role in maintaining those assumptions.

Yesterday we used to book on paper catalogs. Today we do it on Booking.com, and tomorrow we’ll use Decentraland. The Metaverse is not changing how we book or experience hotels and travel; it is simply changing the medium through which we do it. It is like saying that since we switched from booking from telephone to email, we have dematerialized travel. It’s pure nonsense.

Roblox has 50 million daily users, including many young people who may not be able to book a hotel room themselves (yet) but who can influence their parents’ travel decisions.

We lobbied Congress, and the idea of boosting this sector in U.S. manufacturing caught on. Congress secured our loan guarantees, significantly reducing our cost of capital. Ingalls Shipbuilding in Pascagoula, Mississippi, won the contract and began refurbishing our first ship. It was scheduled to begin service by late 2002, and the second ship was slated for 2004. The scenario positioned American Classic for a great decade of growth. Then September 11 happened. Since American Classic’s business was predicated on passengers flying to Hawaii to access our ships, the virtual halt in leisure air travel sank the company. Our shares plummeted, and American Classic was delisted. Our shareholders lost millions, as did the shipbuilders. I personally lost about $100 million. I’d taken the risk, but circumstances beyond my control intervened. It happens.

Rouhani, was elected in 2013. Obama had set his sights on working out a deal with the mad mullahs as early as 2008. You mean he came into office to do the deal? Now you got the rest of the story. He was handpicked to do the deal. Where did this unknown ghost come from? This man, this administration, was handpicked by foreign powers that manipulated him into the presidency. Because of the liars in the media, he has been able to get away with virtual murder. The murder of the truth, the murder of our national security. I know many lives were, let us say, seriously challenged during the HUAC hearings of the McCarthy era, but I want to ask you something. Have you read the Venona papers? The Soviet-era secret correspondence that came out a little over two decades ago, which confirmed that almost everything that Joseph McCarthy had been saying about the news media and Hollywood was true? That there were communists who were openly subverting America? Can anyone tell me the name of someone whose life was actually ruined by HUAC who was not really working to subvert America, who was not really a communist or fellow traveler? I’d like to know whose life was ruined. I think it’s a myth that lives of innocent people were ruined. I know there were movies made, I remember The Front with Zero Mostel, in which he played an innocent actor who jumped out of a window because the House Un-American Activities Committee was after him. Hollywood has made many, many movies about the blacklist. We hear about the blacklist. But how many innocent people’s lives were actually ruined? The operative word here is innocent. I’d like to know their names.

In the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with the Logos. The Logos is the Word of God. That Word transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time. In His human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence, He died and was reborn. The Word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity. Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us. In such cases, we might never recover or, if we do, we change a lot. A good friend of mine discovered that his wife of decades was having an affair. He didn’t see it coming. It plunged him into a deep depression. He descended into the underworld. He told me, at one point, “I always thought that people who were depressed should just shake it off. I didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.” Eventually, he returned from the depths. In many ways, he’s a new man—and, perhaps, a wiser and better man. He lost forty pounds. He ran a marathon. He travelled to Africa and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro. He chose rebirth over descent into Hell.

Of all the lynching photos Marshall had seen, though, it was the image of Rubin Stacy strung up by his neck on a Florida pine tree that haunted him most when he traveled at night into the South. It wasn’t the indentation of the rope that had cut into the flesh below the dead man’s chin, or even the bullet holes riddling his body, that caused Marshall, drenched now in sweat, to stir in his sleep. It was the virtually angelic faces of the white children, all of them dressed in their Sunday clothes, as they posed, grinning and smiling, in a semicircle around Rubin Stacy’s dangling corpse. In that horrid indifference to human suffering lay the legacy of yet another generation of white children, who, in turn, would without conscience prolong the agony of an entire other race.

Cooks find it hard to give up the way that meat and animal fat flavor things so intensely, but it’s so easy! An animal has transformed all the plants he ate into something with lots of complexity, and you need to learn a few tricks to get similar complexity with vegan dishes. But your palate will change, if you will only turn down the volume and listen. Living a plant-based life is like traveling light. Your system adjusts to foods that don’t weigh you down and take forever to digest. You may find that maintaining your weight gets easier, as long as you don’t hit vegan desserts too hard. The vegan mainstream has food manufacturers taking notice: Vegan-friendly packaged foods multiply daily. While that makes it easier to eat vegan, don’t become a junk-food vegan. The upside? Options in dairy-free milks, ice creams, and vegan-friendly sweeteners are growing. The downside? You can construct a vegan diet out of pudding cups, fake bologna, and white bread, but you will not be all that healthy doing it. You still have to seek balance and listen to your body. It will tell you how things are going, if you just pay attention. In the years I have spent cooking for vegans, it seems to me that what they craved most was special food—food for celebrations and shared dinners; food that really tastes great. It’s not that difficult to put together a big salad or sandwich on your own. Restaurants will happily strip down dishes and leave off the cheese. You can eat vegan and survive, but it’s the special foods that you crave. After going to the same sandwich shop a few times and having a sandwich with just veggies and no cheese, vegans want recipes for genuinely interesting food. A virtual world exists on the Internet, where vegans swap sources for marshmallow crème and recipes for mock cheese sauces. This book is my best effort for plant-based diners who want food that rocks. Why Vegan?

The crucial consideration, however, is where reliable solutions to the world’s problems will come from if it is not further development of chemistry. Chemistry holds the key to the enhancement of almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the cradle to the grave and all points in between. It has provided the material foundation of all our comforts, not only in health but in illness too, and there is no reason to suppose that it has reached its zenith. It contributes to our communications, both virtual and physical, for it provides the materials along which our electrons and photons travel in the complex network of patterns and interactions that result in computation. Moreover, it develops our fuels, rendering them more efficiently combustible and through catalysis minimizing their noxious products, and helps in the migration from fossil fuels to renewable sources, such as in the development of photovoltaic substances. Chemistry is the only solution to the problems it causes in the environment, be it in earth, air, or water.

La nozione centrale di "viaggio" potrebbe trasformarsi in modi che possiamo solo intravedere oggi. Pensa a come è cambiata negli anni la connotazione della parola “amico”. Fino al 2004, un amico era una persona fisica con cui uscivi nella vita reale. Dopo Facebook, il termine è diventato anche sinonimo di “connessione virtuale”, qualcuno con cui potresti non aver mai scambiato una singola parola. Quindi chissà cosa significherà viaggiare tra 10-15 anni. Possiamo solo speculare, ma, almeno in teoria, le applicazioni del metaverso sono illimitate: vuoi visitare Atlantide, l’Antica Roma o Marte? Puoi viaggiare nel tempo e nello spazio e sperimentare qualcosa che non esiste nel mondo fisico. Il travel ha un impatto catastrofico sull'ambiente. Il nostro settore, se continua così, farà alzare la temperatura di un grado e mezzo nel giro di 25 anni. Non lo dico io, ma i dati. Solo le emissioni di carbonio causate del volo civile sono cresciute del 75% dagli anni '90. Trovare alternative praticabili a un settore talmente dannoso per l'ambiente come il nostro non è solo auspicabile. È, a questo punto, obbligatorio.

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) -- after water, corn sweetener is their principal ingredient. Grab a beer for you beverage instead and you'd still be drinking corn, in the form of alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn. Read the ingredients on the label of any processed food and, provided you know the chemical names it travels under, corn is what you will find. For modified or unmodified starch, for glucose syrup and maltodextrin, for crystalline fructose and ascorbic acid, for lecithin and dextrose, lactic acid and lysine, for maltose and HFCS, for MSG and polyols, for the caramel color and xanthan gum, read: corn. Corn is in the coffee whitener and Cheez Whiz, the frozen yogurt and TV dinner, the canned fruit and ketchup and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and candies, the soups and snacks and cake mixes, the frosting and gravy and frozen waffles, the syrups and hot sauces, the mayonnaise and mustard, the hot dogs and the bologna, the margarine and shortening, the salad dressings and the relishes and even the vitamins. (Yes, it's in the Twinkie, too.) There are some forty-five thousand items in the average American supermarket and more than a quarter of them now contain corn. This goes for the nonfood items as well: Everything from the toothpaste and cosmetics to the disposable diapers, trash bags, cleansers, charcoal briquettes, matches, and batteries, right down to the shine on the cover of the magazine that catches your eye by the checkout: corn. Even in Produce on a day when there's ostensibly no corn for sale, you'll nevertheless find plenty of corn: in the vegetable wax that gives the cucumbers their sheen, in the pesticide responsible for the produce's perfection, even in the coating on the cardboard it was shipped in. Indeed, the supermarket itself -- the wallboard and joint compound, the linoleum and fiberglass and adhesives out of which the building itself has been built -- is in no small measure a manifestation of corn.

It’s traumatizing to think that a best friend could become just a friend. That’s because there is virtually no difference between an acquaintance and a friend. But the gulf between a friend and a best friend is enormous and profound. And if I look at it that way, I think I can see the value of a wedding. If you’re my best friend and the only way I get to have dinner with you is by traveling thousands of miles, selecting a chicken or fish option, and wearing a dress in the same shade of lavender as six other girls, I will do that. I won't love it. But I love you.

This sort of performative labour is typically enacted on an ever-expanding stage-set of "non-places", as anthropologist Marc Auge describes them: a programmed landscape of retail parks, travel networks, leisuredromes and virtualized call centres which could be anywhere or nowhere.

It was hard to believe that this was a route used virtually throughout the year by travelers, mule drivers and merchants. Anyone in their right mind would have regarded it as a means of suicide. Near the watershed, at an altitude of two thousand meters, amid peaks disappearing into the clouds, rather than a way of getting from point A to point B, the path seemed to have become quite simply a way of departing from all points at once.

The only difference between the impossible and the possible is your mindset. We have access to virtually all the world’s data at the click of a button. We can travel between continents in a matter of hours instead of weeks. We’re seeing medical breakthroughs to remedy conditions once considered fatal. Less than a century ago, these ideas were inconceivable and deemed impossible, and yet with hard work and perseverance, these dreams, like so many others, have become a reality. There will always be reasons not to do something, but don’t let them prevent you from accomplishing great things.

In the world of physics, when two spatially separated events occur at the same time, the question of whether they are absolute is a function of witnesses’ time frames, a phenomenon known as the relativity of simultaneity. The marriage of CAA and TPG arrived at a time when the CAA partners were still grappling with a radically changing media landscape and trying to get their own house in order financially. People believed TPG had summoned a series of budgetary reviews, but just as Noah started work on an ark before even a drop of rain, some financial controls were put in motion before TPG had to request, or insist upon, a single one. One affected area, expense accounts, may sound trifling, but not in the representation game. So it was that modifications in CAA’s travel and entertainment policies brought about changes in the culture as well. One example: For years the opulent St. Regis Hotel in New York City had served as a virtual dorm for CAA agents traveling on business. No more. New regulations were put in place prohibiting midlevel and junior agents from bunking there. Limits were also placed on dining allowances for midlevel and junior agents no matter what the city.

Dendera's so-called Light Bulbs rather portray two buds sprouting against each other while enclosing the geometry of the Great Pyramid. In this vivid relief, the snakes (from the passed night) of the 4th and 5th hours in the Duat exit the shafts at sunrise and sunset towards the pyramid's virtual apex. The settings of sunrise and sunset can be seen on the left and right buds respectively; on the left is a priest of Afu-Ra supporting the bud in the same direction of Afu-Ra's path while being on top of the seed whence it germinates, and on the right is the djed pillar (without Afu-Ra's priest) representing the support of the pyramid's structure itself. Both supports, however, do unequivocally depict the sacred location of the whole scenery being in the House of Ka which is (or part of) the House of Osiris (with his throne on top of the pyramid). The oval shape of the so-called bulbs is yet another indication of the relevancy of the process of regeneration (which takes place in the womb of the pyramid) to the Duat itself; birth takes place at sunrise and gets cycled back at sunset. Another evidence is found in a papyrus where the rising Osiris-Res is in the same pyramidal posture. And according to Budge (who quotes Bergmann), the djed pillar was also called 'The House of Sekher', which I cannot help but interpret as Seker. The elements on the left side are carried on top of a barque signaling Afu-Ra's slanted journey in the southern shaft, whereas the right bud is sprouting on top of a horizontal floor showing probably the King's Chamber horizontal displacement from the center of the pyramid. Another relief shows one single bud combining both of the other buds together in one single scene; the scene of the sunrise. This relief is found right across the hall on the opposite wall. It depicts Afu-Ra's travel from the northern shaft by placing the djed pillar on the boat and in front of the priest. Another subtle difference is seen on the djed pillar's ka in which it touches the snake instead of the oval womb. It hence emphasizes the events surmounting the 5th hour (instead of the 4th). The ka is plucking the snake-like scepter to enact the scene of the 6th hour when the souls rise on their scepters and get provided with knives. And surely enough, an odd creature stands right in front of the bud with two knives in his hands. The presence of giants on these reliefs -who carry these buds- prove my assertion that the whole scene is taking place on a huge structure (i.e. pyramid), and the presence of two priests at the center facing each other (instead of giving their backs to one another) is a vivid representation of the Equinoxes; the time when the snakes creep into and out from the shafts.

Hello 2k Players! Get ready to be in your DND (Do Not Disturb) mode and sleepless nights because NBA 2K18 is here and it is here to stay. If you still do not have it, be sure to get hold of it as fast as you can. Also, continue reading if you would like to find out where to get and how to use the NBA 2K18 Locker Codes Generator for free! [Copy link to your browser to visit] ==>> nba2k18freevc.net There have been a lot of different look and set up. Small and intricate details are added but this just makes it even better. NBA2K18 still have the same general notion as what it continues to offer over the years, but those added details and new look makes it even better with a totally different feel. Great graphics as always plus a whole new lot of customizing your character. We will get to that in a little while. In NBA2K18, MyCareer now caps off and limits your character’s skill set and abilities, but there is a way out and improve. Increase your character’s skills and abilities like agility and play-making by practicing. Yes, you heard it right, practice, practice and more practice. There is a training room where you can either hang out to chill or train your character through shooting. By continuously playing, you will fill up a blue bar to unlock and go above that cap. In addition, NBA2K18 also offers traveling to different places and play in different courts. While changing location will surely entail loading in the game, NBA2K18 loading is quick. Given of course that you have a decent and stable internet connection. Gameplay is also a little bit different because now you can play any position you want, may it be Forward, Center, etc. Of course, depending on your player as well. Also, be sure to download the MyNBA2K18 app from iOS or Android store and login with the same account you use for NBA 2K18 for you to earn VC. You can use the app to start scanning your face, which will then be uploaded into your account to be used for your own character. Remember to complete the warm up challenges to start your NBA journey. NBA2K18 also offers League Pack Boxes which are available for purchase using VC (Virtual Currency). Another thing is that you can also unlock levels with your VC from Rookie to Pro to All Star to Superstar and then of course, Legend. Spend dollars acquire VC points which will then let you to upgrade attributes, unlock items and avail different packages. Do you want more NBA 2K18 Locker Codes? Now if you want or maybe in dire need of VCs and upgrade your gameplay, you may want to try our NBA 2K18 Locker Codes Generator for free. In case that you didn’t know, locker codes can unlock items, VCs and a lot more. The generated locker codes are highly suitable for these devices: Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, XBOX ONE and XBOX360. Again, this is for free and you can generate fresh, new, and unlimited locker codes. Note that we have also added security features in the NBA 2K18 Locker Codes Generator that will help ensure that it always stay as secure, safe from any viruses and untraceable from any game banns.

Philosophy begins by asking the question "Why?" As humanity meets myriad phenomena and objects. That is, it starts from asking the question "why is this?" About all phenomena and things, and trying to give a rational answer to it. This is now a problem consciousness shared by virtually all disciplines, and philosophy can soon be regarded as the source of many other disciplines. ADHD환자용으로 이용되는 페니드 애더럴 등 좋은제품으로 모셔드리겠습니다 카톡【AKR331】텔레【RDH705】라인【SPR331】위커【SPR705】 경영4년차로 단골분들 엄청모시고 운영하는 신용신뢰의 거래처입니다 24시간 언제든지 연락주세요 Compared to general Korean guidebooks, the proportion of pictures is small, and the amount of text and information is high. Therefore, it is often explained more in detail than the Korean guidebook. [3] Because it is a book for people from all over the world, there are local boards in Korea that have no guidebooks. For example, Central Asia. With the exception of The World, which has a language conversation house and other special guidebooks and general tourist information from all countries around the world, it is generally published in three categories: a regional guidebook - a country guidebook - a city guidebook, [4] The amount of information is, of course, increasing as the range of treatment is narrowed. Russia, for example, is covered in Eastern Europe, the guidebook for the country, Russia, the guidebook for the country, and Moscow - Saint Petersburg, the city guidebook. There is also a special guidebook, the Trans - Siberian Railway. In the United States, where the largest number of countries are issued, the five-tiered configuration can be seen in the United States - US West - California - California Coast - San Francisco. There are even guidebooks for different national parks in North America. On the other hand, North Korea comes out with a bill (...) in Pyongyang guidebook. The extreme courses, Brunei and Luxembourg, which are very small, are treated like appendices of Malaysia and Belgium, respectively. Travelable areas can be found both in the National Guide Book or in the Regions Guide Book. In the case of Iraq, which is the most unreachable area, it is also included in the guidebook of the Middle East centered on Kurdistan which is practically possible to travel. Somalia has Somaliland in Ethiopia & Djibouti. On the other hand, popular attractions such as France and London are revised every two years, and the top tourist attractions, such as Rome, were revised in 2013 and 2014. Even if it is somewhat unpopular, it will be revised for up to 5 years. In Korea, Lonely Planet does not have much of a mistake, but there are opinions that it is too old for price information or many reasons. [5] If you read it carefully, there are a lot of things that you feel are not written for "travelers", but for those who came to "foreign language instructors". And even if Korea is small, there are some opinions that the amount is too poor for the guidebooks of the two Koreas. One of the advantages of Korea is that public transportation is cheap and well developed, and travel information is concentrated only in certain areas of Seoul.

Research in resonance and sound shows that if living beings operate or resonate on similar vibrations, one can affect the other. Yet another set of studies hints that there is sharing of energy and intention through the upper range of the electromagnetic spectrum. Replicated studies indicate a significant decrease in gamma rays from patients during alternative healing practices. This suggests that the body’s gamma emitter, a form of potassium, regulates the surrounding electromagnetic field.93 Gamma rays materialize when matter (such as an electron) and its antimatter counterpart (a positron) annihilate on impact. As we have seen, antimatter has the opposite charge and spin of matter. When electrons and positrons collide, they release specific types of gamma rays. Years ago, Nikola Tesla suggested that the gamma rays found on earth emanate from the zero-point field.94 Though it appears as a vacuum, this field is actually quite full, serving as a crossroads for virtual and subatomic particles and fields. When we perform healing, it is possible that we are actually tapping into this zero-point or universal field, shifting its power through intention. Still another theory is that we are accessing torsion fields, fields that travel at 109 times the speed of light. These fields are hypothesized as conveying information without transmitting energy and with no time lapse.95 Part of this suggested effect is based on the definition of time as a vector of the magnetic field. When torsion and gravitational fields function in opposing directions, the torsion field can conceivably alter the magnetic functions, and therefore the vector of time. When superimposed on a specific area in a gravitational field, it might also reduce the effect of gravity in that spot.96 These torsion fields have been researched by Peter Gariaev and Vladimir Poponin, Russian scientists who discovered that photons travel along the DNA molecule in spirals rather than along a linear pathway, which shows that DNA has the ability to bend light around itself. Some physicists believe that this twisting or “torsion-shaped” energy is an intelligent light, emanating from higher dimensions and different from electromagnetic radiation, giving rise to DNA. Many researchers now believe that these torsion waves are consciousness, composing the soul and serving as the precursor to DNA.97