Wiener Quotes

Bad boys, bad boys, whatcha gonna do, watcha gonna do when they cut your wiener,” Gavin sang as he pointed his gun at random objects. “Wow, cops have gotten pretty hardcore lately” Carter muttered.

Heroes like you always have a weak spot. We just have to find it, and then we can kill you. Won't that be lovely? Have a cheese 'n' Wiener!

Girls aren’t supposed to see wieners, Aunt Dee.  And Daddy’s wiener was mad that Mommy saw.  It was so mad, it was pointing at her!

The world of the future will be an even more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves.

She looked up, her face pink as a Christmas ham. “You ever try chasing down a car?” she gasped. “I’ll one-up you. I gave Scott my hot dog and asked if he’d go to Summer Solstice with me.” “What does the hot dog have to do with anything?” “I said he’d be a wiener if he didn’t go with me.” Vee wheezed laughter. “I’d have run harder had I known I’d get to see you call him a wiener.

Poe, you wiener, get your ass over here!" "Shut Up! I ain't a wiener!" Broken, adolescent male laughter echoed through the night air, and if I hadn't been so damned mad, I'd have laughed too. Something about hearing a group of idiotic pubescent fifteen-year-old boys say wiener just cracked me up.

And then I remember this morning and I wonder if it really happened or if I dreamed it. It was nice. And weird. And tender. I'm not used to tender. It's a fossil, that word. Conditions changed and it died out. Like the woolly mammoth. It just couldn't live in the same world as dick box. Ho dog. Or wiener cousins.

I'm going to put corn and hot sauce on your wiener, and then I'll hit you in the face with it. Hit you in the face with your corny wiener.

What are you smiling about? Do you have gas?" Drew joked. "Hey, Mommy, Carter has a HUGE wiener," Gavin said around a mouthful of cookie, holding his hands up in the air about three feet apart, like you do when you're telling someone how big the fish is you just caught. Claire quickly reached over and pushed Gavin's arms down while everyone else at the table laughed. I just sat back and smiled and tried to keep my anaconda penis tucked under the table so it wouldn't scare anyone.

We are not the stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves.

Nichts gibt so sehr das Gefühl der Unendlichkeit als wie die Dummheit.

Progress imposes not only new possibilities for the future but new restrictions.

The internet was a collective howl, an outlet for everyone to prove that they mattered.

Wieners, punch, and spinning into barfing would later be referred to as the "Paris Hilton".

Wow, Carter. You've got a HUGE wiener." Suddenly, Gavin being in the bathroom with me didn’t seem so bad. If only he could have been in the bathroom with me in eighth grade and passed that little tidbit around for Penny Frankles to hear, I might not have gone to the eight grade graduation dance solo. I finished pissing, zipped up my pants and flushed the toilet, all while trying not to pat myself on the back. Yeah, I had a huge wiener. You bet your sweet ass I did. I almost needed a wheelbarrow to carry it around. And because a toddler said it, it must have been true. We got back to the table and I couldn't keep the shit-eating grin off of my face.

My fingers touch each other and he’s squishy, like a sea cucumber. Those creatures are a demonstration of God’s fixation with wieners.

It’s still weird seeing you with a guy,” Vick said. “Not that I’m against two wieners tucking into each other’s buns. To each his own.

I learned that when people see a dachshund, they have to yell, "A wiener dog!" Like "A rainbow!" "A Shriner!" "A shooting star!" "A clown!" "A nudist colony!

You've got to have, like, a lentil for a soul to hate wiener dogs.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women's rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women's rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens' rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia.

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.

Oh my God. I kneed him in the wiener. And oh my frigging God, it was like stone.

For Wiener, entropy was a measure of disorder; for Shannon, of uncertainty. Fundamentally, as they were realizing, these were the same.

Between wiener juice and lung blood, I’d say that chambray shirt was a goner.

Spirituality has always felt to me as private as sexuality. We don't go waving our wieners all over the place and we shouldn't wave our gods around either.

Warm laundry, radio, waiting for the bus. I could get frustrated, overextended, overwhelmed, uncomfortable. Sometimes I ran late. But these banal inefficiencies—I thought they were luxuries, the mark of the unencumbered. Time to do nothing, to let my mind run anywhere, to be in the world. At the very least, they made me feel human.

Information is information, not matter or energy.

The future science of government should be called 'la cybernétique' (1843) {Coining the French word to mean 'the art of governing,' from the Greek (Kybernetes = navigator or steersman), subsequently adopted as cybernetics by Norbert Wiener for the field of control and communication theory.}

The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech’s dark triad: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity.

If the personalized playlists were full of sad singer-songwriters, I could only blame myself for getting the algorithm depressed.

Did you know … Werner Herzog is too self-conscious to eat Wiener Hotdogs?

You'd be wise not to judge me based on one flaming wiener.

Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself awy from the computer, to read a magazine or book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find the prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could have only been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.

The best material model of a cat is another, or preferably the same, cat.

It was like an entire generation had developed its political identity online, using the style and tone of internet forums.

Tech, for the most part, wasn't progress. It was just business.

That guy’s an asshole,” Leo growled. “Don’t think I’m going to forget what he said to you. Let’s see how he likes it when he wakes up in the morning and finds himself with several gay porn site subscriptions. His inbox will be flooded with so many wieners he’ll have to change his name to Oscar Mayer.

Following my accident, I plumped up like a freshly roasted wiener, my skin cracking to accommodate the expanding meat. The doctors, with their hungry scalpels, hastened the process with a few quick slices. The procedure is called an escharotomy, and it gives the swelling tissue the freedom to expand. It's rather like the uprising of your secret inner being, finally given license to claw through the surface. The doctors thought they had sliced me open to commence my healing but, in fact, they only release the monster- a thing of engorged flesh, suffused with juice.

I know it hurts. But, girl, right now you need to see how much better you can do than Becker with a small pecker." I crack and can't hold back the tiny smile. "He does have a small wiener." "See? And you would’ve been stuck with that for the rest of your life! There are so many better guys out there. Guys who come packing.

We were all from North America. We were all white, and in our twenties and thirties. These were not individual moral failings, but they didn't help. We were aware we had blind spots. They were still blind spots.

I didn’t think to mention that if he wanted more women in leadership roles, perhaps we should start by hiring more women. I didn’t note that even if we did hire more women, there were elements of our office culture that women might find uncomfortable. Instead, I told him I would do whatever he needed.

Why did it feel so taboo, I asked, to approach work the way most people did, as a trade of my time and labor for money? Why did we have to pretend it was all so fun? Leah nodded, curls bobbing. ‘That's real,’ she said. ‘But I wonder if you're forcing things. Your job can be in service of the rest of your life.

Mathematics, which most of us see as the most factual of all sciences, constitutes the most colossal metaphor imaginable, and must be judged, aesthetically as well as intellectually in terms of the success of this metaphor.

Instead of being an artificial intelligence, I was an intelligent artifice, an empathetic text snippet or a warm voice giving instructions, listening comfortingly.

And that better be the only wiener you put in your mouth. We do not give blow jobs so that boys will like us!" Claire roars, and Connor nearly chokes on his beer

He entertained himself by slipping increasingly outrageous puns into the copy, which culminated in a headline about a dachshund race that read, “All Wieners in the Long Run.

Being the only woman on a nontechnical team, providing customer support to software developers, was like immersion therapy for internalized misogyny. I liked men—I had a brother. I had a boyfriend. But men were everywhere: the customers, my teammates, my boss, his boss. I was always fixing things for them, tiptoeing around their vanities, cheering them up. Affirming, dodging, confiding, collaborating. Advocating for their career advancement; ordering them pizza. My job had placed me, a self-identified feminist, in a position of ceaseless, professionalized deference to the male ego.

It is the thesis of this book that society can only be understood through a study of the messages and the communication facilities which belong to it; and that in the future development of these messages and communication facilities, messages between man and machines, between machines and man, and between machine and machine, are destined to play an ever-increasing part.

I felt rising frustration and resentment. I was frustrated because I felt stuck, and I was resentful because I was stuck in an industry that was chipping away at so many things I cared about.

I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America's soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn't personal at all. It had become a global affliction.

Yes, Mom. Wrap it before you tap it. Or was it don’t be silly and wrap your willy?” Suli tapped her chin. “No. I think it was sex is cleaner with a packaged wiener!” “SULI!” I yelped. “Where are you learning this stuff?” “Don’t forget to cover your stump before you hump,” Albert interjected.

My impulse, over the past few years, had been to remove myself from my own life, to watch from the periphery and try to see the vectors, the scaffolding, the systems at play. Psychologists might refer to this as dissociation; I considered it the sociological approach. It was, for me, a way out of unhappiness.

The mark of a hustler, a true entrepreneurial spirit, was creating the job that you wanted and making it look indispensable, even if it was institutionally unnecessary. This was an existential strategy for the tech industry itself, and it did not come naturally to me.

It is the part of the scientist—of the intelligent and honest man of letters and of the intelligent and honest clergyman as well—to entertain heretical and forbidden opinions experimentally, even if he is finally to reject them.

communication engineering began with Gauss, Wheatstone, and the first telegraphers.

I realise I'm behind on this but Rebekah Brooks was married to Ross Kemp of Gangs fame?! And she assaulted him? That explains so much.

There was something to be said for expertise.

or the stack of data-driven T-shirts I kept

For all the women who’ve never been skinny dipping because you weren’t skinny. You can go chunky dunkin’ with me and the Kingman boys.

Scientific discovery consists in the interpretation for our own convenience of a system of existence which has been made with no eye to our convenience at all. One of the chief duties of a mathematician in acting as an advisor to scientists is to discourage them from expecting too much of mathematicians.

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization...In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system...It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems indifferent to us. This is no defeatism...The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build up an enclave of organization in the face of nature's overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too... All this represents the manner in which I believe I have been able to add something positive to the pessimism of...the existensialists. I have not replaced the gloom of existence by a philosophy which is optimistic in any Pollyanna sense, but...with a positive attitude toward the universe and toward our life in it.

I still clung to the belief that I could find meaning and fulfillment in work - the result of over two decades of educational affirmation, parental encouragement, socioeconomic privilege, and generational mythology.

Organism is opposed to chaos, to disintegration, to death, as message is to noise. To describe an organism, we do not try to specify each molecule in it, and catalogue it bit by bit, but rather to answer certain questions about it which reveal its pattern: a pattern which is more significant and less probable as the organism becomes, so to speak, more fully an organism.

His brain … he thinks with his big, ole, egotistical wiener. All guys do. It leads Brax Jenkins around like a magical porn radar wand. It has now honed in on your virginal hands-off hootchie cootchie. Guard it well, chica. He’ll snatch it right out from under you like a fucking bandito if you don’t.

Many people suppose that computing machines are replacements for intelligence and have cut down the need for original thought,” Wiener wrote. “This is not the case.”14 The more powerful the computer, the greater the premium that will be placed on connecting it with imaginative, creative, high-level human thinking.

And how do you know he has a big dick? You’ve seen him once. And it was a five-second ‘Oh, that’s my boss, Kline’ conversation while we were walking across the parking lot. You haven’t even met him in person.” “Five seconds is all I need.” She tapped the side of her head. “You know my cockdar is off the chain. I can sense a giant swinging penis pendulum from at least ten miles away. It’s a God-given talent, Georgie.” I choked on my wine. “Let’s not bring God into this.” She raised an eyebrow. “God knows the G-spot needs a more than adequate-sized wiener to get the job done.” “I’m pretty sure that comment just got you wait-listed for heaven.

Had Martha Foley returned William [James Sidis]'s passion as Margaret [Engemann] did Norbert [Wiener]'s, perhaps the two prodigies would have had more in common in the long run. ... In the life of a prodigy, perhaps more than in the average life, a marriage or a requited love is the greatest single factor that can heal the old childhood wounds. William and Norbert's response to their childhood and teenage rejections and humiliations was to retreat into the painless world of ideas, where successes and satisfactions abounded. A successful love affair could be the key to reentry into the world of feeling, bridging the gap between the cerebral and the emotional lives.

The most horrible thing about her? She was still holding her big platter of free samples: Crispy Cheese 'n' Wieners. Her platter was dented from all the times Percy had killed her, but those little samples looked perfectly fine. Stheno just kept toting them across California so she could offer Percy a snack before she killed him. Percy didn't know why she kept doing that, but if he ever needed a suit of armour he was going to make it out of Crispy Cheese 'n' Wieners. They were indestructible. 'Try one?' Stheno offered.

Ich hörte, dass Karl May der Öffentlichkeit so lange als guter Schriftsteller galt, bis irgendwelche Missetaten aus seiner Jugend bekannt wurden. Angenommen aber, er hat sie begangen, so beweist mir das nichts gegen ihn - vielleicht sogar manches für ihn. Jetzt vermute ich in ihm erst recht einen Dichter!" (Neues Wiener Tagblatt, 20 November 1935)

I gave him a shove out the gate and went back inside to figure out how the fuck I was going to woo my girl. Oh shit. Yeah. She was mine. She just didn’t know it yet.

We are all of the same substance, the same life. Though there are many differences between us, those are merely the shadows that delineate our boundaries. Our light is the same.

There are two ways to deal with the cold—put on a fur coat to be warm, or light a fire so that others can be warm, too.

Moving to another city is to change the accent of your affections.

Kelsey sang this love song about being cozy with the one you love, and I swear to god she was looking right at me. Why would she do that to my heart? I was dead now. Deceased. Dust.

A Short Ode To Sausage "Sad to say, there are people who regard lovers of sausages as relics from a kind of nutritional Dark Ages"…---Charles Simic, poet. Theologically, I’d say I was predestined to eat animals carefully stuffed inside their own intestines. I’m the first to eat knockwurst, and the last in a cholesterol tsunami to relinquish my salami to the authorities. Whether beef, lamb or pork-- it will end up on my fork. (I’m clear about my priorities.) And for those who go into hysterics proclaiming sausages barbaric, I want you to understand: That though you might be leaner you can only have my wiener if you pry it from my cold dead hands.

For any machine subject to a varied external environment to act effectively it is necessary that information concerning the results of its own action be furnished to it as part of the information on which it must continue to act.

All this time, and I could just leave. I could have left months ago. For nearly two years, I had been seduced by the confidence of young men. They made it look so simple, knowing what you wanted and getting it. I had been ready to believe in them, eager to organize my life around their principles. I had trusted them to tell me who I was, what mattered, how to live. I had trusted them to have a plan, and trusted that it was the best plan for me. I thought they knew something I did not know. I swam in relief. Watching the city, wrapped in Ian’s jacket, I did not see that I was in good company: an entire culture had been seduced. I understood my blind faith in ambitious, aggressive, arrogant young men from America’s soft suburbs as a personal pathology, but it wasn’t personal at all. It had become a global affliction.

This control of a machine on the basis of its actual performance rather than its expected performance is known as feedback, and involves sensory members which are actuated by motor members and perform the function of tell-tales or monitors—that is, of elements which indicate a performance. It is the function of these mechanisms to control the mechanical tendency toward disorganization; in other words, to produce a temporary and local reversal of the normal direction of entropy.

Que sea la tumba de un niño no identificado. Que esté vacía. Que sea, después de todo, una tumba abierta o reabierta, infinitamente profanada, mostrada como parte de una exhibición que cuenta la historia triunfal de una civilización sobre otras.

Yeah, you like that? You like it when Big Papa gives you his hot and juicy wiener?” I pant, my hips hammering against her. Her fists yank my hair, pulling my head away from her neck so hard that I see stars. “Ow! What the fuck?” I complain as she gives me a dirty look. “You cannot say shit like that when we’re fucking. You Just can’t,” she warns me, letting out a low groan when I shift my hips and grind my pubic bone against her clit. “What’s wrong with a little dirty talk? I thought you’d like it.” “I like dirty talk. I LOVE dirty talk. What you’re doing is not dirty talk. It’s ‘weird as fuck’ talk. Repeat after me: I love fucking you, your pussy is so tight,” Ava demands. (Well, damn, that was hot. I kind of wish I had a vagina right now).

The endgame was the same for everyone: Growth at any cost. Scale above all. Disrupt, then dominate. At the end of the idea: A world improved by companies improved by data. A world of actionable metrics, in which developers would never stop optimizing and users would never stop looking at their screens. A world freed of decision-making, the unnecessary friction of human behavior, where everything—whittled down to the fastest, simplest, sleekest version of itself—could be optimized, prioritized, monetized, and controlled.

My desires were generic. I wanted to find my place in the world, and be independent, useful, and good. I wanted to make money, because I wanted to feel affirmed, confident, and valued. I wanted to be taken seriously. Mostly, I didn’t want anyone to worry about me.

There is a belief, current in many countries, which has been elevated to the rank of an official article of faith in the United States, that free competition is itself a homeostatic process: that in a free market the individual selfishness of the bargainers, each seeking to sell as high and buy as low as possible, will result in the end in a stable dynamics of prices, and with redound to the greatest common good. This is associated with the very comforting view that the individual entrepreneur, in seeking to forward his own interest, is in some manner a public benefactor and has thus earned the great rewards with which society has showered him. Unfortunately, the evidence, such as it is, is against this simpleminded theory. The market is a game, which has indeed received a simulacrum in the family game of Monopoly. It is thus strictly subject to the general theory of games, developed by von Neumann and Morgenstern. This theory is based on the assumption that each player, at every stage, in view of the information then available to him, plays in accordance with a completely intelligent policy, which will in the end assure him of the greatest possible expectation of reward.

I wasted time scrolling through the photos and errant musings of people I should have long since forgotten, and exchanged endless, searching emails with friends, in which we swapped inexpert professional and dating advice. I read the online archives of literary magazines that no longer existed, digitally window-shopped for clothing I could not afford, and created and abandoned private, aspirational blogs with names like A Meaningful Life, in the vain hope that they might push me closer to leading one.

This concentration of public pain was new to me, unsettling. I had never seen such a shameful juxtaposition of blatant suffering and affluent idealism. It was a well-publicized disparity, but one I had underestimated. As a New Yorker, I had thought I was prepared. I thought I’d seen it all. I felt humbled and naïve—and guilty, all the time.

I was worried about a lot of things: loneliness, failure, earthquakes. But I wasn't too worried about my soul. There had always been two sides to my personality. One side was sensible and organized, good at math; appreciative of order, achievement, authority, rules. The other side did everything it could to undermine the first. I behaved as if the first side dominated, but it did not. I wished it did: practicality, I thought, was a safe hedge against failure. It seemed an easier way to move through the world.

My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.a

We are but whirlpools in a river of ever-flowing water. We are not stuff that abides, but patterns that perpetuate themselves. A pattern is a message, and may be transmitted as a message. How else do we employ our radio than to transmit patterns of sound, and our television set than to transmit patterns of light? It is amusing as well as instructive to consider what would happen if we were to transmit the whole pattern of the human body, of the human brain with its memories and cross connections, so that a hypothetical receiving instrument could re-embody these messages in appropriate matter,

> In effect, though Wiener didn't quite express it this way, cybernetics was offering an alternative to the Skinnerian worldview, in which human beings were just stimulus-response machines to be manipulated and conditioned for their own good. It was likewise offering an alternative to von Neumann's worldview, wherein human beings were unrealistically rational technocrats capable of anticipating, controlling, and managing their society with perfect confidence. Instead, cybernetics held out a vision of humans as neither gods nor clay but rather "machines" of the new kind, embodying purpose—and thus, autonomy. No, we were not the absolute masters of our universe; we lived in a world that was complex, confusing, and largely uncontrollable. But neither were we helpless. We were embedded in our world, in constant communication with our environment and one another. We had the power to act, to observe, to learn from our mistakes, and to grow. "From the point of view of cybernetics, the world is an organism," Wiener declared in his autobiography. "In such a world, knowledge is in its essence the process of knowing. . . . Knowledge is an aspect of life which must be interpreted while we are living, if it is to be interpreted at all. Life is the continual interplay between the individual and his environment rather than a way of existing under the form of eternity.

I repeat, feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. If these results are merely used as numerical data for the criticism of the system and its regulation, we have the simple feedback of the control engineers. If, however, the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning.

Norbert Wiener,” Tillingford said. “You recall his work in cybernetics. And, even more important, Enrico Destini’s work in the field of theophonics.” “What’s that?” Tillingford raised an eyebrow. “You are a specialist, my boy. Communication between man and God, of course. Using Wiener’s work, and using the invaluable material of Shannon and Weaver, Destini was able to set up the first really adequate system of communication between Earth and Heaven in 1946. Of course, he had the use of all that equipment from the War Against the Pagan Hordes, those damned Wotan-Worshiping, Oak-Tree-Praising Huns.” “You mean the—Nazis?” “I’m familiar with that term. That’s sociologist jargon, isn’t it? And that Denier of the Prophet, that Anti-Bab. They say he’s still alive down in Argentina. Found the elixir of eternal youth or something. He made that pact with the devil in 1939, you remember. Or was that before your time? But you know about it—it’s history.” “I

Was I trying too hard to make this mean something? I asked Leah. Was that just buying into the industry's own narratives about itself? I tried to summarize the frantic, self-important work culture in Silicon Valley, how everyone was optimizing their bodies for longer lives, which would then be spent productively; how it was frowned upon to acknowledge that a tech job was a transaction rather than a noble mission or a seat on a rocket ship. In this respect, it was not unlike book publishing: talking about doing work for money felt like screaming the safe word. While perhaps not unique to tech--it may even have been endemic to a generation--the expectation was overbearing. Why did it feel so taboo, I asked, to approach work the way most people did, as a trade of my time and labor for money? Why did we have to pretend it was all so fun? Leah nodded, curls bobbing. "That's real," she said. "but I wonder if you're forcing things. Your job can be in service of the rest of your life." She reached out to squeeze my wrist, then leaned her head against the window. "You're allowed to enjoy your life," she said. The city streaked past, the bridge cables flickering like a delay, or a glitch.

E infine lord Barron le sorrise come un predatore che abbia appena fiutato nella foresta la scia della preda. «Non vi preoccupate, mia cara, vi condurrò io.» Iniziarono a piroettare sulla pista, seguendo il ritmo del Wiener Bonbons di Strauss, mentre tutte le altre figure divenivano forme sfocate e indistinte. Lei non aveva mai ballato un valzer in vita sua, ma quella poteva dirsi l’ultima delle sue preoccupazioni. La vicinanza palpabile con quel torace le impediva di produrre pensieri razionali, soprattutto visto che la giacca skinny del completo di Barron gli aderiva come una seconda pelle, evidenziando ogni linea della massa compatta che si nascondeva sotto la stoffa. Bisognava riconoscere che in abiti formali tutti i Ragusia-Selvatia rendevano al meglio. Anzi. Nonostante fosse il fratello di Sua Signoria “PURA LUSSURIA”, il Gobbo non ne era affatto una pallida imitazione. Riusciva a intrigarla quasi di più, proprio perché era massiccio e sostanzioso. Un corpo così invitava le giovani avvocatesse affamate a banchettare. Dio ci manda la carne, e il diavolo i cuochi.

Decrecer es la palabra de moda en casa. No es avanzar ni ganar ni prosperar. Es «decrecer». Ya no porque se hayan alineado los astros sino por decisión propia, hemos empezado a dar marcha atrás en nuestra infinita carrera hacia el progreso. En la lógica en la que nos hemos movido siempre, nos estaría yendo muy mal en la vida. En la lógica del caracol, todo lo contrario. No es una liebre, no es una hormiga, es el lento y baboso animal el símbolo de los que suscriben la doctrina del decrecimiento, la filosofía del necesitar menos para vivir mejor.

Through feedback, said Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth, a mechanism could embody purpose. Even today, more than half a century later, that assertion still has the power to fascinate and disturb. It arguably marks the beginning of what are now known as artificial intelligence and cognitive science: the study of mind and brain as information processors. But more than that, it does indeed claim to bridge that ancient gulf between body and mind—between ordinary, passive matter and active, purposeful spirit. Consider that humble thermostat again. It definitely embodies a purpose: to keep the room at a constant temperature. And yet there is nothing you can point to and say, "Here it is—this is the psychological state called purpose." Rather, purpose in the thermostat is a property of the system as a whole and how its components are organized. It is a mental state that is invisible and ineffable, yet a natural phenomenon that is perfectly comprehensible. And so it is in the mind, Wiener and his colleagues contended. Obviously, the myriad feedback mechanisms that govern the brain are far more complex than any thermostat. But at base, their operation is the same. If we can understand how ordinary matter in the form of a machine can embody purpose, then we can also begin to understand how those three pounds of ordinary matter inside our skulls can embody purpose—and spirit, and will, and volition. Conversely, if we can see living organisms as (enormously complex) feedback systems actively interacting with their environments, then we can begin to comprehend how the ineffable qualities of mind are not separate from the body but rather inextricably bound up in it.

It is my thesis that the physical functioning of the living individual and the operation of some of the newer communication machines are precisely parallel in their analogous attempts to control entropy through feedback. Both of them have sensory receptors as one stage in their cycle of operation: that is, in both of them there exists a special apparatus for collecting information from the outer world at low energy levels, and for making it available in the operation of the individual or of the machine. In both cases these external messages are not taken neat, but through the internal transforming powers of the apparatus, whether it be alive or dead.

Das typische Wiener Kaffeehaus, das in der ganzen Welt berühmt ist, habe ich immer gehasst, weil alles in ihm gegen mich ist. Andererseits fühlte ich mich jahrzehntelang gerade im Bräunerhof, das immer ganz gegen mich gewesen ist (wie das Hawelka), wie zuhause, wie in Cafe Museum, wie in anderen Kaffeehäuser von Wien, die ich in meinen Wiener Jahre frequentiert habe. Ich habe das Wiener Kaffeehaus immer gehasst und bin immer wieder in das von mir gehasste Wiener Kaffeehaus heineingegangen, habe es tagtäglich aufgesucht, denn ich habe, obwohl ich das Wiener Kaffeehaus immer gehasst habe, und gerade weil ich es immer gehasst habe, in Wien immer an der Kaffeehausaufsuchkrankheit gelitten, denn es hat sich herausgestellt, dass diese Kaffeehausaufsuchkrankheit die unheilbarste aller meiner Krankheiten ist. Ich habe die Winer Kaffeehäuser imme gehasst, weil ich in ihnen immer mit Meinesgleichen konfrontiert gewesen bin, das ist die Wahrheit und ich will ja nicht ununterbrochen mit mir konfrontiert sein, schon gar nicht im Kaffeehaus, in das ich ja gehe, damit ich mir entkomme, aber gerade dort bin ich dann mit mir und Meinesgleichen konfrontiert. Ich ertrage mich selbst nicht, geschweige denn eine ganze Horde von grübelnden und schreibenden Meinesgleichen. Ich meide die Literatur, wo ich nur kann, weil ich mich selbst meide, wo ich nur kann und deshalb muss ich mir den Kaffeehausbesuch in Wien verbieten oder wenigstens immer darauf Bedacht nehmen, wenn ich in Wien bin, unter keinen wie immer gearteten Unständen ein sogenanntes Wiener Literatenkaffeehaus aufzusuchen. Aber da ich an der Kaffeehausaufsuchkrankheit leide, bin ich gezwungen, immer wieder in ein Literatenkaffeehaus hineinzugehen, auch wenn sich alles in mir dagegen wehrt. Je mehr und je tiefer ich die Wiener Literatenkaffeehäuser gehasst habe, desto öfter und desto intensiver bin ich in sie hineingegangen. Das ist die Wahrheit.

What I have said about the newspapers and the movies applies equally to the radio, to television, and even to bookselling. Thus we are in an age where the enormous per capita bulk of communication is met by an ever-thinning stream of total bulk of communication. More and more we must accept a standardized inoffensive and insignificant product which, like the white bread of the bakeries, is made rather for its keeping and selling properties than for its food value. This is fundamentally an external handicap of modern communication, but it is paralleled by another which gnaws from within. This is the cancer of creative narrowness and feebleness. In the old days, the young man who wished to enter the creative arts might either have plunged in directly or prepared himself by a general schooling, perhaps irrelevant to the specific tasks he finally undertook, but which was at least a searching discipline of his abilities and taste. Now the channels of apprenticeship are largely silted up. Our elementary and secondary schools are more interested in formal classroom discipline than in the intellectual discipline of learning something thoroughly, and a great deal of the serious preparation for a scientific or a literary course is relegated to some sort of graduate school or other.

A proof represents a logical process which has come to a definitive conclusion in a finite number of stages. However, a logical machine following definite rules need never come to a conclusion. It may go on grinding through different stages without ever coming to a stop, either by describing a pattern of activity of continually increasing complexity, or by going into a repetitive process like the end of a chess game in which there is a continuing cycle of perpetual check. This occurs in the case of some of the paradoxes of Cantor and Russell. Let us consider the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. Is this class a member of itself? If it is, it is certainly not a member of itself; and if it is not, it is equally certainly a member of itself. A machine to answer this question would give the successive temporary answers: “yes,” “no,” “yes,” “no,” and so on, and would never come to equilibrium. Bertrand Russell’s solution of his own paradoxes was to affix to every statement a quantity, the so-called type, which serves to distinguish between what seems to be formally the same statement, according to the character of the objects with which it concerns itself—whether these are “things,” in the simplest sense, classes of “things,” classes of classes of “things,” etc. The method by which we resolve the paradoxes is also to attach a parameter to each statement, this parameter being the time at which it is asserted. In both cases, we introduce what we may call a parameter of uniformization, to resolve an ambiguity which is simply due to its neglect.

A very important function of the nervous system, and, as we have said, a function equally in demand for computing machines, is that of memory, the ability to preserve the results of past operations for use in the future. It will be seen that the uses of the memory are highly various, and it is improbable that any single mechanism can satisfy the demands of all of them. There is first the memory which is necessary for the carrying out of a current process, such as a multiplication, in which the intermediate results are of no value once the process is completed, and in which the operating apparatus should then be released for further use. Such a memory should record quickly, be read quickly, and be erased quickly. On the other hand, there is the memory which is intended to be part of the files, the permanent record, of the machine or the brain, and to contribute to the basis of all its future behavior, at least during a single run of the machine. Let it be remarked parenthetically that an important difference between the way in which we use the brain and the machine is that the machine is intended for many successive runs, either with no reference to each other, or with a minimal, limited reference, and that it can be cleared between such runs; while the brain, in the course of nature, never even approximately clears out its past records. Thus the brain, under normal circumstances, is not the complete analogue of the computing machine but rather the analogue of a single run on such a machine. We shall see later that this remark has a deep significance in psychopathology and in psychiatry.