Zoom Backgrounds Quotes

When you travel you become invisible if you want. I do want. I like to be the observer. What makes these people who they are Could I feel at home here No one expects you to have the stack of papers back by Tuesday or to check messages or to fertilize the geraniums or to sit full of dread in the waiting room at the protologist’s office. When travelling you have the delectable possibility of not understanding a word of what is said to you. Language becomes simply a musical background for watching bicycles zoom along a canal calling for nothing from you. Even better if you speak the language you catch nuances and make more contact with people. Travel releases spontaneity. You become a godlike creature full of choice free to visit the stately pleasure domes make love in the morning sketch a bell tower read a history of Byzantium stare for one hour at the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonna dei fusi. You open as in childhood and – for a time – receive this world. There’s the visceral aspect too – the huntress who is free. Free to go Free to return home bringing memories to lay on the hearth.

They zoom in on the one visible sex difference that is found throughout the animal kingdom: male movements tend to be more brusque and resolute than those of females, which are more flowing and supple. We don’t even need to see whole bodies to make this distinction. When scientists attached little lights to the arms, legs, and pelvis of people and filmed them walking, they found that these dots alone contain all the information we need to distinguish gender.2 From watching just a few moving white specks against a dark background, subjects can tell right away if they are looking at a man or a woman. The walking pattern even varies with the stage of a woman’s ovulatory cycle.

Under the pretense of wanting to record the history of my brother’s year at college, I’d asked to take a picture of Sam with his roommate. Unfortunately, the zoom on my digital camera had somehow been pressed—by a renegade finger, I assumed—and I’d only been able to get a really good close-up shot of Brad. No evidence of Sam in sight. Gosh, darn. What a shame! The photo was now the background wallpaper on my computer desktop.

Moving from “features” to “benefits” and then to “value” often confuses people, particularly folks who come from a technical background. An engineer by training, I often viewed features and the benefits derived from those features as interchangeable early in my career. For many consumer technical products, features are presented as valuable in their own right—but only because we do the translation to value automatically in our heads. For example, phone makers have often represented the quality of their cameras by talking about the number of megapixels. Consumers have been trained to translate megapixels to photo quality and therefore believe that cameras with more megapixels take better photos. Digging a bit deeper, the value of “better photos” for most consumers means sharper, more detailed images when printed or zoomed in.

that age…” He might be “at that age,” but the only girl ever on his mind was the one he couldn’t save. “Oh, never mind, just be nice.” “I’m always nice,” he argued. “But don’t be too nice,” she said. “You don’t want anyone to push you around.” “Mom, you’re driving me crazy.” “Sorry, hon. This is a big deal, that’s all.” “I know.” He’d heard rumors of a hundred applicants for every contestant who was selected. He was sure his essay on why he wanted to make candy was only chosen because Mrs. Chen had helped him write it. He tried to enjoy the colorful buildings of downtown Spring Haven, but their car zoomed by so fast, the background blended all together. Zoomed. He liked the way

I have the house and terrible nineties theme songs allll to myself. Are you sure? Mera frowned at his response, watching as he sent her selfie back to her but with the background zoomed in. The light from her bedroom down the hall had cast a shape on the wall. The shape looked like a person.

Very often these luminous designs, rich in data, take the form of geometry. I speak from experience, having participated in more than seventy ayahuasca sessions since 2003, continuing to work with the brew for the valuable lessons it teaches me long after Supernatural was researched, written, and published. Here’s part of my account of the first time I drank ayahuasca in the Amazon: I raise the cup to my lips again. About two thirds of the measure that the shaman poured for me still remains, and now I drain it in one draught. The concentrated bittersweet foretaste, followed instantly by the aftertaste of rot and medicine, hits me like a punch in the stomach…. Feeling slightly apprehensive, I thank the shaman and wander back to my place on the floor…. Time passes but I don’t keep track of it. I’ve improvized a pillow from a rolled-up sleeping bag and I now find I’m swamped by a powerful feeling of weariness. My muscles involuntarily relax, I close my eyes, and without fanfare a parade of visions suddenly begins, visions that are at once geometrical and alive, visions of lights unlike any light I’ve ever seen—dark lights, a pulsing, swirling field of the deepest luminescent violets, of reds emerging out of night, of unearthly textures and colors, of solar systems revolving, of spiral galaxies on the move. Visions of nets and strange ladder-like structures. Visions in which I seem to see multiple square screens stacked side by side and on top of each other to form immense patterns of windows arranged in great banks. Though they manifest without sound in what seems to be a pristine and limitless vacuum, the images possess a most peculiar and particular quality. They feel like a drum-roll—as though their real function is to announce the arrival of something else.13 Other notes I made following my ayahuasca sessions in the Amazon refer to a “geometrical pulse,”14 to “a recurrence of the geometrical patterns,”15 to “a background of shifting geometrical patterns,”16 and to “complex interlaced patterns of geometry…. I zoom in for a closer view…. They’re rectangular, outlined in black, like windows. There’s a circle in the centre of each rectangle.”17