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<script> const clippings = ["\ufeffVerily, verily I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit. John xii,24\n", "IN 1839 the eighteen-year-old youth Dostoevsky wrote to his brother: \u201cMan is a mystery: if you spend your entire life trying to puzzle it out, then do not say that you have wasted your time. I occupy myself with this mystery, because I want to be a man.\u201d\n", "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God?\u201d\n", "Zaphod knocked one of his heads against the inside wall. He didn\u2019t need this, he thought to himself, this of all things he had no need of. He hadn\u2019t asked to be here. If he was asked at this moment where he would like to be he would probably have said ne would like to be lying on the beach with at least fifty beautiful women and a small team of experts working out new ways they could be nice to him, which was his usual reply.\n", "rich ultramahogany\n", "A good death. Well, he thought, given that you had to die, why want a bad one?\n", "Yalson stirred restlessly in her seat.\u00a0\u00a0Finally she looked over at Balveda.\u00a0\u00a0The Culture woman was looking at Horza and Wubslin with a smile; she turned her head to Yalson, sensing her gaze, and smiled more widely, moving her head fractionally to indicate the two men and raising her eyebrows.\u00a0\u00a0Yalson, reluctantly, grinned back, and shifted the weight of her gun slightly.\n", "\u2018Why did you do it? Why can\u2019t you stop?\u2019\n", "We think of our eyes as open windows and our ears as empty tubes. We experience the out-there as if we are a tiny homunculus gazing from holes in our heads at a world that is flooded with light, music and colour. But this is not true. The things that you are seeing right now are not out there in front of you, but inside your head, being reconstructed in more than thirty sites across your brain. The light is not out there. The objects are not out there. The music is not out there. A violin has no sound without a brain to process it; a rose petal has no colour. It is all a re-creation. A vision. A useful guess about what the world might look like, that is built well enough that we are able to negotiate it successfully.\n", "would a \u2018streetwise\u2019 man or a \u2018formally educated\u2019 woman be better suited to the job? The majority chose the man. When asked why, they said that they had thought carefully about this, and decided that it would be most useful for a police chief to be streetwise. For a second group, researchers switched the genders. This time, the male candidate was \u2018formally educated\u2019 and the female was \u2018streetwise\u2019. The majority chose the man. When asked why, they said that they had thought carefully about this, and decided that it would be most useful for a police chief to be formally educated. It is a discomforting thing, reading of these ordinary men and women, who presumably consider themselves to be kind and rational and fair, operating in such an unknowingly prejudiced manner. The study suggests that they had no idea why they believe what they believe, why they say what they say.\n", "cognitive error we all share, known as the spotlight effect, means that we go through our social lives convinced that everything we are saying, doing and feeling is being closely examined by those around us even though, in reality, they are all preoccupied with themselves, equally convinced the spotlight is on them.\n", "one of the most disturbing revelations of neuroscience is that our sense of being \u2018out there\u2019 in the world is an illusion. We are stuck inside our skulls and the rich sensory landscape of sights and sounds and colours and smells that we think we are moving about in is actually a reconstruction.\n", "\u2018between a third and a half of the variability among people on their political attitudes.\u2019\n", "Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.\n", "Homo denisova\n", "also suffered less from infectious diseases. Most of the infectious diseases that have plagued agricultural and industrial societies (such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis) originated in domesticated animals and were transferred to humans only after the Agricultural Revolution.\n", "Hunter-gatherers made these handprints about 9,000 years ago in the \u2018Hands Cave\u2019, in Argentina. It looks as if these long-dead hands are reaching towards us from within the rock. This is one of the most moving relics of the ancient forager world \u2013 but nobody knows what it means.\n", "Archaeologists are familiar with such monumental structures from sites around the world \u2013 the best-known example is Stonehenge in Britain. Yet as they studied G\u00f6bekli Tepe, they discovered an amazing fact. Stonehenge dates to 2500 BC, and was built by a developed agricultural society. The structures at G\u00f6bekli Tepe are dated to about 9500 BC, and all available evidence indicates that they were built by hunter-gatherers.\n", "combination of base-6 and base-10 numeral systems. Their base-6 system bestowed on us several important legacies, such as the division of the day into twenty-four hours and of the circle into 360 degrees.)\n", "It didn\u2019t disturb the Sumerians that their script was ill-suited for writing poetry. They didn\u2019t invent it in order to copy spoken language, but rather to do things that spoken language failed at.\n", "Eventually the original four castes turned into 3,000 different groupings called jati (literally \u2018birth\u2019). But this proliferation of castes did not change the basic principle of the system, according to which every person is born into a particular rank, and any infringement of its rules pollutes the person and society as a whole. A person\u2019s jati determines her profession, the food she can eat, her place of residence and her eligible marriage partners.\n", "No culture has ever bothered to forbid men to photosynthesise, women to run faster than the speed of light, or negatively charged electrons to be attracted to each other.\n", "If one hundred different commodities are traded in the market, then buyers and sellers will have to know 4,950 different exchange rates. And if 1,000 different commodities are traded, buyers and sellers must juggle 499,500 different exchange rates! How do you figure it out?\n", "The first coins in history were struck around 640 BC by King Alyattes of Lydia, in western Anatolia.\n", "The name \u2018denarius\u2019 became a generic name for coins. Muslim caliphs Arabicised this name and issued \u2018dinars\u2019. The dinar is still the official name of the currency in Jordan, Iraq, Serbia, Macedonia, Tunisia and several other countries.\n", "The Senate decided to send Scipio Aemilianus, Rome\u2019s foremost general and the man who had levelled Carthage, to take care of the Numantians. He was given a massive army of more than 30,000 soldiers. Scipio, who respected the fighting spirit and martial skill of the Numantians, preferred not to waste his soldiers in unnecessary combat. Instead, he encircled Numantia with a line of fortifications, blocking the town\u2019s contact with the outside world. Hunger did his work for him. After more than a year, the food supply ran out. When the Numantians realised that all hope was lost, they burned down their town; according to Roman accounts, most of them killed themselves so as not to become Roman slaves. Numantia later became a symbol of Spanish independence and courage. Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote, wrote a tragedy called The Siege of Numantia which ends with the town\u2019s destruction, but also with a vision of Spain\u2019s future greatness.\n", "Chaotic systems come in two shapes. Level one chaos is chaos that does not react to predictions about it. The weather, for example, is a level one chaotic system. Though it is influenced by myriad factors, we can build computer models that take more and more of them into consideration, and produce better and better weather forecasts.\n", "Equipped with the most advanced scientific instruments that Banks and the Royal Society could buy, the expedition was placed under the command of Captain James Cook, an experienced seaman as well as an accomplished geographer and ethnographer. The expedition left England in 1768, observed the Venus transit from Tahiti in 1769, reconnoitred several Pacific islands, visited Australia and New Zealand, and returned to England in 1771.\n", "Astronomers predicted that the next Venus transits would occur in 1761 and 1769. So expeditions were sent from Europe to the four corners of the world in order to observe the transits from as many distant points as possible.\n", "When he calmed down, the astronauts asked him what it meant. The man explained that the sentence they had memorised so carefully said, \u2018Don\u2019t believe a single word these people are telling you. They have come to steal your lands.\u2019\n", "Around 1517, Spanish colonists in the Caribbean islands began to hear vague rumours about a powerful empire somewhere in the centre of the Mexican mainland. A mere four years later, the Aztec capital was a smouldering ruin, the Aztec Empire was a thing of the past, and Hern\u00e1n Cort\u00e9s lorded over a vast new Spanish Empire in Mexico.\n", "You think that these empires were evil monstrosities that spread death, oppression and injustice around the world? You could easily fill an encyclopedia with their crimes. You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements. Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.\n", "The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests.\n", "While VOC operated in the Indian Ocean, the Dutch West Indies Company, or WIC, plied the Atlantic. In order to control trade on the important Hudson River, WIC built a settlement called New Amsterdam on an island at the river\u2019s mouth. The colony was threatened by Indians and repeatedly attacked by the British, who eventually captured it in 1664. The British changed its name to New York. The remains of the wall built by WIC to defend its colony against Indians and British are today paved over by the world\u2019s most famous street \u2013 Wall Street.\n", "The Mississippi Bubble was one of history\u2019s most spectacular financial crashes. The royal French financial system never recuperated fully from the blow. The way in which the Mississippi Company used its political clout to manipulate share prices and fuel the buying frenzy caused the public to lose faith in the French banking system and in the financial wisdom of the French king. Louis XV found it more and more difficult to raise credit. This became one of the chief reasons that the overseas French Empire fell into British hands.\n", "In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of \u2018free trade\u2019. It was a walkover. The overconfident Chinese were no match for Britain\u2019s new wonder weapons \u2013 steamboats, heavy artillery, rockets and rapid-fire rifles. Under the subsequent peace treaty, China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants and to compensate them for damages inflicted by the Chinese police. Furthermore, the British demanded and received control of Hong Kong, which they proceeded to use as a secure base for drug trafficking (Hong Kong remained in British hands until 1997). In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country\u2019s population, were opium addicts.\n", "In 1881 Egyptian nationalists had had enough and rebelled. They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt. Queen Victoria was not amused. A year later she dispatched her army and navy to the Nile and Egypt remained a British protectorate until after World War Two.\n", "From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations.\n", "Finally, in 1880, the British government took the unprecedented step of legislating that all timetables in Britain must follow Greenwich. For the first time in history, a country adopted a national time and obliged its population to live according to an artificial clock rather than local ones or sunrise-to-sunset cycles.\n", "If we accept the biological approach to happiness, then history turns out to be of minor importance, since most historical events have had no impact on our biochemistry. History can change the external stimuli that cause serotonin to be secreted, yet it does not change the resulting serotonin levels, and hence it cannot make people happier.\n", "Once they wrote poetry. Now it\u2019s the laundry list.\n", "Lucy Stone said in 1855: From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman. When, with my brothers, I reached forth after sources of knowledge, I was reproved with \u201cIt isn\u2019t fit for you; it doesn\u2019t belong to women\u201d\u2026In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman\u2019s heart until she bows down to it no longer.8\n", "Women who displayed any independence or initiative were called \u201cLucy Stoners.\u201d \u201cFeminist,\u201d like \u201ccareer woman,\u201d became a dirty word.\n", "Did women really go home again as a reaction to feminism? The fact is that to women born after 1920, feminism was dead history. It ended as a vital movement in America with the winning of that final right: the vote. In the 1930\u2019s and 40\u2019s, the sort of woman who fought for woman\u2019s rights was still concerned with human rights and freedom\u2014for Negroes, for oppressed workers, for victims of Franco\u2019s Spain and Hitler\u2019s Germany. But no one was much concerned with rights for women: they had all been won. And yet the man-eating myth prevailed. Women who displayed any independence or initiative were called \u201cLucy Stoners.\u201d \u201cFeminist,\u201d like \u201ccareer woman,\u201d became a dirty word.\n", "Protectiveness has often muffled the sound of doors closing against women;\n", "\u201cThe Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of \u2018Woman\u2019s Rights\u2019 with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety\u2026. It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different\u2014then let them remain each in their own position.\u201d\n", "It didn't include acts-of-war insurance. And let me tell you, ma'am, when we land Iorek Byrnison on Svalbard, that will count as an act of war.\" He spat a piece of smokeleaf delicately overboard. \"So I'd like to know what we can expect in the way of mayhem and ructions,\" he finished.\n", "Well, then, however the old sea-captains may order me about\u2014however they may thump and punch me about, I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is all right; that everybody else is one way or other served in much the same way\u2014either in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is; and so the universal thump is passed round, and all hands should rub each other\u2019s shoulder-blades, and be content.\n", "The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us.\n", "Though I cannot tell why it was exactly that those stage managers, the Fates, put me down for this shabby part of a whaling voyage, when others were set down for magnificent parts in high tragedies, and short and easy parts in genteel comedies, and jolly parts in farces\u2014though I cannot tell why this was exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a choice resulting from my own unbiased freewill and discriminating judgment.\n", "But no more of this blubbering now, we are going a-whaling, and there is plenty of that yet to come. Let us scrape the ice from our frosted feet, and see what sort of a place this \u201cSpouter\u201d may be.\n", "enough to drive a nervous man distracted. Yet was there a sort of indefinite, halfattained, unimaginable sublimity about it that fairly froze you to it, till you involuntarily took an oath with yourself to find out what that marvellous painting meant.\n", "Sal and me slept in that ere bed the night we were spliced.\n", "Whether that mattress was stuffed with corn-cobs or broken crockery, there is no telling, but I rolled about a good deal, and could not sleep for a long time.\n", "What under the heavens he did it for,\n", "Go and gaze upon the iron emblematical harpoons round yonder lofty mansion, and your question will be answered. Yes; all these brave houses and flowery gardens came from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans. One and all, they were harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.\n", "In this same New Bedford there stands a Whaleman\u2019s Chapel, and few are the moody fishermen, shortly bound for the Indian Ocean or Pacific, who fail to make a Sunday visit to the spot. I am sure that I did not.\n", "congregation of sailors, and sailors\u2019 wives and widows. A muffled silence reigned, only broken at times by the shrieks of the storm.\n", "But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.\n", "It needs scarcely to be told, with what feelings, on the eve of a Nantucket voyage, I regarded those marble tablets, and by the murky light of that darkened, doleful day read the fate of the whalemen who had gone before me.\n", "Yes, Ishmael, the same fate may be thine. But somehow I grew merry again. Delightful inducements to embark, fine chance for promotion, it seems\u2014aye, a stove boat will make me an immortal by brevet. Yes, there is death in this business of whaling\u2014a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity.\n", "At the time I now write of, Father Mapple was in the hardy winter of a healthy old age; that sort of old age which seems merging into a second flowering youth, for among all the fissures of his wrinkles, there shone certain mild gleams of a newly developing bloom\u2014the spring verdure peeping forth even beneath February\u2019s snow.\n", "\u201cAh, noble ship,\u201d the angel seemed to say, \u201cbeat on, beat on, thou noble ship, and bear a hardy helm; for lo! the sun is breaking through; the clouds are rolling off\u2014serenest azure is at hand.\u201d\n", "\u201cThe ribs and terrors in the whale, Arched over me a dismal gloom, While all God\u2019s sun-lit waves rolled by, And left me deepening down to doom. \u201cI saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell\u2014 Oh, I was plunging to despair. \u201cIn black distress, I called my God, When I could scarce believe him mine, He bowed his ear to my complaints\u2014 No more the whale did me confine. \u201cWith speed he flew to my relief, As on a radiant dolphin borne; Awful, yet bright, as lightning shone The face of my Deliverer God. \u201cMy song for ever shall record That terrible, that joyful hour; I give the glory to my God, His all the mercy and the power.\u201d\n", "Ha! Jonah, that\u2019s another stab. But he swiftly calls away the Captain from that scent. \u2018I\u2019ll sail with ye,\u2019\u2014he says,\u2014\u2018the passage money, how much is that?\u2014I\u2019ll pay now.\u2019 For it is, particularly written, shipmates, as if it were a thing not to be overlooked in this history, \u2018that he paid the fare thereof\u2019 ere the craft did sail. And taken with the context, this is full of meaning.\n", "\u201cScrewed at its axis against the side, a swinging lamp slightly oscillates in Jonah\u2019s room; and the ship, heeling over towards the wharf with the weight of the last bales received, the lamp, flame and all, though in slight motion, still maintains a permanent obliquity with reference to the room; though, in truth, infallibly straight itself, it but made obvious the false, lying levels among which it hung. The lamp alarms and frightens Jonah; as lying in his berth his tormented eyes roll round the place, and this thus far successful fugitive finds no refuge for his restless glance. But that contradiction in the lamp more and more appals him. The floor, the ceiling, and the side, are all awry. \u2018Oh! so my conscience hangs in me!\u2019 he groans, \u2018straight upward, so it burns; but the chambers of my soul are all in crookedness!\u2019\n", "He paused a little; then kneeling in the pulpit\u2019s bows, folded his large brown hands across his chest, uplifted his closed eyes, and offered a prayer so deeply devout that he seemed kneeling and praying at the bottom of the sea.\n", "But all the things that God would have us do are hard for us to do\u2014remember that\u2014and hence, he oftener commands us than endeavors to persuade. And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.\n", "Thought he, it\u2019s a wicked world in all meridians; I\u2019ll die a pagan.\n", "till poor Queequeg took his last long dive. Was there ever such unconsciousness? He did not seem to think that he at all deserved a medal from the Humane and Magnanimous Societies. He only asked for water\u2014fresh water\u2014something to wipe the brine off; that done, he put on dry clothes, lighted\n", "From that hour I clove to Queequeg like a barnacle; yea, till poor Queequeg took his last long dive.\n", "\u201cClam or Cod?\u201d she repeated. \u201cA clam for supper? a cold clam; is that what you mean, Mrs. Hussey?\u201d says I; \u201cbut that\u2019s a rather cold and clammy reception in the winter time, ain\u2019t it, Mrs. Hussey?\u201d\n", "Chowder for breakfast, and chowder for dinner, and chowder for supper, till you began to look for fish-bones coming through your clothes.\n", "Her venerable bows looked bearded.\n", "Scandinavian sea-king, or a poetical Pagan Roman. And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature\u2019s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language\u2014that man makes one in a whole nation\u2019s census\u2014a mighty pageant creature, farmed for noble tragedies.\n", "And when these things unite in a man of greatly superior natural force, with a globular brain and a ponderous heart; who has also by the stillness and seclusion of many long night-watches in the remotest waters, and beneath constellations never seen here at the north, been led to think untraditionally and independently; receiving all nature\u2019s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast, and thereby chiefly, but with some help from accidental advantages, to learn a bold and nervous lofty language\u2014that man makes one in a whole nation\u2019s census\u2014a mighty pageant creature, farmed for noble tragedies.\n", "Still, for all this immutableness, was there some lack of common consistency about worthy Captain Bildad. Though refusing, from conscientious scruples, to bear arms against land invaders, yet himself had illimitably invaded the Atlantic and Pacific; and though a sworn foe to human bloodshed, yet had he in his straight-bodied coat, spilled tuns upon tuns of leviathan gore. How now in the contemplative evening of his days, the pious Bildad reconciled these things in the reminiscence, I do not know; but it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man\u2019s religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another.\n", "\u201cI dost,\u201d said I unconsciously, he was so intense a Quaker.\n", "\u201cAnd a very vile one. When that wicked king was slain, the dogs, did they not lick his blood?\u201d \u201cCome hither to me\u2014hither, hither,\u201d said Peleg, with a significance in his eye that almost startled me. \u201cLook ye, lad; never say that on board the Pequod. Never say it anywhere. Captain Ahab did not name himself. \u2019Twas a foolish, ignorant whim of his crazy, widowed mother, who died when he was only a twelvemonth old. And yet the old squaw Tistig, at Gay-head, said that the name would somehow prove prophetic.\n", "I cherish the greatest respect towards everybody\u2019s religious obligations, never mind how comical, and could not find it in my heart to undervalue even a congregation of ants worshipping a toad-stool;\n", "told him, too, that he being in other things such an extremely sensible and sagacious savage, it pained me, very badly pained me, to see him now so deplorably foolish about this ridiculous Ramadan of his. Besides, argued I, fasting makes the body cave in; hence the spirit caves in; and all thoughts born of a fast must necessarily be half-starved. This is the reason why most dyspeptic religionists cherish such melancholy notions about their hereafters. In one word, Queequeg, said I, rather digressively; hell is an idea first born on an undigested apple-dumpling; and since then perpetuated through the hereditary dyspepsias nurtured by Ramadans.\n", "Ship and boat diverged; the cold, damp night breeze blew between; a screaming gull flew overhead; the two hulls wildly rolled; we gave three heavy-hearted cheers, and blindly plunged like fate into the lone Atlantic.\n", "this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous. Doubtless one leading reason\n", "this business of whaling has somehow come to be regarded among landsmen as a rather unpoetical and disreputable pursuit; therefore, I am all anxiety to convince ye, ye landsmen, of the injustice hereby done to us hunters of whales. In the first place, it may be deemed almost superfluous to establish the fact, that among people at large, the business of whaling is not accounted on a level with what are called the liberal professions. If a stranger were introduced into any miscellaneous metropolitan society, it would but slightly advance the general opinion of his merits, were he presented to the company as a harpooneer, say; and if in emulation of the naval officers he should append the initials S. W. F. (Sperm Whale Fishery) to his visiting card, such a procedure would be deemed pre-eminently presuming and ridiculous.\n", "And if the idea of peril so much enhances the popular conceit of the soldier\u2019s profession; let me assure ye that many a veteran who has freely marched up to a battery, would quickly recoil at the apparition of the sperm whale\u2019s vast tail, fanning into eddies the air over his head. For what are the comprehensible terrors of man compared with the interlinked terrors and wonders of God!\n", "But, though the world scouts at us whale hunters, yet does it unwittingly pay us the profoundest homage; yea, an all-abounding adoration! for almost all the tapers, lamps, and candles that burn round the globe, burn, as before so many shrines, to our glory!\n", "If American and European men-of-war now peacefully ride in once savage harbors, let them fire salutes to the honor and the glory of the whale-ship, which originally showed them the way, and first interpreted between them and the savages. They may celebrate as they will the heroes of Exploring Expeditions, your Cooks, your Krusensterns; but I say that scores of anonymous Captains have sailed out of Nantucket, that were as great, and greater than your Cook and your Krusenstern. For in their succorless emptyhandedness, they, in the heathenish sharked waters, and by the beaches of unrecorded, javelin islands, battled with virgin wonders and terrors that Cook with all his marines and muskets would not willingly have dared. All that is made such a flourish of in the old South Sea Voyages, those things were but the life-time commonplaces of our heroic Nantucketers. Often, adventures which Vancouver dedicates three chapters to, these men accounted unworthy of being set down in the ship\u2019s common log. Ah, the world! Oh, the world!\n", "No dignity in whaling? The dignity of our calling the very heavens attest. Cetus is a constellation in the South! No more! Drive down your hat in presence of the Czar, and take it off to Queequeg!\n", "When close to the whale, in the very death-lock of the fight, he handled his unpitying lance coolly and off handedly, as a whistling tinker his hammer.\n", "What, perhaps, with other things, made Stubb such an easygoing, unfearing man, so cheerily trudging off with the burden of life in a world full of grave peddlers, all bowed to the ground with their packs; what helped to bring about that almost impious goodhumor of his; that thing must have been his pipe. For, like his nose, his short, black little pipe was one of the regular features of his face. You would almost as soon have expected him to turn out of his bunk without his nose as without his pipe. He kept a whole row of pipes there ready loaded, stuck in a rack, within easy reach of his hand; and, whenever he turned in, he smoked them all out in succession, lighting one from the other to the end of the chapter; then loading them again to be in readiness anew. For, when Stubb dressed, instead of first putting his legs into his trowsers, he put his pipe into his mouth.\n", "the mates were fully competent to, so that there was little or nothing, out of himself, to employ or excite Ahab, now; and thus chase away, for that one interval, the clouds that layer upon layer were piled upon his brow, as ever all clouds choose the loftiest peaks to pile themselves upon.\n", "Nevertheless, ere long, the warm, warbling persuasiveness of the pleasant, holiday weather we came to, seemed gradually to charm him from his mood. For, as when the red-cheeked, dancing girls, April and May, trip home to the wintry, misanthropic woods; even the barest, ruggedest, most thunder-cloven old oak will at least send forth some few green sprouts, to welcome such gladhearted visitants; so Ahab did, in the end, a little respond to the playful allurings of that girlish air. More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile.\n", "Old age is always wakeful; as if, the longer linked with life, the less man has to do with aught that looks like death.\n", "Therefore it was that Flask once admitted in private, that ever since he had arisen to the dignity of an officer, from that moment he had never known what it was to be otherwise than hungry, more or less. For what he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.\n", "Dough-Boy\u2019s whole life was one continual lipquiver.\n", "The three mast-heads are kept manned from sun-rise to sun-set; the seamen taking their regular turns (as at the helm), and relieving each other every two hours. In the serene weather of the tropics it is exceedingly pleasant\u2014the mast-head; nay, to a dreamy meditative man it is delightful. There you stand, a hundred feet above the silent decks, striding along the deep, as if the masts were gigantic stilts, while beneath you and between your legs, as it were, swim the hugest monsters of the sea, even as ships once sailed between the boots of the famous Colossus at old Rhodes.\n", "I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed; and this sunken-eyed young Platonist will tow you ten wakes round the world, and never make you one pint of sperm the richer. Nor are these monitions at all unneeded. For nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:\u2014 \u201cRoll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll! Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain.\u201d\n", "Soon his steady, ivory stride was heard, as to and fro he paced his old rounds, upon planks so familiar to his tread, that they were all over dented, like geological stones, with the peculiar mark of his walk. Did you fixedly gaze, too, upon that ribbed and dented brow; there also, you would see still stranger foot-prints\u2014the foot-prints of his one unsleeping, ever-pacing thought.\n", "am game for his crooked jaw, and for the jaws of Death too, Captain Ahab, if it fairly comes in the way of the business we follow; but I came here to hunt whales, not my commander\u2019s vengeance.\n", "Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I\u2019d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other;\n", "Well, well; belike the whole world\u2019s one ball, as your scholars have it; and so \u2019tis right to make one ball-room of it.\n", "yet to chase and point lance at such an apparition as the Sperm Whale was not for mortal man. That to attempt it, would be inevitably to be torn into a quick eternity.\n", "with the mad secret of his unabated rage bolted up and keyed in him, Ahab had purposely sailed upon the present voyage with the one only and all-engrossing object of hunting the White Whale. Had any one of his old acquaintances on shore but half dreamed of what was lurking in him then, how soon would their aghast and righteous souls have wrenched the ship from such a fiendish man! They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint. He was intent on an audacious, immitigable, and supernatural revenge.\n", "Though most men have some vague flitting ideas of the general perils of the grand fishery, yet they have nothing like a fixed, vivid conception of those perils, and the frequency with which they recur. One reason perhaps is, that not one in fifty of the actual disasters and deaths by casualties in the fishery, ever finds a public record at home, however transient and immediately forgotten that record. Do you suppose that that poor fellow there, who this moment perhaps caught by the whale-line off the coast of New Guinea, is being carried down to the bottom of the sea by the sounding leviathan\u2014do you suppose that that poor fellow\u2019s name will appear in the newspaper obituary you will read tomorrow at your breakfast? No: because the mails are very irregular between here and New Guinea. In fact, did you ever hear what might be called regular news direct or indirect from New Guinea? Yet I tell you that upon one particular voyage which I made to the Pacific, among many others, we spoke thirty different ships, every one of which had had a death by a whale, some of them more than one, and three that had each lost a boat\u2019s crew. For God\u2019s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man\u2019s blood was spilled for it.\n", "Starbuck\u2019s body and Starbuck\u2019s coerced will were Ahab\u2019s, so long as Ahab kept his magnet at Starbuck\u2019s brain;\n", "Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.\n", "\u201cWish, by gor! whale eat him, \u2019stead of him eat whale. I\u2019m bressed if he ain\u2019t more of shark dan Massa Shark himself,\u201d muttered the old man, limping away; with which sage ejaculation he went to his hammock.\n", "When in the Southern Fishery, a captured Sperm Whale, after long and weary toil, is brought alongside late at night, it is not, as a general thing at least, customary to proceed at once to the business of cutting him in. For that business is an exceedingly laborious one; is not very soon completed; and requires all hands to set about it. Therefore, the common usage is to take in all sail; lash the helm a\u2019lee; and then send every one below to his hammock till daylight, with the reservation that, until that time, anchor-watches shall be kept; that is, two and two, for an hour each couple, the crew in rotation shall mount the deck to see that all goes well. But sometimes, especially upon the Line in the Pacific, this plan will not answer at all; because such incalculable hosts of sharks gather round the moored carcase, that were he left so for six hours, say, on a stretch, little more than the skeleton would be visible by morning. In most other parts of the ocean, however, where these fish do not so largely abound, their wondrous voracity can be at times considerably diminished, by vigorously stirring them up with sharp whaling-spades, a procedure notwithstanding, which, in some instances, only seems to tickle them into still greater activity. But it was not thus in the present case with the Pequod\u2019s sharks; though, to be sure, any man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.\n", "\u201cQueequeg no care what god made him shark,\u201d said the savage, agonizingly lifting his hand up and down; \u201cwedder Fejee god or Nantucket god; but de god wat made shark must be one dam Ingin.\u201d\n", "\u201cSpeak, thou vast and venerable head,\u201d muttered Ahab, \u201cwhich, though ungarnished with a beard, yet here and there lookest hoary with mosses; speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in thee. Of all divers, thou hast dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved amid this world\u2019s foundations.\n", "the deeper midnight of the insatiate maw;\n", "though sorely strained, you may well believe. So, when on one side you hoist in Locke\u2019s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant\u2019s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.\n", "So, when on one side you hoist in Locke\u2019s head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant\u2019s and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.\n", "His eyes, or rather the places where his eyes had been, were beheld. As strange misgrown masses gather in the knot-holes of the noblest oaks when prostrate, so from the points which the whale\u2019s eyes had once occupied, now protruded blind bulbs, horribly pitiable to see. But pity there was none. For all his old age, and his one arm, and his blind eyes, he must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.\n", "The gallant Perseus, a son of Jupiter, was the first whaleman; and to the eternal honor of our calling be it said, that the first whale attacked by our brotherhood was not killed with any sordid intent. Those were the knightly days of our profession, when we only bore arms to succor the distressed, and not to fill men\u2019s lamp-feeders.\n", "Perseus, St. George, Hercules, Jonah, and Vishnoo! there\u2019s a member-roll for you! What club but the whaleman\u2019s can head off like that?\n", "Take away the tied tendons that all over seem bursting from the marble in the carved Hercules, and its charm would be gone. As devout Eckermanne1 lifted the linen sheet from the naked corpse of Goethe, he was overwhelmed with the massive chest of the man, that seemed as a Roman triumphal arch. When Angelo paints even God the Father in human form, mark what robustness is there. And whatever they may reveal of the divine love in the Son, the soft, curled, hermaphroditical Italian pictures, in which his idea has been most successfully embodied; these pictures, so destitute as they are of all brawniness, hint nothing of any power, but the mere negative, feminine one of submission and endurance, which on all hands it is conceded, form the peculiar practical virtues of his teachings.\n", "well know that these Crappoes of Frenchmen are but poor devils in the fishery; sometimes lowering their boats for breakers, mistaking them for Sperm Whale spouts; yes, and sometimes sailing from their port with their hold full of boxes of tallow candles, and cases of snuffers, foreseeing that all the oil they will get won\u2019t be enough to dip the Captain\u2019s wick into;\n", "\u201cStick to the boat, Pip, or by the Lord, I wont pick you up if you jump; mind that. We can\u2019t afford to lose whales by the likes of you; a whale would sell for thirty times what you would, Pip, in Alabama. Bear that in, mind, and don\u2019t jump any more.\u201d Hereby perhaps Stubb indirectly hinted, that though man loves his fellow, yet man is a money-making animal, which propensity too often interferes with his benevolence.\n", "As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, woven almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,\u2014literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger: while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever. Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers\u2019 hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,\u2014Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness.\n", "Greek fire.\n", "Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,\n", "Oh, you solemn rogue, you\u2014you Bunger! was there ever such another Bunger in the watery world? Bunger, when you die, you ought to die in pickle, you dog; you should be preserved to future ages, you rascal.\u201d\n", "But one night, under cover of darkness, and further concealed in a most cunning disguisement, a desperate burglar slid into his happy home, and robbed them all of everything. And darker yet to tell, the blacksmith himself did ignorantly conduct this burglar into his family\u2019s heart. It was the Bottle Conjuror!\n", "Ahoy, there! Tashtego, Queequeg, Daggoo! What say ye, pagans! Will ye give me as much blood as will cover this barb?\u201d holding it high up. A cluster of dark nods replied, Yes. Three punctures were made in the heathen flesh, and the White Whale\u2019s barbs were then tempered. \u201cEgo non baptizo te in nomine patris, sed in nomine diaboli!\u201d deliriously howled Ahab, as the malignant iron scorchingly devoured the baptismal blood.\n", "As was afterwards learned, the Bachelor had met with the most surprising success; all the more wonderful, for that while cruising in the same seas numerous other vessels had gone entire months without securing a single fish. Not only had barrels of beef and bread been given away to make room for the far more valuable sperm, but additional supplemental casks had been bartered for, from the ships she had met; and these were stowed along the deck, and in the captain\u2019s and officers\u2019 state-rooms. Even the cabin table itself had been knocked into kindling-wood; and the cabin mess dined off the broad head of an oil-butt, lashed down to the floor for a centrepiece. In the forecastle, the sailors had actually caulked and pitched their chests, and filled them; it was humorously added, that the cook had clapped a head on his largest boiler, and filled it; that the steward had plugged his spare coffee-pot and filled it; that the harpooneers had headed the sockets of their irons and filled them; that indeed everything was filled with sperm, except the captain\u2019s pantaloons pockets, and those he reserved to thrust his hands into, in self-complacent testimony of his entire satisfaction.\n", "Not seldom in this life, when, on the right side, fortune\u2019s favorites sail close by us, we, though all adroop before, catch somewhat of the rushing breeze, and joyfully feel our bagging sails fill out.\n", "Then falling into a moment\u2019s revery, he again looked up towards the sun and murmured to himself: \u201cThou sea-mark! thou high and mighty Pilot! thou tellest me truly where I am\u2014but canst thou cast the least hint where I shall be? Or canst thou tell where some other thing besides me is this moment living? Where is Moby Dick? This instant thou must be eyeing him. These eyes of mine look into the very eye that is even now beholding him; aye, and into the eye that is even now equally beholding the objects on the unknown, thither side of thee, thou sun!\u201d\n", "Then gazing at his quadrant, and handling, one after the other, its numerous cabalistical contrivances, he pondered again, and muttered: \u201cFoolish toy! babies\u2019 plaything of haughty Admirals, and Commodores, and Captains; the world brags of thee, of thy cunning and might; but what after all canst thou do, but tell the poor, pitiful point, where thou thyself happenest to be on this wide planet, and the hand that holds thee: no! not one jot more! Thou canst not tell where one drop of water or one grain of sand will be to-morrow noon; and yet with thy impotence thou insultest the sun! Science! Curse thee, thou vain toy; and cursed be all the things that cast man\u2019s eyes aloft to that heaven, whose live vividness but scorches him, as these old eyes are even now scorched with thy light, O sun! Level by nature to this earth\u2019s horizon are the glances of man\u2019s eyes; not shot from the crown of his head, as if God had meant him to gaze on his firmament. Curse thee, thou quadrant!\u201d dashing it to the deck, \u201cno longer will I guide my earthly way by thee; the level ship\u2019s compass, and the level dead-reckoning, by log and by line; these shall conduct me, and show me my place on the sea. Aye,\u201d lighting from the boat to the deck, \u201cthus I trample on thee, thou paltry thing that feebly pointest on high; thus I split and destroy thee!\u201d\n", "Deliberately standing before the binnacle, and eyeing the transpointed compasses, the old man, with the sharp of his extended hand, now took the precise bearing of the sun, and satisfied that the needles were exactly inverted, shouted out his orders for the ship\u2019s course to be changed accordingly. The yards were braced hard up; and once more the Pequod thrust her undaunted bows into the opposing wind, for the supposed fair one had only been juggling her. Meanwhile, whatever were his own secret thoughts, Starbuck said nothing, but quietly he issued all requisite orders; while Stubb and Flask\u2014who in some small degree seemed then to be sharing his feelings\u2014likewise unmurmuringly acquiesced. As for the men, though some of them lowly rumbled, their fear of Ahab was greater than their fear of Fate.\n", "log and line\n", "But I see what you\u2019re saying, Connell added. About feeling a bit imprisoned in the school, I do see that. He should have let you look out the window, I would agree there. You weren\u2019t doing any harm.\n", "She\u2019s not leading the same kind of life as other people. She acts so worldly at times, making him feel ignorant, but then she can be so naive. He wants to understand how her mind works. If he silently decides not to say something when they\u2019re talking, Marianne will ask \u2018what?\u2019 within one or two seconds. This \u2018what?\u2019 question seems to him to contain so much: not just the forensic attentiveness to his silences that allows her to ask in the first place, but a desire for total communication, a sense that anything unsaid is an unwelcome interruption between them.\n", "Then he turns a new page in the notebook so he doesn\u2019t have to look at what he\u2019s done.\n", "Connell has a six-pack of cider with him, but he\u2019s reluctant to do anything that would draw attention to his backpack, in case Gareth might feel prompted to comment on it further.\n", "Everyone got very drunk and Lisa passed out before dessert. Under the table Rob showed Eric and Connell naked photographs of Lisa on his phone. Eric laughed and tapped parts of Lisa\u2019s body on-screen with his fingers. Connell sat there looking at the phone and then said quietly: Bit fucked-up showing these to people, isn\u2019t it? With a loud sigh Rob locked the phone and put it back in his pocket. You\u2019ve gotten awfully fucking gay about things lately, he said.\n", "Your boyfriend\u2019s a Holocaust denier. Oh, he\u2019s just into free speech. Yeah, that\u2019s good. Thank god for white moderates. As I believe Dr King once wrote.\n", "I have all kinds of hang-ups, says Marianne. Very neurotic.\n", "Peggy compliments Marianne\u2019s appearance in a routine, effeminate way and asks what her hang-ups are about.\n", "The whole trip felt like a series of short films, screened only once, and afterwards he had a sense of what they were about but no exact memories of the plot. He remembers seeing things out the windows of taxis.\n", "Marianne had a wildness that got into him for a while and made him feel that he was like her, that they had the same unnameable spiritual injury, and that neither of them could ever fit into the world. But he was never damaged like she was. She just made him feel that way.\n", "There\u2019s always been something inside her that men have wanted to dominate, and their desire for domination can look so much like attraction, even love. In school the boys had tried to break her with cruelty and disregard, and in college men had tried to do it with sex and popularity, all with the same aim of subjugating some force in her personality. It depressed her to think people were so predictable.\n", "They got a bang out of things, though--in a haif-assed way, of course. I know that sounds mean to say, but I don't mean it mean. I just mean that I used to think about old Spencer quite a lot, and if you thought about him too much, you wondered what the heck he was still living for. I mean he was all stooped over, and he had very terrible posture, and in class, whenever he dropped a piece of chalk at the blackboard, some guy in the first row always had to get up and pick it up and hand it to him. That's awful, in my opinion. But if you thought about him just enough and not too much, you could figure it out that he wasn't doing too bad for himself. For instance, one Sunday when some other guys and I were over there for hot chocolate, he showed us this old beat-up Navajo blanket that he and Mrs. Spencer'd bought off some Indian in Yellowstone Park. You could tell old Spencer'd got a big bang out of buying it. That's what I mean. You take somebody old as hell, like old Spencer, and they can get a big bang out of buying a blanket.\n", "I'm the most terrific liar you ever saw in your life. It's awful. If I'm on my way to the store to buy a magazine, even, and somebody asks me where I'm going, I'm liable to say I'm going to the opera. It's terrible.\n", "Something like that--a guy getting hit on the head with a rock or something--tickled the pants off Ackley. \"You have a damn good sense of humor, Ackley kid,\" I told him. \"You know that?\"\n", "I started imitating one of those guys in the movies. In one of those musicals. I hate the movies like poison, but I get a bang imitating them. Old Stradlater watched me in the mirror while he was shaving. All I need's an audience. I'm an exhibitionist. \"I'm the goddarn Governor's son,\" I said. I was knocking myself out. Tap-dancing all over the place. \"He doesn't want me to be a tap dancer. He wants me to go to Oxford. But it's in my goddam blood, tap-dancing.\" Old Stradlater laughed. He didn't have too bad a sense of humor. \"It's the opening night of the Ziegfeld Follies.\" I was getting out of breath. I have hardly any wind at all. \"The leading man can't go on. He's drunk as a bastard. So who do they get to take his place? Me, that's who. The little ole goddam Governor's son.\"\n", "It was nice, though, when we got out of the dining room. There were about three inches of snow on the ground, and it was still coming down like a madman. It looked pretty as hell,\n", "\"No idea. I just want to thank you for being such a goddam prince, that's all,\" I said. I said it in this very sincere voice. \"You're aces, Ackley kid,\" I said. \"You know that?\"\n", "Women kill me. They really do. I don't mean I'm oversexed or anything like that--although I am quite sexy. I just like them, I mean. They're always leaving their goddam bags out in the middle of the aisle.\n", "They didn't invite me to sit down at their table-- mostly because they were too ignorant--but I sat down anyway.\n", "\"Hey, Horwitz,\" I said. \"You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central Park South?\" \"The what?\" \"The lagoon. That little lake, like, there. Where the ducks are. You know.\" \"Yeah, what about it?\" \"Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?\" \"Where who goes?\" \"The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves--go south or something?\" Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn't a bad guy, though. \"How the hell should I know?\" he said. \"How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?\" \"Well, don't get sore about it,\" I said. He was sore about it or something. \"Who's sore? Nobody's sore.\" I stopped having a conversation with him, if he was going to get so damn touchy about it. But he started it up again himself. He turned all the way around again, and said, \"The fish don't go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.\" \"The fish--that's different. The fish is different. I'm talking about the ducks,\" I said. \"What's different about it? Nothin's different about it,\" Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. \"It's tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake.\n", "\"Hey, Horwitz,\" I said. \"You ever pass by the lagoon in Central Park? Down by Central Park South?\" \"The what?\" \"The lagoon. That little lake, like, there. Where the ducks are. You know.\" \"Yeah, what about it?\" \"Well, you know the ducks that swim around in it? In the springtime and all? Do you happen to know where they go in the wintertime, by any chance?\" \"Where who goes?\" \"The ducks. Do you know, by any chance? I mean does somebody come around in a truck or something and take them away, or do they fly away by themselves--go south or something?\" Old Horwitz turned all the way around and looked at me. He was a very impatient-type guy. He wasn't a bad guy, though. \"How the hell should I know?\" he said. \"How the hell should I know a stupid thing like that?\" \"Well, don't get sore about it,\" I said. He was sore about it or something. \"Who's sore? Nobody's sore.\" I stopped having a conversation with him, if he was going to get so damn touchy about it. But he started it up again himself. He turned all the way around again, and said, \"The fish don't go no place. They stay right where they are, the fish. Right in the goddam lake.\" \"The fish--that's different. The fish is different. I'm talking about the ducks,\" I said. \"What's different about it? Nothin's different about it,\" Horwitz said. Everything he said, he sounded sore about something. \"It's tougher for the fish, the winter and all, than it is for the ducks, for Chrissake. Use your head, for Chrissake.\"\n", "He was one of those guys that think they're being a pansy if they don't break around forty of your fingers when they shake hands with you.\n", "we chewed the fat for a while.\n", "They acted a little bit the way old Ernie, down in the Village, plays the piano. If you do something too good, then, after a while, if you don't watch it, you start showing off. And then you're not as good any more.\n", "The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't. She had this little kid with her that was bored as hell and had to go to the bathroom, but she wouldn't take him. She kept telling him to sit still and behave himself. She was about as kindhearted as a goddam wolf. You take somebody that cries their goddam eyes out over phony stuff in the movies, and nine times out of ten they're mean bastards at heart. I'm not kidding.\n", "\"So. You and Pencey are no longer one,\" he said. He always said things that way. Sometimes it amused me a lot and sometimes it didn't. He sort of did it a little bit too much. I don't mean he wasn't witty or anything--he was--but sometimes it gets on your nerves when somebody's always saying things like \"So you and Pencey are no longer one.\" D.B. does it too much sometimes, too.\n", "I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you'd never guess what I saw on the wall. Another \"Fuck you.\" It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones. That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write \"Fuck you\" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say \"Holden Caulfield\" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say \"Fuck you.\" I'm positive, in fact.\n", "'When you're awake you move, and I miss things.' 'What things?' He felt her kissing his head. 'Everything you do. When you're asleep you hardly move, and I can take it all in. There's enough time.'\n", "'Thanks. And thanks for not bringing that goddamn drone. I can imagine the jokes.' '... Yes,' Sma said, hesitantly, so that he said: 'Sma? What is it?' 'Well...' The woman looked uncomfortable. 'Tell me.' 'Skaffen-Amtiskaw,' she said, awkwardly. 'It sent you a present.' She fished a small package from her pocket, flourished it, embarrassed. 'I... I don't know what it is, but...' 'Well I can't open it. Come on, Sma.' Sma opened the package. She looked at the contents. Stod Perice leant over, and then turned quickly away, holding one hand at his mouth, coughing. Sma pursed her lips. 'I may ask for a new escort drone.' He closed his eyes. 'What is it?' 'It's a hat.'\n", "He saw a chair, and a ship that was not a ship; he saw a man with two shadows, and he saw that which cannot be seen; a concept; the adaptive, self-seeking urge to survive, to bend everything that can be reached to that end, and to remove and to add and to smash and to create so that one particular collection of cells can go on, can move onwards and decide, and keeping moving, and keeping deciding, knowing that - if nothing else - at least it lives. And it had two shadows, it was two things; it was the need and it was the method. The need was obvious; to defeat what opposed its life. The method was that taking and bending of materials and people to one purpose, the outlook that everything could be used in the fight; that nothing could be excluded, that everything was a weapon, and the ability to handle those weapons, to find them and choose which one to aim and fire; that talent, that ability, that use of weapons.\n", "But I don't know what the right thing to do is; I sometimes think I know too much, I've studied too much, learned too much, remembered too much. It all seems to average out, somehow; like dust that settles over... whatever machinery we carry inside us that leads us to act, and puts the same weight everywhere, so that always you can see good and bad on each side, and always there are arguments, precedents for every possible course of action... so of course one ends up doing nothing. Perhaps that's only right; perhaps that's what evolution requires, to leave the field free for younger, unencumbered minds, and those not afraid to act.'\n", "'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. 'But look; this table's clean.'\n", "He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while. 'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. 'But look; this table's clean.' He agreed that the table was clean.\n", "Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it. He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who'd taken a notion to help out for a while. 'Of course I don't have to do this,' one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. 'But look; this table's clean.' He agreed that the table was clean. 'Usually,' the man said. 'I work on alien - no offence - alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that's my speciality... like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalogue, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But... the job's never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get re-evaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled... but,' he slapped the table, 'when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you've done something. It's an achievement.' 'But in the end, it's still just cleaning a table.' 'And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?' the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man's grin, 'Well, yes.' 'But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway,' the man laughed, 'people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,' the man said with a smile, 'it's a good way of meeting people. So; where are you from, anyway?'\n", "drifting rudderless towards the rocks,\n", "To fight for what would inevitably melt and could never provide food or minerals or a permanent place to live, seemed an almost deliberate caricature of the conventional folly of war.\n", "'It's not cynicism,' he said flatly. 'I just think people overvalue argument because they like to hear themselves talk.'\n", "\"Zakalwe, in all the human societies we have ever reviewed, in every age and every state, there has seldom if ever been a shortage of eager young males prepared to kill and die to preserve the security, comfort and prejudices of their elders, and what you call heroism is just an expression of this simple fact; there is never a scarcity of idiots.\"'\n", "A large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbor bottom\u2014that was how he liked to imagine his heart. Someday he would have an anchor tattooed on his chest.\n", "it seemed increasingly obvious that the world would have to topple if he was to attain the glory that was rightfully his. They were consubstantial: glory and the capsized world.\n", "She thrilled to the sight\n", "Closing the mouth of the fountain with his thumb, he squirted a fan of water at the dahlias and white chrysanthemums languishing in the heat: leaves quivered, a small rainbow arched, flowers recoiled.\n", "Noboru squeezed a mountain of toothpaste onto his toothbrush and belabored his mouth until the gums bled. Staring into the mirror, he watched a pistachio foam swaddle his irregular teeth until only the shiny pointed edges of the boyish cuspids showed: he was despondent. The smell of peppermint made a purity of his rage. Tearing off his shirt, Noboru put on his pajama tops and looked around the room.\n", "The parting, like the white fruit of an apple discoloring instantly around the bite, had begun three days before when they had met aboard the Rakuyo. Saying goodbye now entailed not a single new emotion.\n", "\"Excuse me,\" I said. \"I thought you were a trout stream.\" \"I'm not,\" she said.\n", "Forgotten Works.\n", "red sugar, golden sugar, gray sugar, black, soundless sugar, white sugar, blue sugar, brown sugar.\n", "\"I will tell you. This place stinks. This isn't iDEATH at all. This is just a figment of your imagination. All of you guys here are just a bunch of clucks, doing ducky things at your clucky iDEATH. \"iDEATH\u2014ha, don't make me laugh. This place is nothing but a claptrap. You wouldn't know iDEATH if it walked up and bit you. \"I know more about iDEATH than all of you guys, especially Charley here who thinks he's something extra. I know more about iDEATH in my little finger than all you guys know put together. \"You haven't the slightest idea what's going on here. I know. I know. I know. To hell with your iDEATH. I've forgotten more iDEATH than you guys will ever know. I'm going down to the Forgotten Works to live. You guys can have this damn rat hole.\"\n", "That really disgusted me: a decent woman smiling at inBOIL. I could not help but wonder, what next?\n", "Besides, it was raining. Rich cinnabar gushed out of the old brick walls and washed into puddles on the street. The masts spiring above the roofs were dripping wet. Not wanting to attract attention, Fusako waited in the back seat of the car. Through the rain-streaked window she watched the crew emerge one by one from the weather-beaten wooden shed.\n", "Procedural justice deals with how the law is enforced, as opposed to substantive justice, which involves the actual outcomes of the functioning of the system.\n", "Another part of the problem lies in the nature of community. Steve Herbert shows that community meetings tend to be populated by long-time residents, those who own rather than rent their homes, business owners, and landlords. The views of renters, youth, homeless people, immigrants, and the most socially marginalized are rarely represented.\n", "White jurors are much more likely to side with police, regardless of the race of the officer and the person killed.\n", "There is a problem of officer compliance. In numerous shooting cases, officers have failed to turn on their cameras. For example: One of the officers present at the shooting of Walter Scott in Charleston did not have his camera turned on. Not a single one of the officers present at a shooting in Washington, D.C., in 2016 had their camera on. Eighteen-year-old Paul O\u2019Neil was killed by police in Chicago who did not have their cameras on. One study actually found that departments using cameras had higher rates of shootings. Ultimately, body cameras are only as effective as the accountability mechanisms in place.\n", "Any hope we have of holding police more accountable must be based on greater openness and transparency. Police departments are notoriously defensive and insular. Their special status as the sole legitimate users of force has contributed to a mindset of \u201cthem against us,\u201d which has engendered a culture of secrecy. For too long police have walled themselves off from public inspection, open academic research, and media investigations. Entrenched practices that serve no legitimate purpose, failed policies, implicit and explicit racism among the rank and file, and a culture of hostility toward the public must be rooted out.\n", "They have given up on using government to improve racial and economic inequality and seem hellbent on worsening these inequalities and using the police to manage the consequences.\n", "Too often, when biased policing is pointed out, the response is to circle the wagons, deny any intent to do harm, and block any discipline against the officers involved. This sends an unambiguous message that officers are above the law and free to act on their biases without consequence. It also says that the institution is more concerned about defending itself than rooting out these problems.\n", "policing emerged as new political and economic formations developed, producing social upheavals that could no longer be managed by existing private, communal, and informal processes.3 This can be seen in the earliest origins of policing, which were tied to three basic social arrangements of inequality in the eighteenth century: slavery, colonialism, and the control of a new industrial working class.\n", "Most liberal and conservative academics attempt to counter this argument by pointing to the London Metropolitan Police, held up as the \u201coriginal\u201d police force. Created in 1829 by Sir Robert Peel, from whom the \u201cBobbies\u201d get their name, this new force was more effective than the informal and unprofessional \u201cwatch\u201d or the excessively violent and often hated militia and army. But even this noble endeavor had at its core not fighting crime, but managing disorder and protecting the propertied classes from the rabble. Peel developed his ideas while managing the British colonial occupation of Ireland and seeking new forms of social control that would allow for continued political and economic domination in the face of growing insurrections, riots, and political uprisings.7 For years, such \u201coutrages\u201d had been managed by the local militia and, if necessary, the British Army. However, colonial expansion and the Napoleonic Wars dramatically reduced the availability of these forces just as resistance to British occupation increased. Furthermore, armed troops had limited tools for dealing with riots and others forms of mass disorder. Too often they were called upon to open fire on crowds, creating martyrs and further inflaming Irish resistance. Peel was forced to develop a lower-cost and more legitimate form of policing: a \u201cPeace Preservation Force,\u201d made up of professional police who attempted to manage crowds by embedding themselves more fully in rebellious localities, then identifying and neutralizing troublemakers and ringleaders through threats and arrests. This led eventually to the creation of the Royal Irish Constabulary, which for about a century was the main rural police force in Ireland. It played a central role in maintaining British rule and an oppressive agricultural system dominated by British loyalists, a system that produced widespread poverty, famine, and displacement.\n", "At the epicenter of this transformation is Texas, where privatization and drastic cuts to the public sector meet the expansion of punitive mechanisms of social control. Texas was an early adopter of high-stakes testing in the 1990s. As governor, George W. Bush expanded its role and implemented a series of punitive measures, mostly focused on zero-tolerance approaches. Since, as we\u2019ve seen, testing motivates teachers to remove low-performing and disruptive students from class, suspension rates went through the roof\u201495 percent of them for minor infractions. By 2009\u201310 there were 2 million suspensions in Texas, 1.9 million of which were for \u201cviolating local code of conduct\u201d rather than a more serious offense. To deal with this onslaught of suspensions, for-profit companies with close ties to state Republican leaders developed what Annette Fuentes calls \u201csupermax schools.\u201d11 These schools use fingerprint scanners, metal detectors, frequent searches, heavy video surveillance, and intense disciplinary systems to manage kids kicked out of regular schools. In many cases there is no talking allowed in hallways or lunchrooms. Teachers have little specialized training, and the low pay means fewer certified teachers than in regular schools. The emphasis is on computer-based learning and frequent testing. Outside evaluations have been tightly controlled; the few external reviews have found terrible performance and prison-like conditions. Overall, the claimed \u201cTexas Miracle\u201d of improved test scores was based on faked test results, astronomical suspension and dropout rates, and the shunting of problem students to prison-like schools outside the state testing regime. Bush rode this chicanery all the way to the White House, where he instituted it nationally in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act.\n", "are encourage to\n", "A Columbia University study found that children receiving RCCP instruction from their teachers developed more positively than their peers: they saw their social world in a less hostile way, saw violence as an unacceptable option, and chose nonviolent ways to resolve conflict. They also scored higher on standardized tests in reading and math.\n", "Metal detectors, police on campus, and zero-tolerance disciplinary codes drive a wedge between students and teachers and create a climate of distrust that can actually increase disruptive and criminal behavior, as education professors Matthew Mayer and Peter Leone found in their groundbreaking 1999 study of school crime.\n", "Even if armed police on campus were an effective tool for reducing a few violent incidents, the social costs of that approach are not acceptable. We must find better ways to keep kids safe than turning their schools into armed fortresses and prisons. It\u2019s time to take police out of the schools and reject the harsh punitive focus of school management. Our young people need compassion and care, not coercion and control.\n", "But there are worse places to live. There are much worse places right here in this U-Stor-It. Only the big units like this one have their own doors. Most of them are accessed via a communal loading dock that leads to a maze of wide corrugated-steel hallways and freight elevators. These are slum housing, 5-by-10s and 10-by-10s where Yanoama tribespersons cook beans and parboil fistfuls of coca leaves over heaps of burning lottery tickets.\n", "\u201cJust gotta run a few tests on this delivery of yours,\u201d the man with the glass eye says. \u201cEver think of introducing yourself?\u201d Y.T. says. \u201cNah,\u201d he says, \u201cpeople always forget names. You can just think of me as that one guy, y'know?\u201d\n", "Saint Louis Bertrand\n", "hits the chain-link fence as if it were a fog bank,\n", "\u201cThese legends reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was superior to anything that came afterward.\u201d \u201cIs Sumerian really that good?\u201d \u201cNot as far as modern-day linguists can tell,\u201d the Librarian says. \u201cAs I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that the Sumerians\u2014who spoke a language radically different from anything in existence today\u2014had fundamentally different brains from yours.\n", "When I spoke to him, he said, pull the other one, kid, it has got bells on.\n", "It was a five hundred mile journey and, surprisingly, quite uneventful. People who are rather more than six feet tall and nearly as broad across the shoulders often have uneventful journeys. People jump out at them from behind rocks then say things like, \u201cOh. Sorry. I thought you were someone else.\u201d\n", "But, well, a lad your age, stuck down here\u2026It\u2019s not right. You know. I mean. Not a child anymore. Having to shuffle around on your knees most of the time, and everything. It\u2019s not right.\u201d \u201cWhat is my own kind, then?\u201d said Carrot, bewildered. The old dwarf took a deep breath. \u201cYou\u2019re human,\u201d he said. \u201cWhat, like Mr. Varneshi?\u201d Mr. Varneshi drove an ox-cart up the mountain trails once a week, to trade things for gold. \u201cOne of the Big People?\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re six foot six, lad. He\u2019s only five foot.\u201d The dwarf twiddled the loose rivet again. \u201cYou see how it is.\u201d\n", "It is said that the gods play games with the lives of men. But what games, and why, and the identities of the actual pawns, and what the game is, and what the rules are\u2014who knows? Best not to speculate.\n", "\u201cIt\u2019s, er, the wizards, see,\u201d said Brother Fingers. \u201cYou prob\u2019ly dint know this, when you was banged up with them venerable herberts on their mountain, but the wizards around here come down on you like a ton of bricks if they catches you doin\u2019 anything like that.\u201d \u201cDemarcation, they call it,\u201d said Brother Plasterer. \u201cLike, I don\u2019t go around fiddling with the mystic interleaved wossnames of causality, and they don\u2019t do any plastering.\u201d\n", "I went to the Watch House and met Sgt. Colon, a very fat man, and when I told him about the Thieves\u2019 Guild he said, Don\u2019t be A Idiot. I do not think he is serious. He says, Don\u2019t you worry about Thieves\u2019 Guilds, This is all what you have to do, you walk along the Streets at Night, shouting, It\u2019s Twelve O\u2019clock and All\u2019s Well. I said, What if it is not all well, and he said, You bloody well find another street.\n", "\u201cCorporal Nobbs,\u201d he rasped, \u201cwhy are you kicking people when they\u2019re down?\u201d \u201cSafest way, sir,\u201d said Nobby.\n", "Once you\u2019ve ruled out the impossible then whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The problem lay in working out what was impossible, of course. That was the trick, all right.\n", "\u201cAny idea who it is?\u201d The Librarian shrugged, a decidedly expressive gesture for a body which was basically a sack between a pair of shoulderblades.\n", "It was clearly the room of a woman, but one who had cheerfully and without any silly moping been getting on with her life while all that soppy romance stuff had been happening to other people somewhere else, and been jolly grateful that she had her health. Such clothing as was visible had been chosen for sensible hardwearing qualities, possibly by a previous generation by the look of it, rather than its use as light artillery in the war between the sexes.\n", "\u201cHwhat,\u201d she said, \u201cis the meaning of this?\u201d If a Ramkin had ever been given to introspection she\u2019d have admitted that it wasn\u2019t a very original line. But it was handy. It did the job. The reason that cliches become cliches is that they are the hammers and screwdrivers in the toolbox of communication.\n", "Then came a voice that was a honeyed purr of sheer deadly menace. \u201cThis is Lord Mountjoy Quickfang Winterforth IV, the hottest dragon in the city. It could burn your head clean off.\u201d Captain Vimes limped forward from the shadows. A small and extremely frightened golden dragon was clamped firmly under one arm. His other hand held it by the tail. The rioters watched it, hypnotized. \u201cNow I know what you\u2019re thinking,\u201d Vimes went on, softly. \u201cYou\u2019re wondering, after all this excitement, has it got enough flame left? And, y\u2019know, I ain\u2019t so sure myself\u2026\u201d He leaned forward, sighting between the dragon\u2019s ears, and his voice buzzed like a knife blade: \u201cWhat you\u2019ve got to ask yourself is: Am I feeling lucky?\u201d\n", "Going Up in the World is a metaphor, which I am learning about, it is like Lying but more decorative.\n", "a better one, it is in a place called Pseudopolis Yard, opposite the Opera House. Sgt. Colon said we have gone Up in the World and has told Nobby not to try to sell the furnishings. Going Up in the World is a metaphor, which I am learning about, it is like Lying but more decorative.\n", "The other two entered the room. Vimes gave his men his usual look of resigned dismay. \u201cMy squad,\u201d he mumbled. \u201cFine body of men,\u201d said Lady Ramkin. \u201cThe good old rank and file, eh?\u201d \u201cThe rank, anyway,\u201d said Vimes.\n", "as the last representative of one of Ankh-Morpork\u2019s oldest families she\u2019d had to go to the victory ball to show willing. Lord Vetinari seldom had balls. There was a popular song about it, in fact.\n", "\u201cA Wizard\u2019s Staff Has A Knob On The End.\u201d\n", "\u201cWhat happened, then?\u201d said Carrot. \u201cHe died,\u201d said Nobby, \u201cin the hexecution of his duty.\u201d \u201cI told him,\u201d said Colon, taking a swig at the bottle they had brought along to see them through the night, \u201cI told him. Slow down, I said. You\u2019ll do yourself a mischief, I said. I don\u2019t know what got into him, running ahead like that.\u201d \u201cI blame the Thieves\u2019 Guild,\u201d said Nobby. \u201cAllowing people like that on the streets\u2014\u201d \u201cThere was this bloke we saw done a robbery one night,\u201d said Colon miserably. \u201cRight in front of us! And Captain Vimes, he said Come On, and we run, only the point is you shouldn\u2019t run too fast, see. Else you might catch them. Leads to all sorts of problems, catching people\u2014\u201d \u201cThey don\u2019t like it,\u201d said Nobby. There was a mutter of thunder, and a flurry of rain. \u201cThey don\u2019t like it,\u201d agreed Colon. \u201cBut Gaskin went and forgot, he ran on, went around the corner and, well, this bloke had a couple of mates waiting\u2014\u201d \u201cIt was his heart really,\u201d said Nobby. \u201cWell. Anyway. And there he was,\u201d said Colon. \u201cCaptain Vimes was very upset about it. You shouldn\u2019t run fast in the Watch, lad,\u201d he said solemnly. \u201cYou can be a fast guard or you can be an old guard, but you can\u2019t be a fast old guard. Poor old Gaskin.\u201d \u201cIt didn\u2019t ought to be like that,\u201d said Carrot. Colon took a pull at the bottle. \u201cWell, it is,\u201d he said. Rain bounced on his helmet and trickled down his face. \u201cBut it didn\u2019t ought to be,\u201d said Carrot flatly. \u201cBut it is,\u201d said Colon.\n", "\u201cCan\u2019t we do something for the poor man?\u201d said Lady Ramkin. Nobby saluted smartly. \u201cI could kick him in the bollocks for you if you like, m\u2019lady.\u201d \u201cDddrrr,\u201d said Brother Fingers, beginning to shake uncontrollably, while Lady Ramkin smiled the iron-hard blank smile of a high-born lady who is determined not to show that she has understood what has just been said to her.\n", "The first problem was the palace guard. Vimes had never liked them. They\u2019d never liked him. Okay, so maybe the rank were only one step away from petty scofflaws, but in Vimes\u2019s professional opinion the palace guard these days were only one step away from being the worst criminal scum the city had ever produced. A step further down. They\u2019d have to reform a bit before they could even be considered for inclusion in the Ten Most Unwanted list. They were rough. They were tough. They weren\u2019t the sweepings off the gutter, they were what you still found sticking to the gutter when the gutter sweepers had given up in exhaustion.\n", "about memory, originality, and repetition. In highly literate cultures, there is a tendency to dismiss repetitive or formulaic discourse as clich\u00e9; we think of it as boring or lazy writing. In primarily oral cultures, repetition tends to be much more highly valued.\n", "\u201cSomething wrong with your neck, Captain?\u201d said the chief beggar politely, as they waited for the coaches. \u201cWhat?\u201d said Vimes distractedly. \u201cYou keep on staring upward,\u201d said the beggar. \u201cHmm? Oh. No. Nothing wrong,\u201d said Vimes. The beggar wrapped his velvet cloak around him. \u201cYou couldn\u2019t by any chance spare\u2014\u201d he paused, calculating a sum in accordance with his station\u2014\u201cabout three hundred dollars for a twelve-course civic banquet, could you?\u201d \u201cNo.\u201d \u201cFair enough. Fair enough,\u201d said the chief beggar amiably. He sighed. It wasn\u2019t a rewarding job, being chief beggar. It was the differentials that did for you. Low-grade beggars made a reasonable enough living on pennies, but people tended to look the other way when you asked them for a sixteen-bedroom mansion for the night.\n", "Just fancy.\n", "\u201cWhat is it?\u201d said Nobby. It was vaguely round, of a woodish texture, and when struck made a noise like a ruler plucked over the edge of a desk. Sergeant Colon tapped it again. \u201cI give in,\u201d he said. Carrot proudly lifted it out of the battered packaging. \u201cIt\u2019s a cake,\u201d he said, shoving both hands under the thing and raising it with some difficulty. \u201cFrom my mother.\u201d He managed to put it on the table without trapping his fingers. \u201cCan you eat it?\u201d said Nobby. \u201cIt\u2019s taken months to get here. You\u2019d think it would go stale.\u201d \u201cOh, it\u2019s to a special dwarfish recipe,\u201d said Carrot. \u201cDwarfish cakes don\u2019t go stale.\u201d Sergeant Colon gave it another sharp rap. \u201cI suppose not,\u201d he conceded. \u201cIt\u2019s incredibly sustaining,\u201d said Carrot. \u201cPractically magical. The secret has been handed down from dwarf to dwarf for centuries. One tiny piece of this and you won\u2019t want anything to eat all day.\u201d \u201cGet away?\u201d said Colon. \u201cA dwarf can go hundreds of miles with a cake like this in his pack,\u201d Carrot went on. \u201cI bet he can,\u201d said Colon gloomily, \u201cI bet all the time he\u2019d be thinking, \u2018Bloody hell, I hope I can find something else to eat soon, otherwise it\u2019s the bloody cake again.\u2019\u201d\n", "I can see what the captain means, he thought. No wonder he always has a drink after he thinks about things. We always beat ourselves before we even start. Give any Ankh-Morpork man a big stick and he\u2019ll end up clubbing himself to death.\n", "\u201cThe sergeant is right, Nobby,\u201d said Carrot virtuously. \u201cYou know that when there\u2019s just one chance which might just work\u2014well, it works. Otherwise there\u2019d be no\u2014\u201d he lowered his voice\u2014\u201cI mean, it stands to reason, if last desperate chances didn\u2019t work, there\u2019d be no\u2026well, the gods wouldn\u2019t let it be any other way. They wouldn\u2019t.\u201d As one man, the three of them turned and looked through the murky air toward the hub of the Discworld, thousands of miles away. Now the air was gray with old smoke and mist shreds, but on a clear day it was possible to see Cori Celesti, home of the gods. Site of the home of the gods, anyway. They lived in Dunmanifestin, the stuccoed Valhalla, where the gods faced eternity with the kind of minds that were at a loss to know what to do to pass a wet afternoon. They played games with the fates of men, it was said. Exactly what game they thought they were playing at the moment was anyone\u2019s guess. But of course there were rules. Everyone knew there were rules. They just had to hope like Hell that the gods knew the rules, too. \u201cIt\u2019s got to work,\u201d mumbled Colon. \u201cI\u2019ll be using my lucky arrow \u2019n all. You\u2019re right. Last hopeless chances have got to work. Nothing makes any sense otherwise. You might as well not be alive.\u201d\n", "\u201cAiding and Abetting what, Captain?\u201d said Carrot, as the weaponless guards trooped away. \u201cYou have to aid and abet something.\u201d \u201cI think in this case it will just be generalized abetting,\u201d said Vimes. \u201cPersistent and reckless abetment.\u201d\n", "\u201cI believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people,\u201d said the man. \u201cYou\u2019re wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides.\u201d\n", "I wished that Aphrodite had not made me go crazy, when she took me from my country, and made me leave my daughter and the bed I shared with my fine, handsome, clever husband.\u201d And Menelaus said, \u201cYes, wife, quite right.\n", "As when Athena and Hephaestus teach a knowledgeable craftsman every art, and he pours gold on silver, making objects more beautiful\u2014just so Athena poured attractiveness across his head and shoulders. Then he went off and sat beside the sea; his handsomeness was dazzling. The girl was shocked. She told her slaves with tidy hair, \u201cNow listen to me, girls! The gods who live on Mount Olympus must have wished this man to come in contact with my godlike people. Before, he looked so poor and unrefined; now he is like a god that lives in heaven. I hope I get a man like this as husband, a man that lives here and would like to stay. But, girls, now give the stranger food and drink!\u201d\n", "They all enjoyed the games. When they were over, Laodamas, Alcinous\u2019 son, said, \u201cNow my friends, we ought to ask the stranger if he plays any sports. His build is strong; his legs and arms and neck are very sturdy, and he is in his prime, though he has been broken by suffering. No pain can shake a man as badly as the sea, however strong he once was.\u201d Euryalus replied, \u201cYou are quite right, Laodamas. Why not call out to challenge him yourself?\u201d The noble son of Alcinous agreed with him. He stood up in the middle of them all and called Odysseus. \u201cCome here!\u201d he said. \u201cNow you, sir! You should try our games as well, if you know any sports; it seems you would. Nothing can be more glorious for a man, in a whole lifetime, than what he achieves with hands and feet.\n", "Early the Dawn appeared, pink fingers blooming, and then he lit his fire and milked his ewes in turn, and set a lamb by every one. When he had diligently done his chores, he grabbed two men and made a meal of them.\n", "On the tenth day, I landed on the island of those who live on food from lotus flowers. We gathered water, and my crew prepared a meal. We picnicked by the ships, then I chose two men, and one slave to make the third, to go and scout. We needed to find out what kind of people lived there on that island. The scouts encountered humans, Lotus-Eaters, who did not hurt them. They just shared with them their sweet delicious fruit. But as they ate it, they lost the will to come back and bring news to me. They wanted only to stay there, feeding on lotus with the Lotus-Eaters. They had forgotten home.\n", "\u2018Wake up! Now no more dozing in sweet sleep. We have to go. The goddess gave instructions.\u2019 They did as I had said. But even then I could not lead my men away unharmed. The youngest one\u2014Elpenor was his name\u2014 not very brave in war, nor very smart, was lying high up in the home of Circe, apart from his companions, seeking coolness since he was drunk. He heard the noise and bustle, the movements of his friends, and jumped up quickly, forgetting to climb down the lofty ladder. He fell down crashing headlong from the roof, and broke his neck, right at the spine. His spirit went down to Hades.\n", "The men were terrified; their hands let fall the oars\u2014they splashed down in the water. The ship stayed still, since no one now was pulling the slender blades. I strode along the deck pausing to cheer each man, then gave a speech to rally all of them. \u2018Dear friends! We are experienced in danger. This is not worse than the time the Cyclops captured us, and forced us to remain inside his cave. We got away that time, thanks to my skill and brains and strategy. Remember that.\n", "\u2018Your Majesty, Odysseus, great general, I am about to die from this cold weather! I have no cloak. Some spirit tricked me into wearing my tunic only; now there is no way to fix it.\u2019\n", "When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book\u2014to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.\n", "When I learned about Deep Listening, I realized I had unwittingly been practicing it for a while\u2014only in the context of bird-watching. In fact, I\u2019ve always found it funny that it\u2019s called bird-watching, because half if not more of bird-watching is actually bird-listening. (I personally think they should just rename it \u201cbird-noticing.\u201d)\n", "\u201cSilence is not the absence of something but the presence of everything.\u201d\n", "find the varying fates of the 1960s communes to be especially instructive. First, as relatively recent versions of this experiment, the communes exemplify the problems with any imagined escape from the media and effects of capitalist society, including the role of privilege. Second, they show how easily an imagined apolitical \u201cblank slate\u201d leads to a technocratic solution where design has replaced politics, ironically presaging the libertarian dreams of Silicon Valley\u2019s tech moguls. Lastly, their wish to break with society and the media\u2014proceeding from feelings I can sympathize with\u2014ultimately reminds me not only of the impossibility of such a break, but of my responsibility to that same society.\n", "The rural setting sometimes created \u201ca natural impetus to revert to traditional roles: Women stay inside, cook, and look after the children, while men plow, chop, and build roads.\u201d19 In What the Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm, Stephen Diamond states it outright: \u201cNone of the men ever washes dishes or hardly cooks.\u201d20 A spatial move to the country, or into an isolated communal house, did not always equal a move out of ingrained ideologies.\n", "If I had no choice about the age in which I was to live, I nevertheless have a choice about the attitude I take and about the way and the extent of my participation in its living ongoing events. To choose the world is\u2026an acceptance of a task and a vocation in the world, in history and in time. In my time, which is the present.\n", "After the election, I also saw many acquaintances jumping into the melee, pouring out long, emotional, and hastily written diatribes online that inevitably got a lot of attention. I\u2019m no exception; my most-liked Facebook post of all time was an anti-Trump screed. In my opinion, this kind of hyper-accelerated expression on social media is not exactly helpful (not to mention the huge amount of value it produces for Facebook). It\u2019s not a form of communication driven by reflection and reason, but rather a reaction driven by fear and anger. Obviously these feelings are warranted, but their expression on social media so often feels like firecrackers setting off other firecrackers in a very small room that soon gets filled with smoke.\n", "By spending too much time on social media and chained to the news cycle, he says, \u201c[y]ou are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people\u2019s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it\u2019s yourself you\u2019re thinking about or anything else.\u201d\n", "But most important, standing apart represents the moment in which the desperate desire to leave (forever!) matures into a commitment to live in permanent refusal, where one already is, and to meet others in the common space of that refusal. This kind of resistance still manifests as participating, but participating in the \u201cwrong way\u201d: a way that undermines the authority of the hegemonic game and creates possibilities outside of it.\n", "That Diogenes\u2019s actions in some ways prefigured performance art has not gone unnoticed by the contemporary art world. In a 1984 issue of Artforum, Thomas McEvilley presented some of Diogenes\u2019s best \u201cworks\u201d in \u201cDiogenes of Sinope (c. 410\u2013c. 320 BC): Selected Performance Pieces.\u201d Arranged in this context, his acts indeed sound like the cousins of the works from the twentieth-century antics of Dada and Fluxus.\n", "McEvilley, as so many others throughout history have, admires Diogenes\u2019s courage when it came to flouting customs so customary that they were not even spoken about. He writes, \u201c[Diogenes\u2019s] general theme was the complete and immediate reversal of all familiar values, on the ground that they are automatizing forces which cloud more of life than they reveal.\u201d12 When McEvilley says that Diogenes\u2019s actions \u201c[thrust] at the cracks of communal psychology\u201d and \u201claid bare a dimension of hiding possibilities he thought might constitute personal freedom,\u201d it\u2019s easy to think not only of how easily Pilvi Takala unsettled her coworkers at Deloitte, but every person who, by refusing or subverting an unspoken custom, revealed its often-fragile contours. For a moment, the custom is shown to be not the horizon of possibility, but rather a tiny island in a sea of unexamined alternatives.\n", "Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students. James C. McMillan, an art professor at Bennett College who advised students when they participated in the 1960 Greensboro sit-ins, said that black adults were \u201creluctant\u201d to \u201cjeopardize any gains, economic and otherwise,\u201d but that the students \u201cdid not have that kind of an investment, that kind of economic status, and, therefore, were not vulnerable to the kind of reprisals that could have occurred.\u201d43 Participating students were under the care of black colleges, not at the mercy of white employers. In contrast, McMillan says that working-class black residents who went so far as to express support for the students were threatened with violence and unemployment. For them, the margin was much smaller.\n", "In other words, the piece is a collage not so much because Hockney had an aesthetic fondness for collage, but because something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception.\n", "While I am all for legal restrictions on addictive technology, I also want to see what\u2019s possible when we take up William James\u2019s challenge and bring attention back, over and over again, to an idea \u201cheld steadily before the mind until it fills the mind.\u201d I am personally unsatisfied with untrained attention, which flickers from one new thing to the next, not only because it is a shallow experience, or because it is an expression of habit rather than will, but because it gives me less access to my own human experience.\n", "Chris J. Cuomo critiques the animal rights stance that proceeds solely from the logic that some animals are sentient and can feel pain, because it privileges sentience in an ecology that relies on both sentient and non-sentient beings. This privileging, she writes, \u201ccomes out of the assumption that human beings are paradigmatic ethical objects, and that other life-forms are valuable only in so far as they are seen as similar to humans.\u201d\n", "noticed an article on the front page of a local newspaper about an \u201catmospheric river\u201d that would be arriving from the Philippines. I had never heard the term, and when I looked it up, I learned that atmospheric rivers are temporary narrow regions in the atmosphere that transport moisture from the tropics, in this case to the West Coast (the most well-known being the Pineapple Express). As the river makes landfall, its water vapor cools and falls in the form of rain. Atmospheric rivers are hundreds of miles wide and can carry many times the amount of water as the Mississippi River. I was surprised to find that California gets 30\u201350 percent of its rainfall from atmospheric river events.\n", "In a speech at a feminist conference where she is one of only two black speakers, she vents exasperation with the prevailing reaction to difference, which is either one of fearful tolerance or total blindness. \u201cDifference must be not merely tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic,\u201d she says. \u201cOnly then does the necessity for interdependency become unthreatening.\u201d19 Difference is strength, a prerequisite for creativity that allows individual growth and communal political innovation.\n", "As Pauline Oliveros writes in Deep Listening \u201cWhen you enter an environment where there are birds, insects or animals, they are listening to you completely. You are received. Your presence may be the difference between life and death for the creatures of the environment. Listening is survival!\u201d\n", "Spatial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that help define it. Context also helps establish the order of events. Obviously, the bits of information we\u2019re assailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can\u2019t help but wonder: What am I supposed to think of all this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn\u2019t make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the sum total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding but a dull and stupefying dread.\n", "the internet is just a new context. \n", "I worry about what this means, long term, for our propensity to seek out context, or our ability to understand context at all. Given that all of the issues that face us demand an understanding of complexity, interrelationship, and nuance, the ability to seek and understand context is nothing less than a collective survival skill.\n", "It was called Community Memory, and it contained a teletype machine connected via a 110-baud modem to 24-foot-long XDS-940 time-sharing computer in San Francisco. Every day, over and over, the modem made and received calls to the San Francisco computer, ultimately printing messages for users on the teletype machine. Community Memory had been installed by a group of three computer-science dropouts from UC Berkeley, who placed it below the store\u2019s physical bulletin board in the hopes that it would serve the same purpose, just more efficiently. The 1972 flyer for Community Memory is almost heartbreaking to read now, amid new commonplaces like \u201csocial media fatigue,\u201d headlines about Facebook and hate speech, and calls to ban our own president from Twitter: COMMUNITY MEMORY is the name we give to this experimental information service. It is an attempt to harness the power of the computer in the service of the community. We hope to do this by providing a sort of super bulletin board where people can post notices of all sorts and can find the notices posted by others rapidly.\n", "In this and other ways, Nextdoor is basically of the same species of technology as Facebook and Twitter, even if its communities are geographically bounded. Once again, our interactions become data collected by a company, and engagement goals are driven by advertising. It\u2019s not just technology that\u2019s being \u201charnessed to facilitate local interactions,\u201d but local interactions that are being harnessed to produce revenue. The rules of engagement are nonnegotiable, the software is a black box, and the whole thing relies on centralized, company-owned servers whose terms of service are the same for everyone everywhere. This \u201ccommons\u201d only feels like a commons. As Oliver Leistert puts it in \u201cThe Revolution Will Not Be Liked,\u201d for social media companies, \u201cthe public sphere is an historically elapsed phase from the twentieth century they now exploit for their own interests by simulating it.\u201d\n", "My own experience using Patchwork bears this out. There is nothing on it that could be called persuasive design, and it was surprisingly strange. Left alone in an uncrowded interface with nothing at all being suggested to me, I realized it is finally incumbent on me to decide what to say, when, and to whom\u2014already the beginnings of context. And like Jonathan, I felt the knee-jerk urge to join a pub, because of what I was used to. Only afterward did I question why I assume social media needs to feel like a Wall Street trading floor.\n", "I had never been to Elkhorn Slough before and the route was new to me. I turned off Highway 1 South onto a road that tunneled through oak trees and rolling hills, enjoying the scenery but feeling haunted by a dull dread from the morning\u2019s news. All of a sudden, as I rounded a turn, part of the slough came into view. In that brilliant, surprising blue, I saw them: hundreds, maybe thousands of birds, congregating in the shallows and rising into the sky in giant glittering flocks that turned from black to silver as they changed direction. Unexpectedly, I started crying. Although this site would certainly be classified as \u201cnatural,\u201d it appeared to me like nothing short of a miracle, one I felt I or this world somehow didn\u2019t deserve. In its unlikely splendor, the slough seemed to represent all of the threatened spaces, all that stood to be lost, that was already being lost. But I also realized for the first time that my wish to preserve this place was also a self-preservation instinct, insofar as I needed spaces like this too, and insofar as I couldn\u2019t feel truly at home in a solely human community. I withered without this contact; a life without other life didn\u2019t seem worth living. To acknowledge that this space and everything in it was endangered meant acknowledging that I, too, was endangered. The wildlife refuge was my refuge. It\u2019s a bit like falling in love\u2014that terrifying realization that your fate is linked to someone else\u2019s, that you are no longer your own. But isn\u2019t that closer to the truth anyway? Our fates are linked, to each other, to the places where we are, and everyone and everything that lives in them. How much more real my responsibility feels when I think about it this way! This is more than just an abstract understanding that our survival is threatened by global warming, or even a cerebral appreciation for other living beings and systems. Instead this is an urgent, personal recognition that my emotional and physical survival are bound up with these \u201cstrangers,\u201d not just now, but for life.\n", "If you become interested in the health of the place where you are, whether that\u2019s cultural or biological or both, I have a warning: you will see more destruction than progress.\n", "In \u201cThe Round River: A Parable,\u201d the conservationist Aldo Leopold writes: One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.\n", "Do-nothing farming recognized that there was a natural intelligence at work in the land, and therefore the most intelligent thing for the farmer to do was to interfere as little as possible. Of course, that didn\u2019t mean not interfering at all. Fukuoka recalls the time he tried to let some orchard trees grow without pruning: the trees\u2019 branches became intertwined and the orchard was attacked by insects. \u201cThis is abandonment, not \u2018natural farming,\u2019\u201d he writes. Somewhere between over-engineering and abandonment, Fukuoka found the sweet spot by patiently listening and observing. His expertise lay in being a quiet and patient collaborator with the ecosystem he tended to. Fukuoka\u2019s stance is an example of something that Jedediah Purdy suggests in his book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. In each subsequent chapter, Purdy shows how the different views of nature throughout history have each corresponded to a set of political beliefs about value and subjecthood, being used to justify everything from hierarchical social orders and racism (\u201ceverything in its place\u201d) to an obsession with the productivity of industry.\n", "Be kind to guests while they are visiting, then help them on their way. So friend, remain just till I fetch some splendid gifts to pile onto your carriage. Wait till you see them! I will instruct the women to prepare a banquet in the hall from our rich stores. Feasting before a long trip brings you honor; it also makes good sense. And if you want to have me travel with you all through Greece, I shall yoke up my horses and escort you through every town, and everywhere we go we will be given gifts\u2014a fine bronze tripod, a cauldron, or two mules, or golden cups.\u201d\n", "This dog belonged to someone who has died in foreign lands. If he were in good health, as when Odysseus abandoned him and went to Troy, you soon would see how quick and brave he used to be. He went to hunt in woodland, and he always caught his prey. His nose was marvelous.\n", "Eumaeus, you replied, \u201cAntinous, you are a lord, but what you say is trash.\n", "But all the others reproached Antinous insistently. \u201cYou ought not to have hit a poor old beggar! If he turns out to be a god from heaven it will end badly! Gods disguise themselves as foreigners and strangers to a town, to see who violates their holy laws, and who is good.\u201d\n", "He went there with his maternal cousins and grandfather, noble Autolycus, who was the best of all mankind at telling lies and stealing.\n", "Odysseus comes from a long lineage of great liars, wouldnt most people hate him and his family? Or were they great liars because they were never caught.\n", "He went there with his maternal cousins and grandfather, noble Autolycus, who was the best of all mankind at telling lies and stealing.\n", "\u201cNanny! Why are you trying to destroy me? You fed me at your breast! Now after all my twenty years of pain, I have arrived back to my home. You have found out; a god has put the knowledge in your mind. Be silent; no one must know, or else I promise you, if some god helps me bring the suitors down, I will not spare you when I kill the rest, the other slave women, although you were my nurse.\u201d\n", "darkness drenched his eyes.\n", "Twelve stepped away from honor: those twelve girls ignore me, and Penelope our mistress. She would not let Telemachus instruct them, since he is young and only just grown-up. Let me go upstairs to the women\u2019s rooms, to tell your wife\u2014some god has sent her sleep.\u201d The master strategist Odysseus said, \u201cNot yet; do not wake her. Call the women who made those treasonous plots while I was gone.\u201d The old nurse did so. Walking through the hall, she called the girls. Meanwhile, Odysseus summoned the herdsmen and Telemachus and spoke winged words to them. \u201cNow we must start to clear the corpses out. The girls must help. Then clean my stately chairs and handsome tables with sponges fine as honeycomb, and water. When the whole house is set in proper order, restore my halls to health: take out the girls between the courtyard wall and the rotunda. Hack at them with long swords, eradicate all life from them. They will forget the things the suitors made them do with them in secret, through Aphrodite.\u201d Sobbing desperately the girls came, weeping, clutching at each other. They carried out the bodies of the dead and piled them up on top of one another, under the roof outside. Odysseus instructed them and forced them to continue. And then they cleaned his lovely chairs and tables with wet absorbent sponges, while the prince and herdsmen with their shovels scraped away the mess to make the sturdy floor all clean. The girls picked up the trash and took it out. The men created order in the house and set it all to rights, then led the girls outside and trapped them\u2014they could not escape\u2014 between the courtyard wall and the rotunda.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0460 Showing initiative, Telemachus insisted, \u201cI refuse to grant these girls a clean death, since they poured down shame on me and Mother, when they lay beside the suitors.\u201d At that, he wound a piece of sailor\u2019s rope round the rotunda and round the mighty pillar, stretched up so high no foot could touch the ground. As doves or thrushes spread their wings to fly home to their nests, but someone sets a trap\u2014 they crash into a net, a bitter bedtime;\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0470 just so the girls, their heads all in a row, were strung up with the noose around their necks to make their death an agony. They gasped, feet twitching for a while, but not for long.\n", "Scholars who have studied the convict lease system point out that in many important respects, convict leasing was far worse than slavery, an insight that can be gleaned from titles such as One Dies, Get Another (by Mancini), Worse Than Slavery (David Oshinsky\u2019s work on Parchman Prison),27 and Twice the Work of Free Labor (Alex Lichtenstein\u2019s examination of the political economy of convict leasing). Slave owners may have been concerned for the survival of individual slaves, who, after all, represented significant investments. Convicts, on the other hand, were leased not as individuals, but as a group, and they could be worked literally to death without affecting the profitability of a convict crew. According to descriptions by contemporaries, the conditions under which leased convicts and county chain gangs lived were far worse than those under which black people had lived as slaves. The records of Mississippi plantations in the Yazoo Delta during the late 1880s indicate that the prisoners ate and slept on bare ground, without blankets or mattresses, and often without clothes. They were punished for \u201cslow hoeing\u201d (ten lashes), \u201csorry planting\u201d (five lashes), and \u201cbeing light with cotton\u201d (five lashes). Some who attempted to escape were whipped \u201ctill the blood ran down their legs\u201d; others had a metal spur riveted to their feet. Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds, and \u201cshackle poisoning\u201d (the constant rubbing of chains and leg irons against bare flesh).\n", "According to a Chinese creation myth that dates to 600 BC, Phan Ku the Giant Creator emerged from an egg and proceeded to create the world by using a chisel to carve valleys and mountains from the landscape. Next, he set the Sun, Moon and stars in the sky; he died as soon as these tasks were finished. The death of the Giant Creator was an essential part of the creation process, because fragments of his own body helped to complete the world. Phan Ku\u2019s skull formed the dome of sky, his flesh formed the soil, his bones became rocks and his blood created rivers and seas. The last of his breath forged the wind and clouds, while his sweat became rain. His hair fell to Earth, creating plant life, and the fleas that had lodged in his hair provided the basis for the human race. As our birth required the death of our creator, we were to be cursed with sorrow forever after.\n", "And as well as revolutionary, the Sun-centred model of the universe also seemed completely impossible. This is why the word k\u00f6pperneksch, based on the German form of Copernicus, has come to be used in northern Bavaria to describe an unbelievable or illogical proposition.\n", "Uraniborg, on the island of Hven, the best funded and most hedonistic astronomical observatory in history.\n", "Galileo\u2019s success as a scientist would rely on his tremendous curiosity about the world and everything in it. He was well aware of his inquisitive nature and once exclaimed:\u2018When shall I cease from wondering?\u2019\n", "In his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, Galileo used three characters to explore the merits of the Sun-centred and Earth-centred world-views. Salviati presented Galileo\u2019s preferred Sun-centred view and was clearly an intelligent, well-read and eloquent man. Simplicio, the buffoon, attempted to defend the Earth-centred position. And Sagredo acted as a mediator, guiding the conversation between the other two characters, although his bias sometimes emerged when he scolded and mocked Simplicio along the way.\n", "The Thirty Years\u2019 War had begun in 1618, when a group of Protestants marched into the Royal Palace in Prague and threw two of the town\u2019s officials out of an upper window, an event known as the Defenestration of Prague.\n", "Modern notions of a godless Big Bang would have seemed heretical to eighteenth-century theologians, much as the Sun-centred universe had offended the Inquisition back in the seventeenth century. In Europe, the Bible continued to be the indisputable authority on the creation of the universe, and the overwhelming majority of scholars accepted that God had created the Heavens and the Earth.\n", "imagine that you are near a cannon that is fired exactly on the hour. You hear the cannon, start your stopwatch and then start driving away in a straight line at l00 km/h, so that you are 100 km away by the time the cannon is fired again. You stop the car and hear a very faint cannon blast. Given that sound travels at roughly 1,000 km/h, you will perceive that it was 66 minutes, not 60 minutes, between the first and second cannon blasts. The 66 minutes consists of 60 minutes for the actual interval between firings and 6 minutes for the time taken for the sound of the second blast to cover the 100 km and reach you. The cannon is perfectly regular in its firings, but you will experience a delay of 6 minutes because of the finite speed of sound and your new position.\n", "however bob's reference frame is the whole earth. \n", "However, if Alice looked at Bob as she whizzed past him, it would appear to her that it was Bob and his environment that was undergoing time dilation, because he is moving relative to her.\n", "Unfortunately, the physics community was not entirely convinced by Einstein\u2019s calculation. The scientific establishment is inherently conservative, as we already know, partly for practical reasons and partly for emotional reasons. If a new theory overturns an old one, the old theory has to be abandoned and what remains of the scientific framework has to be reconciled with the new theory. Such an upheaval is justified only if the establishment is utterly convinced that the new idea really works.\n", "The Great Debate was all about humankind\u2019s place within the cosmos, and settling the matter would require a major breakthrough in astronomy. Some scientists, such as the popular astronomy writer Robert Ball, believed that such a breakthrough was impossible. In The Story of the Heavens, he was of the opinion that astronomers were at the limits of knowledge: \u2018We have already reached a point where man\u2019s intellect begins to fail to yield him any more light, and where his imagination has succumbed in the endeavour to realise even the knowledge he has gained.\u2019 Similar statements had probably been made by some ancient Greeks dismissing the possibility of measuring the size of the Earth or the distance to the Sun.\n", "Figure 41 shows a plot of Delta Cephei\u2019s variation. The most striking feature is the lack of symmetry. Whereas the Algol plot (Figure 40) displays a series of thin, symmetric valleys, Delta Cephei ramps up to peak brightness in just a day and then gradually fades to a minimum over the course of four days. Eta Aquilae showed a similar sawtooth or shark\u2019s-fin pattern. This pattern cannot be explained by any sort of eclipse effect, so the two young men assumed that there must be something intrinsic to the two stars that was causing the variation. They decided that Eta Aquilae and Delta Cephei belonged to a new class of variable star, which we now call Cepheid variables, or simply Cepheids. Some Cepheids are very subtle, such as Polaris, the North Star, which is our closest Cepheid.\n", "Unfortunately, he soon became frustrated because of his team\u2019s lack of concentration and failure to pay attention to detail. One day, when his patience had been exhausted, he blurted out that his Scotch maid could do a better job. To prove his point, he sacked his allmale team, hired women computers to replace them and put his maid in charge.Williamina Fleming had been a teacher in Scotland before emigrating to America, where she had been abandoned by her husband when pregnant, forcing her to take a job as a housekeeper. Now she was leading a team nicknamed \u2018Pickering\u2019s harem\u2019 and scrutinising the world\u2019s largest set of astronomical images. Pickering is generally respected for his liberal recruitment policy, but to some extent he was motivated by practical issues.The women were generally more accurate and meticulous than the men they replaced, and they also tolerated being paid between 25 and 30 cents per hour, whereas the men had demanded 50 cents. Also, the women were restricted to the role of computers and were denied the opportunity to make observations themselves. This was partly because the telescopes were housed in cold, dark observatories, which were considered unsuitable for the fairer sex, and partly because Victorian sensitivities would have been offended by the thought of a man and a woman working together late into the night, staring up at the romantic array of stars. But at least the women could now examine the photographic results of night-time observations and contribute to astronomy, a discipline that had largely excluded them in the past.\n", "the cooler the star, the greater its tendency to emit long wavelengths and the redder it appears. Conversely, the hotter the star, the greater its tendency to emit short wavelengths and the bluer it appears.\n", "The shift in wavelength and pitch is highly predictable thanks to an equation developed by Doppler. The received wavelength (\u03bbr) depends on the initial emitted wavelength (\u03bb), and the ratio between the speed of the emitter (ve) and the speed of the wave (vw). If the emitter is travelling towards the observer, then ve is reckoned as positive, and it if is travelling away from the observer then it is negative:\n", "Cosmologists are often in error, but never in doubt.\n", "Alpher and Herman continued to develop their early history of the universe and wondered what else might happen to this sea of light and plasma as the universe expanded with time. They realised that as the universe expanded, its energy would become spread through a greater volume, so the universe and the plasma within it would steadily cool. The two young physicists deduced that there would be a critical moment when the temperature would become too cool for a plasma to exist, at which point the electrons would latch on to nuclei and form stable, neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium. The transition from plasma to atoms happens at roughly 3,000\u00b0C for hydrogen and helium, and the duo estimated that it would take 300,000 years or so for the universe to cool to this temperature.\n", "Alpher and Herman estimated that the sea of light released at the moment of recombination had a wavelength of roughly one-thousandth of a millimetre. This wavelength was a direct consequence of the temperature of the universe when the plasma fog cleared, which was 3,000\u00b0C. However, all these light waves would have been stretched because the universe has been expanding ever since recombination. This was similar to the stretching and redshift of light from the apparently receding galaxies, which had already been measured by astronomers such as Hubble. Alpher and Herman confidently predicted that the stretched Big Bang light should now have a wavelength of roughly a millimetre. This wavelength is invisible to the human eye, and is located in the so-called microwave region of the spectrum. Alpher and Herman were making a specific prediction. The universe should be full of a feeble microwave light with a wavelength of one millimetre, and it should be coming from all directions because it had existed everywhere in the universe at the moment of recombination. Anybody who could detect this so-called cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB radiation) would prove that the Big Bang really happened. Immortality was waiting for whoever could make the measurement.\n", "Gamow also became famous for Mr Tompkins in Wonderland, a book in which he described a world where the speed of light was just a few kilometres per hour, so that a bicycle ride would reveal the weird effects of relativity, such as time dilation and length contraction.\n", "The inspiration for this new model seems to have come from a film called Dead of Night, released in September 1945. Although it was made by Ealing Studios, it was a far cry from their usual output of genteel English comedies. In fact, it was the first horror film to be made in Britain after the repeal of wartime censorship, which had prohibited any form of entertainment that might damage morale.\n", "producer and fellow Cambridge academic Peter Laslett disregarded the warning label and invited Hoyle to broadcast a series of five lectures on the Third Programme radio network. The series was aired at eight o\u2019clock on Saturday evenings, and transcripts were published in the Listener magazine. The entire project was a huge success, turning Hoyle into a celebrity. The radio series is still remembered today because of a historic moment in the final lecture. Although the term \u2018Big Bang\u2019 has appeared in previous chapters of this book, its use has actually been anachronistic, because the term was originated by Hoyle during this radio broadcast. Up until the moment that Hoyle coined this catchy title, the theory had generally been known as the dynamic evolving model. The term \u2018Big Bang\u2019 emerged while Hoyle was explaining that there were two rival theories of the cosmos. There was, of course, his own Steady State model, and then there was the model which involved a moment of creation: One of them is distinguished by the assumption that the universe started its life a finite time ago in a single huge explosion. On this supposition, the present expansion is a relic of the violence of this explosion. Now this Big Bang idea seemed to me to be unsatisfactory\u2026On scientific grounds this Big Bang assumption is much the less palatable of the two. For it is an irrational process that cannot be described in scientific terms\u2026On philosophical grounds, too, I cannot see any good reason for preferring the Big Bang idea.\n", "In the Soviet Union, the influence was not theological but political, and it was not pro-Big-Bang but anti-Big-Bang. Soviet ideologues were antagonistic towards the Big Bang model because it failed to comply with the tenets of Marxist-Leninist ideology. In particular, they could not accept any model that posited a moment of creation, because creation was synonymous with a Creator. Also, they perceived the Big Bang as a Western theory, even though it was Alexander Friedmann in St Petersburg who had laid its foundations. Andrei Zhdanov, who helped to coordinate the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and 1940s, encapsulated the Soviet position on the Big Bang: \u2018Falsifiers of science want to revive the fairy tale of the origin of the world from nothing.\u2019 He sought out and persecuted those he called \u2018Lema\u00eetre\u2019s agents\u2019. His victims included the astrophysicist Nikolai Kozyrev, who was sent to a labour camp in 1937 and sentenced to be executed for continuing to discuss his belief in the Big Bang model. Fortunately his death sentence was commuted to ten years\u2019 incarceration when officials were unable to drum up a firing squad. After appeals by his colleagues, Kozyrev was eventually released and allowed to return to work at the Pulkovo Observatory. Vsevolod Frederiks and Matvei Bronstein, who were also supporters of the Big Bang model, received the harshest punishments of all. Frederiks was imprisoned in a series of camps and died after six years of hard labour, while Bronstein was shot after being arrested on trumped-up charges of being a spy. By making examples of these and other scientists, the Soviets effectively gagged serious cosmological research and delivered a message that echoed on through the decades of Communism. The Russian astronomer V.E. Lov followed the party line by stating that the Big Bang model is a \u2018cancerous tumour that corrodes modern astronomical theory and is the main ideological enemy of materialist science\u2019. And Boris Vorontsov-Vel\u2019iaminov, one of Lov\u2019s colleagues, maintained solidarity by calling Gamow an \u2018Americanised apostate\u2019 because of his defection to the West, stating that he \u2018advances new theories only for the sake of sensation\u2019.\n", "The fact that politicians and theologians alike were using cosmology to shore up their beliefs struck Hoyle as ridiculous. As he wrote in 1956:\u2018Both Catholics and Communists argue by dogma. An argument is judged \u201cright\u201d by these people because they judge it to be based on \u201cright\u201d premises, not because it leads to results that accord with the facts. Indeed, if the facts should disagree with the dogma then so much worse for the facts.\u2019\n", "by the 1940s it was becoming evident that most stars could be grouped into two broad types, called populations. Older stars belong to Population II, and after these stars have expired their debris becomes an ingredient of newer, younger, Population I stars, which are generally hotter, brighter and bluer than their counterparts in Population II. Baade assumed that Cepheids were also split into these two categories, and suggested that this was what lay behind the contradictions over the distance to the Andromeda Galaxy. Baade\u2019s argument that Andromeda was farther away was based on two simple steps. First, Population I Cepheids are intrinsically brighter than Population II Cepheids that have the same period of variation. And second, astronomers tended to see only the brighter Population I Cepheids in the Andromeda Galaxy, but they had inadvertently built their Cepheid distance scale by using the dimmer Population II Cepheids in the Milky Way. Unaware that there were two types of Cepheid, Hubble had made the mistake of comparing dim, local Population II Cepheids with Andromeda\u2019s relatively bright Population I Cepheids. The consequence was that he had erroneously estimated the Andromeda Galaxy to be closer than it really is.\n", "Astronomers could not use the Cepheid yardstick technique for measuring the distance to the farthest galaxies because it had been impossible to detect Cepheid variable stars so far away. Instead, they were forced to adopt a completely different measuring technique, which relied on the reasonable assumption that the brightest star in the Andromeda Galaxy was intrinsically as bright as the brightest star in any other galaxy. Therefore, if the brightest star in a distant galaxy was apparently 1/100 (1/102) as bright as the brightest star in Andromeda, then the distant galaxy was assumed to be 10 times farther away, because brightness falls off with the square of the distance.\n", "Thanks to improved photography, Sandage could see that what had been repeatedly perceived as the brightest star in a distant galaxy was in fact something else altogether. Much of the hydrogen in the universe has coalesced into familiar compact stars, but there is also a significant amount of it in the form of vast clouds known as HII regions. An HII region absorbs light from surrounding stars, which heats it to over 10,000\u00b0C. Because of its temperature and size, an HII region can outshine almost any star. Before Sandage, astronomers had been accidentally and incorrectly comparing the brightest star visible in the Andromeda Galaxy with the brightest HII region in more distant, newly discovered galaxies. Thinking that the HII regions were stars, astronomers had assumed that these new galaxies were relatively close because their brightest \u2018stars\u2019 appeared to be comparatively bright. When Sandage obtained images that were sharp enough to distinguish these HII regions from genuine stars, he concluded that the brightest genuine stars in distant galaxies were actually much fainter than the misinterpreted HII regions, so the galaxies had to be farther away than previously estimated.\n", "Hoyle wanted to understand what would happen towards the end of a star\u2019s life, when it began to run out of hydrogen fuel. Not surprisingly, the fuel shortage would cause the star to begin to cool down. The fall in temperature would result in a fall in outward pressure, and the gravitational force would become overpowering and would initiate a stellar contraction. Crucially, however, Hoyle realised that this contraction was not the end of the story. As the entire star falls inwards, the compression would cause the stellar core to heat up and generate an increased outward pressure, which would halt the collapse. The temperature rise associated with compression has several causes, but one of them is that compression encourages more nuclear reactions, resulting in the generation of more heat. Although this extra heat re-establishes some level of stability in the star, it is only a temporary hiatus; the star\u2019s death has only been deferred. The star continues to consume more fuel, and eventually its dwindling fuel supply becomes critical. Lack of fuel means lack of energy production, so the core begins to cool again, which leads to another collapsing phase. Again, this heats the core, again halting the collapse until the next fuel shortage. This stop\u2014start collapse means that many stars endure a slow, lingering death. Hoyle set about analysing the various types of star (e.g. small, medium, large, Population I, Population II), and after several years of dedicated research he successfully completed his calculations of all the temperature and pressure changes that happened in different stars as they neared the end of their lives. Most importantly of all, he also worked out the nuclear reactions in each death spasm, and crucially showed how the various combinations of extreme temperatures and pressures could lead to a whole range of medium-weight and heavyweight atomic nuclei,\n", "Marcus Chown, author of The Magic Furnace, described the significance of stellar alchemy as follows: \u2018In order that we might live, stars in their billions, tens of billions, hundreds of billions even, have died. The iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the oxygen that fills our lungs each time we take a breath\u2014all were cooked in the furnaces of the stars\n", "Hoyle\u2019s premise was that he existed in the universe. Furthermore, he pointed out, he was a carbon-based life form. Therefore carbon existed in the universe, so there must have been a way of creating carbon. However, the only way to create carbon seemed to rely on the existence of a specific excited state of carbon. Consequently, such an excited state must exist. Hoyle was rigorously applying what would later become known as the anthropic principle. This principle can be defined and interpreted in various ways, but one version states: We are here to study the universe, so the laws of the universe must be compatible with our own existence.\n", "After ten days of analysing the carbon-12 nucleus, Fowler\u2019s team found a new excited state. It was at 7.65 MeV, exactly where Hoyle said it should be. This was the first and only time that a scientist had made a prediction using the anthropic principle and had been proved right. It was an instance of extreme genius. At last, Hoyle had proved and identified the mechanism by which helium could be transformed into beryllium and then into carbon. He had confirmed that carbon was synthesised at temperatures of roughly 200,000,000\u00b0C via the reaction shown in Figure 89(b). It was a slow process, but billions of stars over billions of years could create significant amounts of carbon. And explaining the creation of carbon confirmed the starting point for the other nuclear reactions that created all the other elements in the universe.\n", "He was detecting the well-established wavelengths associated with hydrogen, except that they had been redshifted to an extent never seen before. This was astonishing because 3C 273 was supposed to be a local star, and local stars travel at less than 50 km/s, far too low a speed to account for the redshift observed by Schmidt. In fact, the redshift measurements implied that 3C 273 was receding at 48,000 km/s, roughly 16% of the speed of light. According to Hubble\u2019s law, this implied that 3C 273 was the most distant object ever detected, over a billion light years from the Milky Way. Object 3C 273 was not a reasonably bright local star, but a fantastically brilliant far-off galaxy, several hundred times brighter than the brightest galaxies hitherto known. However, its brightness was largely in the form of radio waves rather than visible light. 3C 273 became known as a quasi-stellar radio object (or quasar), because it was a radio galaxy whose extreme distance and brightness gave it the deceptive appearance of a local star. It was not long before several other radio sources were identified as exceptionally brilliant and far-flung quasar galaxies.\n", "Bell Labs had designed Telstar, the first active communications satellite,\n", "\u2018There was a pigeon fancier who was willing to strangle them for us, but I figured the most humane thing was just to open the cage and shoot them.\u2019\n", "Gamow, Alpher and Herman had calculated that the universe would undergo a transition roughly 300,000 years after the Big Bang. By this time the universe\u2019s temperature would have fallen to roughly 3,000\u00b0C, cool enough for the previously free-floating electrons to latch onto nuclei and form stable atoms. The sea of light that filled the universe could no longer interact with either the charged electrons or the charged nuclei, because they had bonded to each other to form neutral atoms. Ever since this moment in the history of the universe, known as recombination, the primordial light has been allowed to pass through the universe completely unchanged\u2014except in one important respect. Gamow, Alpher and Herman had predicted that, as the universe expanded with time, the wavelength of that primordial light would have been stretched as space itself has been stretched. The light had a wavelength of roughly one-thousandth of a millimetre when it originally emerged from the cosmic fog when the universe was 300,000 years old, but according to the Big Bang model the universe has since expanded by roughly a factor of a thousand. Therefore those light waves should now have a wavelength of roughly 1 millimetre, which would place them in the radio region of the electromagnetic spectrum. The echo from the Big Bang had transformed itself into radio waves and was being detected as noise by Penzias and Wilson\u2019s radio telescope. These waves can be assigned to a sub-category of the radio spectrum known as microwaves, which is why this Big Bang echo came to be known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The existence or non-existence of the CMB radiation was critical to the Big Bang versus Steady State debate,\n", "Theories are never proved right. The best they can do is to survive.\u2019\n", "The experiment was launched on board a U-2 in 1976, and within just a few months Smoot and his colleagues had discovered a staggering variation in the CMB radiation. The radiation coming from one half of the sky had a wavelength that was 1 part in 1,000 longer than the radiation coming from the opposite half of the sky. It was an important result, but not the one that Smoot had really been looking for.\n", "There was a relatively obvious explanation for Smoot\u2019s measurements. The broad hemispherical variation was caused simply by the Earth\u2019s own motion and the resulting Doppler effect. As the Earth swept through space, if the detector was looking forwards it perceived the incoming CMB radiation to have a slightly shorter wavelength; if the detector was looking backwards then the wavelength appeared to be slightly longer. By measuring the difference in wavelengths, Smoot could actually measure the speed of the Earth through the cosmos. This speed was the combined effect of the Earth moving around the Sun, the Sun moving within our Milky Way galaxy, and the Milky Way\u2019s own movement. The result was announced on the front page of the New York Times on 14 November 1977: GALAXY\u2019S SPEED THROUGH UNIVERSE FOUND TO EXCEED A MILLION M.P.H.\n", "From the very first batch of data that was beamed back to Earth, it was clear that COBE was operating perfectly and that each detector had survived the physical stress of the rocket launch. However, Smoot and his colleagues were unable to make any announcements relating to the main objective of their mission. Proving, or disproving, the existence of the variations in the CMB radiation would require a very subtle and long-term analysis of data from the DMR detector, and even accumulating these measurements was a slow process. The detector could simultaneously measure and compare the CMB radiation from two small patches of the sky 60\u00b0 apart, but in order to measure the radiation across the entire sky the satellite first had to orbit the Earth hundreds of times. The DMR detector eventually completed its first rough survey of the entire sky in April 1990. The first analysis revealed no sign of any variation in the CMB radiation at a level of 1 part in 3,000. After the second trawl there was no sign of any variation at a level of 1 part in 10,000. Science writer Marcus Chown described the measurements as \u2018unbroken blandness\u2019. COBE had been sent into space to find the variations that seeded today\u2019s galaxies. Perhaps they were just proving difficult to find. Or perhaps they did not exist at all, which would be disastrous for the Big Bang model because then there would be no explanation for the creation of the galaxies. And without galaxies, there would be no stars, no planets and no life. The situation was becoming distressing. As John Mather put it: \u2018We haven\u2019t ruled out our own existence yet. But I\u2019m completely mystified as to how the present day structure exists without having left some signature on the background radiation.\u2019\n", "The COBE DMR detector had continued gathering more data throughout 1990 and 1991, and it had completed its first thorough mapping of the entire sky by December 1991, taking 70 million measurements along the way. At last, a variation had appeared at the level of just 1 part in 100,000. In other words, the peak wavelength of the CMB radiation varied by 0.001% depending on where COBE was looking.\n", "But now the Catholic Church concentrates on the spiritual world and leaves the job of explaining the natural world to science, which means that it can remain secure in the knowledge that any future scientific discoveries cannot diminish the status of God. Science and religion can live independently, side by side. In 1988, as if to reinforce this independence, Pope John Paul II declared:\u2018Christianity possesses the source of its justification within itself and does not expect science to constitute its primary apologetic.\u2019 Then, in 1992, the Vatican even admitted that it had been wrong to persecute Galileo. Advocating a Sun-centred view of the universe had been considered heresy because, according to the Bible: \u2018God fixed the Earth upon its foundation, not to be moved for ever.\u2019 However, after an inquiry that lasted thirteen years, Cardinal Paul Poupard reported that theologians at the time of Galileo\u2019s trial \u2018failed to grasp the profound non-literal meaning of the Scriptures when they describe the physical structure of the universe\u2019. And in 1999 the Pope symbolically put an end to the centuries-old conflict between religion and cosmology when he toured his Polish homeland and visited the birthplace of Nicholas Copernicus, specifically praising Copernicus\u2019s scientific achievements.\n", "the tale of the Heike crab, a species that is famous because its shell often looks like a samurai mask. The traditional explanation is that the crabs contain the souls of samurai soldiers belonging to the Heike clan, who drowned in a sea battle in 1185. For this reason, today\u2019s fishermen always throw back to the sea any crabs exhibiting the distinctive samurai shell, as it would be unthinkable to eat a creature with the soul of a samurai. In fact a tiny fraction of these crabs have always exhibited a vaguely samurai appearance, but their numbers increased dramatically and their samurai appearance was enhanced after the battle of 1185 when fishermen started to take more notice of them and the practice of not eating such crabs began. Suddenly there was a huge survival advantage for a crab to look like a samurai, so this property was exaggerated and promulgated to create the large population of samurai-looking crabs that we have today.\n", "\u201cBodies of children dead of starvation and disease are burned on the beaches. On the beaches of Tius, seven hundred kilometers away in the Nation of A-Io (and here came the jeweled navels), women kept for the sexual use of male members of the propertied class (the Iotic words were used, as there was no equivalent for either word in Pravic) lie on the sand all day until dinner is served to them by people of the unpropertied class.\u201d\n", "there was only dust to swim in.\n", "Like all children of Anarres he had had sexual experience freely with both boys and girls, but he and they had been children; he had never got further than the pleasure he assumed was all there was to it. Beshun, expert in delight, took him into the heart of sexuality, where there is no rancor and no ineptitude, where the two bodies striving to join each other annihilate the moment in their striving, and transcend the self, and transcend time.\n", "Would you really like to live in a society where you had no responsibility and no freedom, no choice, only the false option of obedience to the law, or disobedience followed by punishment? Would you really want to go to live in a prison?\u201d \u201cOh, hell, no. Can\u2019t I talk? The trouble with you, Shev, is you don\u2019t say anything till you\u2019ve saved up a whole truckload of damned heavy brick arguments, and then you dump them all out and never look at the bleeding body mangled beneath the heap\u2014\u201d\n", "Wasn\u2019t it immoral to do work you didn\u2019t enjoy? The work needed doing but a lot of people didn\u2019t care what they were posted to and changed jobs all the time; they should have volunteered. Any fool could do this work. In fact, a tot of them could do it better than he could. He had been proud of his strength, and had always volunteered for the \u201cheavies\u201d on tenth-day rotational duty; but here it was day after day, eight hours a day, in dust and heat. All day he would look forward to evening when he could be alone and think, and the instant he got to the sleeping tent after supper his head flopped down and he slept like a stone till dawn, and never a thought crossed his mind.\n", "\u201cLife partnership is really against the Odonian ethic, I think,\u201d Shevek said, harsh and pedantic.\n", "I don\u2019t know Sabul well; I know nothing against him; but keep this in mind; you will be his man.\u201d The singular forms of the possessive pronoun in Pravic were used mostly for emphasis; idiom avoided them. Little children might say \u201cmy mother,\u201d but very soon they learned to say \u201cthe mother.\u201d Instead of \u201cmy hand hurts,\u201d it was \u201cthe hand hurts me,\u201d and so on; to say \u201cthis one is mine and that\u2019s yours\u201d in Pravic, one said, \u201cI use this one and you use that.\u201d Mitis\u2019s statement, \u201cYou will be his man,\u201d had a strange sound to it. Shevek looked at her blankly.\n", "How soon can you learn Iotic?\u201d \u201cIt took me several years to learn Pravic,\u201d Shevek said. His mild irony passed Sabul by completely.\n", "He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men\u2019s acts, even the terrible became banal. Shevek looked at this monstrous pettiness with contempt, and without interest. He did not admit, he could not admit, that in fact it frightened him.\n", "\u201cJust that. Listen, wasn\u2019t it Odo who said that where there\u2019s property there\u2019s theft?\u201d \u201cTo make a thief, make an owner; to create crime, create laws. The Social Organism.\u201d\n", "In a pause after conversation, the younger boy said in his small, clear voice, \u201cMr. Shevek doesn\u2019t have very good manners.\u201d \u201cWhy not?\u201d Shevek asked before Oiie\u2019s wife could reprove the child. \u201cWhat did I do?\u201d \u201cYou didn\u2019t say thank you.\u201d \u201cFor what?\u201d \u201cWhen I passed you the dish of pickles.\u201d \u201cIni! Be quiet!\u201d Sadik! Don\u2019t egoize! The tone was precisely the same.\n", "\u201cNo. We have no government, no laws, all right. But as far as I can see, ideas never were controlled by laws and governments, even on Urras. If they had been, how would Odo have worked out hers? How would Odonianism have become a world movement? The archists tried to stamp it out by force, and failed. You can\u2019t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that\u2019s precisely what our society is doing! Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can\u2019t, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn\u2019t any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn\u2019t any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That\u2019s the power structure he\u2019s part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.\u201d Shevek leaned his hands on the window sill, looking through the dim reflections on the pane into the darkness outside. He said at last, \u201cCrazy talk, Dap.\u201d \u201cNo, brother, I\u2019m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain\u2014you said that! But it\u2019s the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It\u2019s the lies that make you want to kill yourself.\u201d\n", "But how can they justify this kind of censorship? You write music! Music is a cooperative art, organic by definition, social. It may be the noblest form of social behavior we\u2019re capable of. It\u2019s certainly one of the noblest jobs an individual can undertake. And by its nature, by the nature of any art, it\u2019s a sharing. The artist shares, it\u2019s the essence of his act. No matter what your syndics say, how can Divlab justify not giving you a posting in your own field?\u201d \u201cThey don\u2019t want to share it,\u201d Salas said gleefully. \u201cIt scares \u2019em.\u201d Bedap spoke more gravely; \u201cThey can justify it because music isn\u2019t useful. Canal digging is important, you know; music\u2019s mere decoration. The circle has come right back around to the most vile kind of profiteering utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative that was the center of the Odonian ideal, we\u2019ve thrown it all away. We\u2019ve gone right back to barbarism. If it\u2019s new, run away from it; if you can\u2019t eat it, throw it away!\u201d Shevek thought of his own work and had nothing to say. Yet he could not join in Bedap\u2019s criticism. Bedap had forced him to realize that he was, in fact, a revolutionary; but he felt profoundly that he was such by virtue of his upbringing and education as an Odonian and an Anarresti. He could not rebel against his society, because his society, properly conceived, was a revolution, a permanent one, an ongoing process. To reassert its validity and strength, he thought, one need only act, without fear of punishment and without hope of reward: act from the center of one\u2019s soul.\n", "Valley, in Northeast.\n", "There are souls, he thought, whose umbilicus has never been cut. They never got weaned from the universe. They do not understand death as an enemy; they look forward to rotting and turning into humus. It was strange to see Takver take a leaf into her hand, or even a rock. She became an extension of it, it of her.\n", "Bedap, Salas, Desar, and the rest came to them as thirsty people come to a fountain. The others were peripheral to them: but they were central to the others. They did nothing much; they were not more benevolent than other people or more brilliant talkers; and yet their friends loved them, depended on them, and kept bringing them presents\u2014the small offerings that circulated among these people who possessed nothing and everything: a handknit scarf, a bit of granite studded with crimson garnets, a vase hand-thrown at the Potters\u2019 Federation workshop, a poem about love, a set of carved wooden buttons, a spiral shell from the Sorruba Sea. They gave the present to Takver, saying, \u201cHere, Shev might like this for a paperweight,\u201d or to Shevek, saying, \u201cHere, Tak might like this color.\u201d In giving they sought to share in what Shevek and Takver shared, and to celebrate, and to praise.\n", "Why does she mince out her words like that?\n", "\u201cYou ask questions like a true profiteer,\u201d Shevek said, and not a soul there knew he had insulted Dean with the most contemptuous word in his vocabulary; indeed Dearri nodded a bit, accepting the compliment with satisfaction. Vea, however, sensed a tension, and burst in, \u201cI don\u2019t really understand a word you say, you know, but it seems to me that if I did understand what you said about the book\u2014that everything really all exists now\u2014then couldn\u2019t we foretell the future? If it\u2019s already there?\u201d \u201cNo, no,\u201d the shyer man said, not at all shyly. \u201cIt\u2019s not there like a couch or a house. Time isn\u2019t space. You can\u2019t walk around in it!\u201d Vea nodded brightly, as if quite relieved to be put in her place. Seeming to gain courage from his dismissal of the woman from the realms of higher thought, the shy man turned to Dean\n", "\u201cBe quiet. I feel emotional.\u201d Shevek raised his cup of fruit juice. \u201cI want to say\u2014 What I want to say is this. I\u2019m glad Sadik was born now. In a hard year, in a hard time, when we need our brotherhood. I\u2019m glad she was born now, and here. I\u2019m glad she\u2019s one of us, an Odonian, our daughter and our sister. I\u2019m glad she\u2019s sister to Bedap. That she\u2019s sister to Sabul, even to Sabul! I drink to this hope: that as long as she lives, Sadik will love her sisters and brothers as well, as joyfully, as I do now tonight. And that the rain will fall.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u201d\n", "at the PDC center. Letters went unsealed, not by law, of course, but by convention. Personal communication at long distance is costly in materials and labor, and since the private and the public economy was the same, there was considerable feeling against unnecessary writing or calling. It was a trivial habit; it smacked of privatism, of egoizing. This was probably why the letters went unsealed: you had no right to ask people to carry a message that they couldn\u2019t read.\n", "While he got hungrier, while the train sat hour after hour on the siding between a scarred and dusty quarry and a shut-down mill, he had grim thoughts about the reality of hunger, and about the possible inadequacy of his society to come through a famine without losing the solidarity that was its strength. It was easy to share when there was enough, even barely enough, to go round. But when there was not enough? Then force entered in; might making right; power, and its tool, violence, and its most devoted ally, the averted eye.\n", "Shevek had listened with incredulous disgust. \u201cYou call that organization?\u201d he had inquired. \u201cYou even call it discipline? But it is neither. It is a coercive mechanism of extraordinary inefficiency\u2014a kind of seventh-millennium steam engine! With such a rigid and fragile structure what could be done that was worth doing?\u201d This had given Atro a chance to argue the worth of warfare as the breeder of courage and manliness and the weeder-out of the unfit, but the very line of his argument had forced him to concede the effectiveness of guerrillas, organized from below, self-disciplined. \u201cBut that only works when the people think they\u2019re fighting for something of their own\u2014you know, their homes, or some notion or other,\u201d the old man had said. Shevek had dropped the argument. He now continued it, in the darkening basement among the stacked crates of unlabeled chemicals. He explained to Atro that he now understood why the army was organized as it was. It was indeed quite necessary. No rational form of organization would serve the purpose. He simply had not understood that the purpose was to enable men with machine guns to kill unarmed men and women easily and in great quantities when told to do so. Only he still could not see where courage, or manliness, or fitness entered in.\n", "\u201cI was four already,\u201d Sadik stated. \u201cYou say, I am four already,\u201d said Takver, dumping her off gently in order to get her coat from the closet. Sadik stood up, in profile to Shevek; she was extremely conscious of him, and directed her remarks towards him. \u201cBut I was four, now I\u2019m more than four.\u201d \u201cA temporalist, like the father!\u201d \u201cYou can\u2019t be four and more than four at the same time, can you?\u201d the child asked, sensing approbation, and now speaking directly to Shevek. \u201cOh, yes, easily. And you can be four and nearly five at the same time, too.\u201d Sitting on the low platform, he could hold his head on a level with the child\u2019s so that she did not have to look up at him. \u201cBut I\u2019d forgotten that you were nearly five, you see. When I last saw you you were hardly more than nothing.\u201d \u201cReally?\u201d Her tone was indubitably flirtatious. \u201cYes. You were about so long.\u201d He held his hands not very far apart.\n", "To report an Anarresti managerial debate in full would be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speaking at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid; the tone emotional, often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers, or among thoughts in an undecided mind.\n", "\u201cBut this hurricane in the Caribbean was really something. The Rakuyo was built overseas more than twenty years ago and she starts leaking when you hit rough weather. Well, this time the water came pouring in around the rivet holes in the hull. And at a time like that there\u2019s no difference between officers and deck-hands, everybody works together like drowning rats, bailing and throwing mats down and pouring cement as fast as you can get it mixed. And even if you get slammed against a wall or hurled into the dark when the power shorts out, you haven\u2019t got time to be scared.\n", "The sea was undulating grayly; three buoys, washed by endless waves, were bobbing up and down.\n", "THE GAME WAS CAROUSEL HAZARD, the stakes were roughly half of all the wealth they commanded in the entire world, and the plain truth was that Locke Lamora and Jean Tannen were getting beaten like a pair of dusty carpets.\n", "Dice fell and glasses clinked; celebrants laughed and coughed and cursed and sighed.\n", "Commerce never truly ground to a halt in Tal Verrar; with thousands of people coming and going from the Golden Steps, there was enough coin floating around for a few dozen nocturnal stall-keepers to stake out a spot just after sunset every evening. The Night Market could be a great convenience, and it was invariably more eccentric than its daytime counterpart.\n", "The first Verrari to throw his pitch against the gates of their good judgment was a one-armed man getting on in years, with long white hair braided down to his waist. He waved a wooden ladle at them, indicating four small casks set atop a portable counter not unlike a flat-topped wheelbarrow. \u201cWhat\u2019s your fare?\u201d \u201cDelicacies from the table of Iono himself, the sweetest taste the sea has to offer. Sharks\u2019 eyes in brine; all fresh plucked. Crisp the shells, soft the humors, sweet the juices.\u201d\n", "\u201cGods damn it!\u201d Locke yelled. \u201cLet us out. You\u2019ve made your point!\u201d \u201cWhat point,\u201d rasped Jean, \u201ccould that possibly be?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d Locke coughed. \u201cI don\u2019t care. Whatever it is, they\u2019ve damn well made it, don\u2019t you think?\u201d\n", "TIME WENT by with all the speed of a sleepless night. Locke was seeing colors flashing and wobbling in the darkness, and while part of him knew they weren\u2019t real, that part of him was getting less and less assertive with every passing minute.\n", "\u201cYou drank from the same bottle,\u201d said Locke, still standing. \u201cOf course I did. It wasn\u2019t actually in the cider. It was in your goblets, painted into the bottoms. Colorless and tasteless. A proprietary alchemical substance, quite expensive. You should be flattered. I\u2019ve increased your net personal worth, heh.\u201d\n", "He was about to start conjuring verbal flowers when Guildmistress Gallardine seized him by his collar and dragged him into her house.\n", "\u201cAnd yes, anywhere else, it might be plain murder. But this is Salon Corbeau, and they\u2019re here of their own free will. As are you and I. They could simply choose not to come\u2014\u201d \u201cAnd starve and die elsewhere.\u201d \u201cPlease. I have seen the world, Master Fehrwight. I might recommend it to you for perspective.\n", "\u201cAnything\u2019s possible,\u201d said Stragos. \u201cBut if you\u2019re thoroughly in my power, pray tell me, what does that make you?\u201d \u201cDownright embarrassed,\u201d muttered Locke.\n", "You\u2019d have to take your shoes and breeches off to count to twenty-one!\n", "\u201cGods,\u201d Locke muttered. \u201cWe should be back in our beds, sleeping the day away. Have we ever been less in control of our lives than we are at this moment? We can\u2019t run away from the archon and his poison, which means we can\u2019t just disengage from the Sinspire game. Gods know we can\u2019t even see the Bondsmagi lurking, and we\u2019ve suddenly got assassins coming out of our assholes. Know something? I\u2019d lay even odds that between the people following us and the people hunting us, we\u2019ve become this city\u2019s principal means of employment. Tal Verrar\u2019s entire economy is now based on fucking with us.\u201d\n", "The soldiers on the dock rapidly pulled back the ramp, unlashed the boat, and gave it a good push away from the dock with their legs. \u201cPull,\u201d said Merrain, and the rowers exploded into action. Soon the boat was creaking to their steady rhythm and knifing across the little waves of Tal Verrar\u2019s harbor.\n", "\u201cMaster de Ferra, hold out your right hand and don\u2019t whine.\u201d Jean extended his right hand toward Caldris. Without hesitation, the sailing master slashed the knife across Jean\u2019s palm. The big man said nothing, and Caldris grunted as though pleasantly surprised. He turned Jean\u2019s palm upside down and smeared the bread with the blood trickling from the cut. \u201cNow you, Master Kosta. Keep that kitten still. Vile luck to cut her by accident. Plus she\u2019s armed, fore and aft.\u201d A moment later, Caldris had made a shallow, stinging cut across Locke\u2019s right palm and was pressing the loaf of bread up against it as though to stanch the wound. When he seemed to decide that Locke had bled sufficiently, he smiled and moved to the edge of the stone plaza, overlooking the water. \u201cI know you both been passengers on ships,\u201d he said, \u201cbut passengers don\u2019t signify. Passengers ain\u2019t involved. Now you\u2019re gonna be involved, proper, so I got to make things right for us first.\u201d He cleared his throat, knelt at the edge of the water, and put up his arms. In one hand he held the loaf of bread; in the other, the silver knife. \u201cIono! Iono Stormbringer! Lord of the Grasping Waters! Your servant Caldris bal Comar calls. Long you been pleased to show your servant mercy, and your servant kneels to show his devotion. Surely you know a mighty fuckin\u2019 mess waits over the horizon for him.\u201d He tossed the bloody knife into the bay and said, \u201cThis is the blood of landsmen. All blood is water. All blood is yours. This is a knife of silver, metal of the sky, sky that touches water. Your servant gives you blood and silver to show his devotion.\u201d He took the loaf of bread in both hands, tore it in half, and threw both halves into the water. \u201cThis is the bread of landsmen, that landsmen need to live! At sea, all life is yours. At sea, yours is the only mercy. Give your servant strong winds and open waters, Lord. Show him mercy in his passage. Show him the might of your will within the waves, and send him safe home again. Hail, Iono! Lord of the Grasping Waters!\u201d Caldris rose from his knees, groaning, and wiped a few smears of blood on his tunic. \u201cRight. If that can\u2019t help, we never had a fuckin\u2019 chance.\u201d\n", "As always, thought Jean, there were two sorts in a city watch\u2014the ones that had eyes for trouble in the backs of their heads, and the ones that used their skulls to store sawdust.\n", "discipline, mark my words.\u201d Locke gazed out across the black waves and was startled to see a pale white-green shape, glowing like an alchemical lantern, leap up from the waves and splash back down a few seconds later. The arc of its passage left an iridescent afterimage when he blinked. \u201cGods,\u201d he said, \u201cwhat the hell is that?\u201d There was a fountain of the things, now, about a hundred yards from the ship. They flew silently after one another, appearing and disappearing above the surf, casting their ghostly light on black water that returned it like a mirror. \u201cYou really are new to these waters,\u201d said Caldris. \u201cThose are flit-wraiths, Kosta. South of Tal Verrar, you see \u2019em all about. Sometimes in great schools, or arches leapin\u2019 over the water. Over ships. They\u2019ve been known to follow us about. But only after dark, mind you.\u201d \u201cAre they some kind of fish?\u201d \u201cNobody rightly knows,\u201d said Caldris. \u201cFlit-wraiths can\u2019t be caught. They can\u2019t be touched, as I hear it. They fly right through nets, like they was ghosts. Maybe they are.\u201d\n", "\u201cYou get used to \u2019em after a few years,\u201d said Caldris. He drew smoke from his pipe, and the orange glow strengthened momentarily. \u201cThe Sea of Brass is a damned strange place, Kosta. Some say it\u2019s haunted by the Eldren. Most say it\u2019s just plain haunted. I\u2019ve seen things. Saint Corella\u2019s fire, burnin\u2019 blue and red up on the yardarms, scaring the piss outta the top-watch. I sailed over seas like glass and seen\u2026a city, once. Down below, not kidding. Walls and towers, white stone. Plain as day, right beneath our hull. In waters that our charts put at a thousand fathoms. Real as my nose it was, then gone.\u201d \u201cHeh,\u201d said Locke, smiling. \u201cYou\u2019re pretty good at this. You don\u2019t have to toy with me, Caldris.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m not toying with you one bit, Kosta.\u201d Caldris frowned, and his face took on a sinister cast in the pipe-light. \u201cI\u2019m telling you what to expect. Flit-wraiths is just the beginning. Hell, flit-wraiths is almost friendly. There\u2019s things out there even I have trouble believing. And there\u2019s places no sensible ship\u2019s master will ever go. Places that are\u2026wrong, somehow. Places that wait for you.\u201d\n", "\u201cSisters,\u201d said Jean. \u201cInteresting. A bit of your past for free?\u201d\n", "\u201cYou going to catch a nap?\u201d asked Jean. \u201cBloody hell, no. I expect to twiddle my thumbs and go steadily out of my skull until called for duty. Maybe I can find someone to share a hand of cards\u2014\u201d \u201cDoubt it,\u201d said Delmastro. \u201cYour reputation\u2026\u201d \u201cUnjust persecution for my good fortune,\u201d said Locke. \u201cYeah, well, maybe you should consider a public streak of bad luck. Word to the wise.\u201d She blew Locke a mocking little kiss. \u201cOr whatever you are, Ravelle.\u201d\n", "Something was there, for the briefest instant\u2014a dark shape visible through the curtains of mist. Man-sized. Tall, thin, and motionless. Waiting there, atop the reef. Jean shuddered violently, and the shape disappeared. He blinked as though waking from a daydream. The fog was now as dark and solid as ever, the imagined light gone, the hissing rush of water over shoals no longer so pleasing to his ears. Sweat ran in itching streams down his neck and arms, and he welcomed the distraction, scratching himself furiously.\n", "\u201cHandsome Marcus,\u201d said Drakasha. \u201cGods, you get uglier every time I come back. Like someone\u2019s slowly sculpting an ass out of a human face.\n", "A moment later Jean was squeezing past those brutes, into the familiar smells of a busy tavern at an hour closer to dawn than dinner. Sweat, scalded meat, puke, blood, smoke, and a dozen kinds of bad ale and wine: the bouquet of the civilized nightlife.\n", "Always thus, thought Zamira. Always thus in this life.\n", "\u201cDon\u2019t be stupid in your anger, Jerome.\u201d Drakasha grabbed him by the shoulders. \u201cBe cold. Cold\u2019s the only thing that\u2019s going to work,\n", "the makers of fortunes have a second love of money as a creation of their own, resembling the affection of authors for their own poems, or of parents for their children, besides that natural love of it for the sake of use and profit which is common to them and all men.\n", "the great blessing of riches, I do not say to every man, but to a good man, is, that he has had no occasion to deceive or to defraud others, either intentionally or unintentionally; and when he departs to the world below he is not in any apprehension about offerings due to the gods or debts which he owes to men. Now to this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I say, that, setting one thing against another, of the many advantages which wealth has to give, to a man of sense this is in my opinion the greatest.\n", "\"That is Thak,\" answered the priest, caressing his temple. \"Some would call him an ape, but he is almost as different from a real ape as he is different from a real man. His people dwell far to the east, in the mountains that fringe the eastern frontiers of Zamora. There are not many of them; but, if they are not exterminated, I believe they will become human beings in perhaps a hundred thousand years. They are in the formative stage; they are neither apes, as their remote ancestors were, nor men, as their remote descendants may be. They dwell in the high crags of well-nigh inaccessible mountains, knowing nothing of fire or the making of shelter or garments, or the use of weapons. Yet they have a language of a sort, consisting mainly of grunts and clicks.\n", "Be at ease, girl. Storms are rare on Vilayet at this time of year. If we make the steppes, we shall not starve. I was reared in a naked land. It was those cursed marshes, with their stench and stinging flies, that nigh unmanned me. I am at home in the high lands. As for pirates\u2014\" He grinned enigmatically, and bent to the oars.\n", "a great parrot which dropped on to a leafy branch and swayed there, a gleaming image of jade and crimson. It turned its crested head sidewise and regarded the invaders with glittering eyes of jet. \"Crom!\" muttered the Cimmerian. \"Here is the grandfather of all parrots. He must be a thousand years old! Look at the evil wisdom of his eyes. What mysteries do you guard, Wise Devil?\" Abruptly the bird spread its flaming wings and, soaring from its perch, cried out harshly: \"Yagkoolan yok tha, xuthalla!\" and with a wild screech of horribly human laughter, rushed away through the trees to vanish in the opalescent shadows.\n", "His beauty was not altogether human\u2014like the dream of a god, chiseled out of living marble.\n", "This, then, was the end of the trail\u2014for what human being could withstand the fury of that hairy mountain of thews and ferocity? Yet as she stared in wide-eyed horror at the bronzed figure facing the monster, she sensed a kinship in the antagonists that was almost appalling. This was less a struggle between man and beast than a conflict between two creatures of the wild, equally merciless and ferocious. With a flash of white tusks, the monster charged.\n", "\"Swear by the hilt,\" Conan demanded. Forty-four sword-hilts were lifted toward him, and forty-four voices blended in\n", "\u201cWonderful!\u201d I ejaculated.\n", "I ain\u2019t afeared of anything on this side o\u2019 the grave;\n", "that ever I clapped eyes on.\n", "there was a tap at the door, and the spokesman of the street Arabs, young Wiggins, introduced his insignificant and unsavoury person.\n", "I\u2019m Joseph Stangerson, who travelled with you in the desert when the Lord stretched out His hand and gathered you into the true fold.\u201d \u201cAs He will all the nations in His own good time,\u201d said the other in a nasal voice; \u201cHe grindeth slowly but exceeding small.\u201d\n", "That\u2019s the whole of my story, gentlemen. You may consider me to be a murderer; but I hold that I am just as much an officer of justice as you are.\u201d\n", "Discrimination is displaced and accountability is outsourced in this postdemocratic approach to governing social life.\n", "The etymology of the word robot is Czech; it comes from a word for \u201ccompulsory service,\u201d itself drawn from the Slav robota (\u201cservitude, hardship\u201d). So yes, people have used robots to\n", "The etymology of the word robot is Czech; it comes from a word for \u201ccompulsory service,\u201d itself drawn from the Slav robota (\u201cservitude, hardship\u201d).\n", "The first cultural representation that employed the word robot was a 1920 play by a Czech writer whose machine was a factory worker of limited consciousness. Social domination characterized the cultural laboratory in which robots were originally imagined.\n", "Then if the just man is good at keeping money, he is good at stealing it.\n", "the facts are these.\n", "\u201cWhat a very attractive woman!\u201d I exclaimed, turning to my companion. He had lit his pipe again, and was leaning back with drooping eyelids. \u201cIs she?\u201d he said, languidly. \u201cI did not observe.\u201d \u201cYou really are an automaton,\u2014a calculating-machine!\u201d I cried. \u201cThere is something positively inhuman in you at times.\u201d He smiled gently. \u201cIt is of the first importance,\u201d he said, \u201cnot to allow your judgment to be biased by personal qualities. A client is to me a mere unit,\u2014a factor in a problem. The emotional qualities are antagonistic to clear reasoning. I assure you that the most winning woman I ever knew was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money, and the most repellant man of my acquaintance is a philanthropist who has spent nearly a quarter of a million upon the London poor.\u201d\n", "Let me recommend this book,\u2014one of the most remarkable ever penned. It is Winwood Reade\u2019s \u2018Martyrdom of Man.\u2019\n", "\u201cMy father was, as you may have guessed, Major John Sholto, once of the Indian army. He retired some eleven years ago, and came to live at Pondicherry Lodge in Upper Norwood. He had prospered in India, and brought back with him a considerable sum of money, a large collection of valuable curiosities, and a staff of native servants.\n", "You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.\u201d\n", "\u201cWinwood Reade is good upon the subject,\u201d said Holmes. \u201cHe remarks that, while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty.\n", "Here are a couple of headlines that won\u2019t get past a newspaper editor, because they are unlikely to get past our own filters: \u201cMALARIA CONTINUES TO GRADUALLY DECLINE.\u201d \u201cMETEOROLOGISTS CORRECTLY PREDICTED YESTERDAY THAT THERE WOULD BE MILD WEATHER IN LONDON TODAY.\u201d\n", "The doors just continued to close tightly around my student\u2019s leg. She cried out in pain and fear. The elevator started moving upward. She cried out louder. Just as I realized this young woman\u2019s leg was going to get crushed against the top of the doorway, our host leaped across the elevator and hit the red emergency stop button. He hissed at me to help and between us we prised the doors far enough apart to release my student\u2019s bleeding limb. Afterward, our host looked at me and said, \u201cI have never seen that before. How can you admit such stupid people for medical training?\u201d I explained that all elevators in Sweden had sensors on the doors. If something were put between them, they would instantaneously stop closing and open instead. The Indian doctor looked doubtful. \u201cBut how can you be sure that this advanced mechanism is working every single time?\u201d I felt stupid with my reply: \u201cIt just always does. I suppose it\u2019s because there are strict safety rules and regular inspections.\u201d He didn\u2019t look convinced. \u201cHmmm. So your country has become so safe that when you go abroad the world is dangerous for you.\u201d I can assure you that the young woman was not at all stupid. She had simply, and unwisely, generalized from her own Level 4 experience of elevators to all elevators in all countries.\n", "In the media, we see photos of everyday life on Level 4 and crisis on the other levels all the time. Google toilet, bed, or stove. You will get images from Level 4. If you want to see what everyday life is like on the other levels, Google won\u2019t help.\n", "Before modern medicine, one of the worst imaginable skin diseases was syphilis, which would start as itchy boils and then eat its way into the bones until it exposed the skeleton. The microbe that caused this disgusting sight and unbearable pain had different names in different places. In Russia it was called the Polish disease. In Poland it was the German disease; in Germany, the French disease; and in France, the Italian disease. The Italians blamed back, calling it the French disease. The instinct to find a scapegoat is so core to human nature that it\u2019s hard to imagine the Swedish people calling the open sores the Swedish disease, or the Russians calling it the Russian disease. That\u2019s not how people work. We need someone to blame and if a single foreigner came here with the disease, then we would happily blame a whole country. No further investigation needed.\n", "we don\u2019t need predictions and scenarios. We know that 800 million are suffering right now. We also know the solutions: peace, schooling, universal basic health care, electricity, clean water, toilets, contraceptives, and microcredits to get market forces started. There\u2019s no innovation needed to end poverty. It\u2019s all about walking the last mile with what\u2019s worked everywhere else.\n", "They do not notice what\u2019s missing. But then, how can they? Who misses what they have never, ever even imagined? That would not be human nature. How fortunate, then, that there are more people in this world than just humankind.\n", "\u201cIf you hadn\u2019t taken her away,\u201d you say, \u201cthey would\u2019ve killed you and her, too.\u201d This is stonelore: Honor in safety, survival under threat.\n", "\u201cOrogenes built the Fulcrum,\u201d he says. She\u2019s almost never heard him say orogene. \u201cWe did it under threat of genocide, and we used it to buckle a collar around our own necks, but we did it. We are the reason Old Sanze grew so powerful and lasted so long, and why it still half-rules the world, even if no one will admit it. We\u2019re the ones who\u2019ve figured out just how amazing our kind can be, if we learn how to refine the gift we\u2019re born with.\u201d \u201cIt\u2019s a curse, not a gift.\u201d Syenite closes her eyes. But she doesn\u2019t push away the bundle. \u201cIt\u2019s a gift if it makes us better. It\u2019s a curse if we let it destroy us. You decide that\u2014not the instructors, or the Guardians, or anyone else.\u201d\n", "An end to all Seasons? It\u2019s hard even to imagine. No need for runny-sacks.\n", "But what you felt in that moment was a kind of cold, monstrous love. A determination to make sure your son\u2019s life remained the beautiful, wholesome thing that it had been up to that day, even if it meant you had to end his life early.\n", "Remwha glances at me in bland reproach,\n", "evidence blends into a symphony of accord on this conclusion.\n", "For many years Western scholars argued about whether the Polynesian colonisation of the Pacific \u2013 a stupendous achievement when one confronts their starting-point and the area of ocean enclosed by the triangular boundaries of Hawai\u2018i, New Zealand and Easter Island \u2013 was a consequence of deliberate or accidental voyaging. A careful study of available navigation techniques and computer simulations of voyages, allowing for prevailing winds, currents and weather systems, have led to the inescapable conclusion that Polynesian voyaging was wide-ranging and was deliberate. As they moved eastwards, navigators tacked and searched largely in upwind quadrants away from their points of departure, in directions from which they could most easily and most safely return downwind. This ensured three outcomes: that they had a means of getting home, whether or not they discovered new islands; that initial voyages were conventionally two-way; and that such voyages of discovery would precede voyages of deliberate colonisation, which would then make for a known and reported destination with appropriate navigational directions. This was the sequence and pattern of voyages that would have preceded the more difficult Polynesian discovery and colonisation of New Zealand.\n", "James Belich identified what he called an \u2018ethos of expansion\u2019 which assured Polynesians that \u2018new lands had always been found in the past, and therefore would be in the future. Failed migrations told no tales.\u2019 One can take this concept further. There was clearly something spiritually significant about the movement eastwards. Early burials in Polynesian islands had corpses trussed into a sitting position and facing east. And a proverb carried from Island Polynesia to New Zealand may also express part of the reality of that ethos: \u2018E kore au e ngaro, te kakano i ruia mai i Rangiatea.\u2019 (I shall not perish, but as a seed sent forth from Rangiatea I shall flourish.)\n", "Omitting the protected attribute makes it impossible not only to measure this bias but also to mitigate it. For instance, a machine-learning model used in a recruiting context might penalize a candidate for not having had a job in the prior year. We might not want this penalty applied to pregnant women or recent mothers, however\u2014but this will be difficult if the model must be \u201cgender-blind\u201d and can\u2019t include gender itself, nor something so strongly connected to it as pregnancy. \u201cThe most robust fact in the research area,\u201d Hardt says, \u201cis that fairness through blindness doesn\u2019t work. That\u2019s the most established and most robust fact in the entire research area.\u201d\n", "Criminals who successfully evade arrest get treated by the system as \u201clow-risk\u201d\u2014prompting recommendations for the release of other similar criminals. And the overpoliced, and wrongfully convicted, become part of the alleged ground-truth profile of \u201chigh-risk\u201d individuals\u2014prompting the system to recommend\n", "Criminals who successfully evade arrest get treated by the system as \u201clow-risk\u201d\u2014prompting recommendations for the release of other similar criminals. And the overpoliced, and wrongfully convicted, become part of the alleged ground-truth profile of \u201chigh-risk\u201d individuals\u2014prompting the system to recommend detention for others like them.\n", "He elaborates: \u201cReducing crime and incarceration rates is a really, really hard problem that I would like to leave to experts in criminal justice. I feel like prediction offers a bit of a dystopian perspective on the topic, which is \u2018Let\u2019s assume that we\u2019re not gonna structurally reduce crime. We\u2019re going to predict where it\u2019s gonna happen and go and try to catch people before it\u2019s happening.\u2019 It doesn\u2019t really offer, to me, a mechanism to structurally reduce crime. And that\u2019s what I find dystopian about it. I don\u2019t want to know how to predict where crime\u2019s going to happen. I guess that\u2019s useful, but, much rather I would have a mechanism to reduce crime structurally. I, as a computer scientist, have nothing to offer on that topic, absolutely nothing. I can\u2019t tell you the first thing about this. It would take me years to get to a point where I could.\u201d The importance of stepping back to take a wider, more macroscopic view of the criminal justice system was not lost on the earliest pioneers in the field. Ernest Burgess, writing in 1937\u2014after his initial report on the parole system had prompted a risk-assessment model that went into practice statewide\u2014felt that it was high time to move on to something more comprehensive. \u201cThe time has arrived in Illinois, in my judgment,\u201d he wrote, \u201cto stop tinkering with parole as an isolated part of our penal problem. What is required is a major operation which involves a complete reorganization of the prison system of the state.\u201d93 Eighty-some years have passed since then. It\u2019s still true.\n", "Caruana decided to spend the next twenty years developing models that attempt to have the best of both worlds\u2014models that are, ideally, as powerful as neural networks but as transparent and legible as a list of rules. One of his favorites is an architecture called \u201cgeneralized additive models,\u201d first pioneered by statisticians Trevor Hastie and Robert Tibshirani in 1986. A generalized additive model is a collection of graphs, each of which represents the influence of a single variable. For instance, one graph might show risk as a function of age, another would show risk as a function of blood pressure, a third would show risk as a function of temperature or heart rate, and so forth. These graphs can be linear, or curved, or incredibly complex\u2014but all of that complexity can be immediately apprehended visually, simply by looking at the graph. These \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0individual one-variable risks are then simply added up to produce the final prognosis. In this way it is more complex by far than, say, a linear regression but also much more interpretable than a neural net. You can visualize, on a plain old two-dimensional graph, every factor going into the model. Any strange patterns should immediately stand out. Many years after the original pneumonia study, Caruana revisited the dataset and built a generalized additive model to explore it. The generalized additive model turns out to be just as accurate as his old neural net, and far more transparent. He plotted the pneumonia mortality risk, for example, as a function of age. It was mostly what one would expect: it\u2019s good to be young or middle-aged if you have pneumonia, and more dangerous to be older. But something in particular stood out: an abrupt, sharp jump beginning at age 65. It seemed unusual that a particular birthday would trigger a sudden increase in risk. What was going on? Caruana realized that the model had managed to learn the impact of retirement. \u201cIt\u2019s really annoying that it\u2019s dangerous, right? You would hope that the risk goes down when you retire; sadly, it goes up.\u201d11 More importantly however, the closer he looked, the greater the number of troubling connections he saw. He had feared that his old neural network had learned not just the problematic asthma correlation but others like it\u2014though the simple rule-based models at the time weren\u2019t powerful enough to show him what else might be lurking in the neural network. Now, twenty years later, he had powerful interpretable models. It was like having a stronger microscope and suddenly seeing the mites in your pillow, the bacteria on your skin. \u201cI looked at it, and I was just like, \u2018Oh my\u2014 I can\u2019t believe it.\u2019 It thinks chest pain is good for you. It thinks heart disease is good for you. It thinks being over 100 is good for you. . . . It thinks all these things are good for you that are just obviously not good for you.\u201d12 None of them made any more medical sense than asthma; the correlations were just as real, but again it was precisely the fact that these patients were prioritized for more intensive care that made them as likely to survive as they were. \u201cThank God,\u201d he says, \u201cwe didn\u2019t ship the neural net.\u201d\n", "Your ETA as you drive home from the airport will tend to be more accurate the closer you are to home.) This means that, in general, as our expectation fluctuates, we get differences between our successive expectations, each of which is a learning opportunity; Sutton called these temporal differences, or TD errors. When one of these temporal differences happens, the later of the two estimates is the one more likely to be correct. And so maybe we don\u2019t need to wait until we get the eventual ground truth in order to learn something. Maybe we can learn from these fluctuations themselves. Any time our expectation changes can be treated as an error in our previous estimate, and, hence, an opportunity to learn: not from the ultimate truth, which has yet to arrive, but from the new estimate, made by our very slightly older and wiser self. As Sutton puts it: \u201cWe are learning a guess from a guess.\u201d\n", "This, of course, is the classic experience of dopamine-related drugs\u2014cocaine being a prototypical example. The drug works in large part by inhibiting the brain\u2019s reuptake of dopamine, leading to a temporary \u201cflood\u201d of it. The TD story suggests that the brain interprets this as a pervasive sense that things are going to be great\u2014but the dopamine is writing checks that the environmental rewards can\u2019t cash. Eventually the predicted greatness doesn\u2019t come, and the equal and opposite negative \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0prediction error is sure to follow. \u201cIt seemed like everything was going to be so great . . .\u201d We can chemically fool our brain\u2019s prediction mechanism\u2014but not forever. As the writer David Lenson puts it, \u201cCocaine promises the greatest pleasure ever known in just a minute more, if the right image is presented to the eyes, if another dose is administered, if a sexual interaction is orchestrated in just the right way. But that future never comes. There is a physical pleasure to the drug, to be sure, but it is incidental, trivial, compared to what is always just about to happen.\u201d71 Understanding cocaine as a drug of dopamine, and dopamine as a chemical of temporal difference\u2014of fluctuations in our expectation\u2014makes the story clear. By artificially dumping the brain\u2019s supply, one experiences not the bliss that things are great but the giddy euphoria that things are surprisingly promising. If that promise isn\u2019t kept, the temporal-difference error swings the other way, and our dopamine system goes silent. It was our high expectations that were in error. We were duped.\n", "\u201cMomentary happiness is a state that reflects not how well things are going but instead whether things are going better than expected.\u201d74 This sounds exactly like a temporal-difference error\u2014in other words, exactly like the role played by dopamine.\n", "One doesn\u2019t have to squint too hard to see a cautionary tale here for Homo sapiens. A heuristic like \u201cAlways eat as much sugar and fat as you possibly can\u201d is optimal as long as there isn\u2019t all that much sugar and fat in your environment and you aren\u2019t especially good at getting it. Once that dynamic changes, a reward function that served you and your ancestors for tens of thousands of years suddenly leads you off the rails. For Andrew Barto, there are clues in thinking about evolution that are useful for us as we now play the role of the reward designer. \u201cEvolution has provided our reward function, and so that is really quite important with regard to how we design reward functions for artificial systems,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s what happened in nature. Evolution came up with these reward signals to encourage us to do things that led to our reproductive success.\u201d57 As Barto notes, \u201cSo, an interesting thing is that evolution didn\u2019t give us reproductive success as a reward signal. They gave us rewards for predictors.\u201d We optimize our behavior to maximize the things we find rewarding, but in the background and at a larger scale, evolution is shaping the things we find rewarding in the first place. \u201cSo, it\u2019s a two-level optimization,\u201d says Barto. \u201cI\u2019m very interested in that.\u201d\n", "The theory and practice of reward shaping in machine learning not only gives us a way to make our autonomous helicopters maneuver appropriately but contributes two distinct things to our understanding of human life and human intelligence. One, it shows us a reason\u2014sparsity\u2014why some problems or tasks are more difficult than others to solve or accomplish. Two, it gives us a theory\u2014incentivize the state, not the action\u2014for how to make tough problems easier without introducing perverse incentives.\n", "this intrinsic motivation, as Berlyne saw, was every bit as central to human nature as the drives for, say, food and sex\u2014despite being \u201cunduly neglected by psychology for many years.\u201d20 (Indeed, the severest punishment our society allows, short of death\u2014solitary confinement\u2014is, in effect, the infliction of boredom on people.)\n", "there is a fundamental tension at the heart of curiosity, almost a tug-of-war: As we explore an environment and our available behaviors within it\u2014whether that\u2019s the microcosm of an Atari game, the real-world great outdoors, or the nuances of human society\u2014we simultaneously delight in the things that surprise us while at the same time we become harder and harder to surprise. It\u2019s almost as if the mind comprises two different learning systems, set at cross-purposes to each other. One does its best not to be surprised. The other does its best to surprise it.\n", "In better coming to understand our own motivations and drives, we then, in turn, have a chance for complementary and reciprocal insights about how to build an artificial intelligence as flexible, resilient, and intellectually omnivorous as our own.\n", "this deeply seated capacity to recognize ourselves in relation to others\u2014whom we perceive in some fundamental way as like ourselves\u2014is the beginning not only of psychological development but, as he puts it, \u201cthe kernel embryonic foundation for the development of social norms, values, ethics, empathy. . . . It\u2019s a big bang. The initial beginning is this imitation of bodily movements.\n", "The thought experiment that she considered has come to be known as that of \u201cProfessor Procrastinate. The premise is straightforward: Professor Procrastinate is both a professor and\u2014you guessed it\u2014an inveterate procrastinator. He is asked to read a student\u2019s paper and offer feedback, which he is uniquely qualified to provide. But what would surely happen instead, should he agree, is that he\u2019ll fritter the time away and never get the feedback to the student. This will be worse than simply declining, in which case the student could ask for (slightly less high-quality) feedback from someone else. Should he accept? Here diverge two different schools of moral thought: \u201cpossibilism\u201d\u2014the view that one should do the best possible thing in every situation\u2014versus \u201cactualism\u201d\u2014the view that one should do the best thing at the moment, given what will actually happen later (whether because of your own later deeds or some other reason). Possibilism says that the best possible thing for Procrastinate to do is to accept the review and write it on time. This begins with accepting it, and so he should accept. Actualism takes a more pragmatic view. By its lights, accepting the review inevitably results in a bad outcome: no review at all. Declining the review means a comparatively better outcome: a review by a slightly less well-qualified reviewer. The professor should do the thing that actually results in the best outcome; hence he should say no. Smith was led to the conclusion that \u201cone must sometimes choose the lower rather than the higher act.\u201d She elaborates: \u201cThere seems little point in prescribing an act which puts the agent in a position to do great things if the same act also puts him in a position to do something disastrous, and he would choose the latter rather than the former.\u201d\n", "Indeed, the verdict from studying human-human teams is clear. \u201cThere\u2019s an established literature,\u201d says Shah, \u201cthat essentially shows that explicitly commanding a person to do a task is one of the worst ways to train interdependent work between two people. You know, when you think of it, it\u2019s like: Well, obviously! Right? . . . They are among the worst human team-training practices you can implement.\u201d \u201cThere are also good human studies,\u201d she adds, \u201cthat say if you have multiple people trying to achieve the same goal, or same intention\u2014everyone \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0knows what that goal or that intention is\u2014but your two people have different strategies for achieving that and their work needs to be interdependent, they\u2019re going to perform much worse than if they have a suboptimal but coherent strategy.\u201d In almost any team scenario\u2014from business to warfighting to sports to music\u2014it\u2019s a given that everyone\u2019s high-level goals are the same. But shared goals alone aren\u2019t enough. They also need a plan. What does work in human teams is something called cross-training. The members of the team temporarily switch roles: suddenly, finding themselves in their teammate\u2019s shoes, they begin to understand how they can change their own actual work to better suit their teammate\u2019s needs and workflow. Cross-training is something of a gold standard in human team training, used in military settings, industrial settings, medicine, and beyond.\n", "In these cases, we want a somewhat different directive than the typical one to infer my goals from my behavior and facilitate my doing more of the same. We want to say, in effect, \u201cYou must not infer that I want to be doing this because I am doing it. Please do not make this any easier \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0for me. Please do not amplify it or reinforce it or in any way tamp down the desire path that leads this way. Please grow the briars behind me.\u201d I think there is an important policy matter here, at least as much as a theoretical one. We should take seriously the idea that users have a right both to see and to alter any preference model that a site or app or advertiser has about them. It is worth considering regulation to this effect: to say, in essence, I have the right to my own models. I have the right to say, That\u2019s not who I am. Or, aspirationally, This is who I want to be. This is the person in whose interest you must work.\n", "what would happen if you left dropout on in a deployed system? By running a prediction multiple times, each with a different random portion of the network dropped out, you would get a bouquet of slightly different predictions. It was like getting an exponentially large ensemble for free out of a single model. The resulting uncertainty in the system\u2019s outputs doesn\u2019t just resemble the output of the ideal, but tragically uncomputable, Bayesian neural network. As it turns out, it is the output\u2014at least, a close approximation, within rigorous theoretical bounds\u2014of that ideal, uncomputable Bayesian neural network. The result has been a set of tools that put those once-impractical techniques within reach, making them available for practitioners to make use of in real applications. \u201cThat\u2019s been a big, big change over the past few years,\u201d says Gal, \u201cbecause now you can take these beautiful mathematics, yield some approximations, and then you can use these for interesting problems.\u201d23 Gal downloaded a bunch of state-of-the-art image-recognition models from the internet and reran them completely off the shelf, but with dropout turned on during testing. Changing nothing else about them other than leaving dropout running during evaluation and averaging over a number of estimates, Gal found that the models were even more accurate, when run as implicit ensembles in this way, than they were when run normally. \u201cUncertainty,\u201d Gal argues, \u201cis indispensable for classification tasks.\u201d25 The networks are every bit as accurate\u2014and then some\u2014while offering an explicit measure of their own uncertainty, which can be used in a variety of ways. \u201cWhen you use this for interesting problems, you can \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0actually show that you can get gains. You can actually get improvement by showing that you can know when you don\u2019t know.\u201d26 One of the more striking examples of this comes from medicine: specifically, the diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy, one of the leading causes of blindness in working-age adults. A group from the Institute for Ophthalmic Research at Eberhard Karls University in T\u00fcbingen, Germany, led by postdoc Christian Leibig, wanted to see if they could make use of Gal and Ghahramani\u2019s dropout idea. Computer vision and, in particular, deep learning has, even as of the first few years after AlexNet, made amazing contributions to medicine. It seems that every week we hear some headline or other that \u201cAI diagnoses x condition with 99% accuracy\u201d or \u201cbetter than human experts.\u201d But there\u2019s a major problem with this. As Leibig and his colleagues note, typical deep-learning tools for disease detection \u201chave been proposed without methods to quantify and control their uncertainty in a decision.\u201d This human capacity\u2014to know when and what we don\u2019t know\u2014was missing. \u201cA physician knows whether she is uncertain about a case,\u201d they write, \u201cand will consult more experienced colleagues if needed.\u201d What they sought was a system that could do the same.\n", "AI safety gridworlds. It did work. Acting to maximize each individual game\u2019s rewards while at the same time preserving its future ability to satisfy four or five random auxiliary goals, the agent, remarkably, goes out of its way to push the block to a reversible spot, and only then beelines to the goal. Stuart Armstrong had first envisioned \u201ctwenty billion\u201d metrics, chosen inclusively but with some care. Four or five, generated at random\u2014at least in the simplified land of the sokoban warehouse\u2014were enough. The debate and exploration of these sorts of formal measures of machine caution\u2014and how we scale them from the gridworlds to the real world\u2014will doubtless go on, but work like this is an encouraging start. Both stepwise relative reachability and attainable utility preservation \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0share an underlying intuition: that we want systems which to the extent possible keep options open\u2014both theirs and ours\u2014whatever the specific environment might be.\n", "Many within the field of AI believe that manually authoring or handcrafting such explicit reward functions or objective functions is a kind of well-intentioned road to hell: no matter how thoughtfully you do it, or how pure your motives may be, there will simply always be something you failed to account for. This fatalistic attitude about explicit objective functions is so deep that, as we have seen in the last few chapters, much of the work being done in advanced AI applications and in AI safety in particular is about moving beyond systems that take in an explicit objective, and toward \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0systems that attempt to imitate humans (in the case of many self-driving cars), or seek their approval (in the case of the backflipping robot, offering endless choices between options), or infer their goals and adopt them as their own (in the case of the helicopter).\n", "\u201cA man with a watch knows what time it is, but a man with two watches is never sure.\u201d\n", "We are in danger of losing control of the world not to AI or to machines as such but to models. To formal, often numerical specifications for what exists and for what we want.\n", "Whether one calls slime molds, fungi, and plants \u201cintelligent\u201d depends on one\u2019s point of view. Classical scientific definitions of intelligence use humans as a yardstick by which all other species are measured. According to these anthropocentric definitions, humans are always at the top of the intelligence rankings, followed by animals that look like us (chimpanzees, bonobos, etc.), followed again by other \u201chigher\u201d animals, and onward and downward in a league table\u2014a great chain of intelligence drawn up by the ancient Greeks, which persists one way or another to this day. Because these organisms don\u2019t look like us or outwardly behave like us\u2014or have brains\u2014they have traditionally been allocated a position somewhere at the bottom of the scale. Too often, they are thought of as the inert backdrop to animal life. Yet many are capable of sophisticated behaviors that prompt us to think in new ways about what it means for organisms to \u201csolve problems,\u201d \u201ccommunicate,\u201d \u201cmake decisions,\u201d \u201clearn,\u201d and \u201cremember.\u201d As we do so, some of the vexed hierarchies that underpin modern thought start to soften. As they soften, our ruinous attitudes toward the more-than-human world may start to change.\n", "For your community of microbes\u2014your \u201cmicrobiome\u201d\u2014your body is a planet. Some prefer the temperate forest of your scalp, some the arid plains of your forearm, some the tropical forest of your crotch or armpit.\n", "It is usually taken for granted\u2014within modern industrial societies, at least\u2014that we start where our bodies begin and stop where our bodies end. Developments in modern medicine, such as organ transplants, worry these distinctions; developments in the microbial sciences shake them at their foundations. We are ecosystems, composed of\u2014and decomposed by\u2014an ecology of microbes,\n", "They are chemically loquacious, vociferous even.\n", "Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened.\n", "The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for \u201chill,\u201d for example, is a verb: to be a hill. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills. Equipped with this \u201cgrammar of animacy,\u201d it is possible to talk about the life of other organisms without either reducing them to an \u201cit\u201d or borrowing concepts traditionally reserved for humans.\n", "The biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, observes that the indigenous Potawatomi language is rich in verb forms that attribute aliveness to the more-than-human world. The word for \u201chill,\u201d for example, is a verb: to be a hill. Hills are always in the process of hilling, they are actively being hills. Equipped with this \u201cgrammar of animacy,\u201d it is possible to talk about the life of other organisms without either reducing them to an \u201cit\u201d or borrowing concepts traditionally reserved for humans. By contrast, in English, writes Kimmerer, there is no way to recognize the \u201csimple existence of another living being.\u201d If you\u2019re not a human subject, by default you\u2019re an inanimate object: an \u201cit,\u201d a \u201cmere thing.\u201d If you repurpose a human concept to help make sense of the life of a nonhuman organism, you\u2019ve tumbled into the trap of anthropomorphism. Use \u201cit,\u201d and you\u2019ve objectified the organism and fallen into a different kind of trap. Biological realities are never black-and-white. Why should the stories and metaphors we use to make sense of the world\u2014our investigative tools\u2014be so? Might we be able to expand some of our concepts, such that speaking might not always require a mouth, hearing might not always require ears, and interpreting might not always require a nervous system? Are we able to do this without smothering other life-forms with prejudice and innuendo?\n", "Animals put food in their bodies, whereas fungi put their bodies in the food.\n", "A mycelial network is a map of a fungus\u2019s recent history and is a helpful reminder that all life-forms are in fact processes not things. The \u201cyou\u201d of five years ago was made from different stuff than the \u201cyou\u201d of today. Nature is an event that never stops. As William Bateson, who coined the word genetics, observed, \u201cWe commonly think of animals and plants as matter, but they are really systems through which matter is continually passing.\u201d\n", "\u201cWomen Gathering Mushrooms\u201d is an example of musical polyphony. Polyphony is singing more than one part, or telling more than one story, at the same time. Unlike the harmonies in a barbershop quartet, the voices of the women never weld into a unified front. No voice surrenders its individual identity. Nor does any one voice steal the show. There is no front woman, no soloist, no leader. If the recording was played to ten people and they were asked to sing the tune back, each would sing something different.\n", "\u201cI don\u2019t think they\u2019re brains,\u201d Olsson explained to me. \u201cI had to hold back the brain concept. As soon as one says it, people start thinking of brains like ours where we have language and process thoughts to make decisions.\u201d His caution is well-placed. Brain is a trigger word, burdened with concepts that spend most of their time in the animal world. \u201cWhen we say \u2018brain,\u2019\u2009\u201d Olsson continued, \u201call associations are with animal brains.\u201d Besides, as he pointed out, brains behave like brains because of the way they\u2019re built. The architecture of animal brains is very different from that of fungal networks. In animal brains, neurons connect with other neurons at junctions called synapses. At synapses, signals can combine with other signals. Neurotransmitter molecules pass across synapses and allow different neurons to behave in different ways\u2014some excite other neurons, some inhibit them. Mycelial networks don\u2019t share any of these features. But if fungi did use waves of electrical activity to transmit signals around a network, wouldn\u2019t we think of mycelium as at least a brain-like phenomenon? In Olsson\u2019s view, there could be other ways to regulate electrical impulses in mycelial networks to create \u201cbrain-like circuits, gates, and oscillators.\u201d In some fungi, hyphae are divided into compartments by pores, which can be sensitively regulated. Opening or closing a pore changes the strength of the signal that passes from one compartment to another, whether chemical, pressure, or electrical. If sudden changes in the electrical charge within a hyphal compartment could open or close a pore, Olsson mused, a burst of impulses could change the way subsequent signals passed along the hypha and form a simple learning loop. What\u2019s more, hyphae branch. If two impulses converged on one spot, they would both influence pore conductivity, integrating signals from different branches. \u201cYou do not need much knowledge of how computers work to realize that such systems can create decision gates,\u201d Olsson told me. \u201cIf you combine these systems in a flexible and adaptable network we have the possibility for \u2018a brain\u2019 that could learn and remember.\u201d He held the word brain at a safe distance, clamped in the forceps of quotation marks to emphasize that a metaphor was in play.\n", "A fungal computer may sound fantastical, but biocomputing is a fast-growing field. Adamatzky has spent years developing ways to use slime molds as sensors and computers. These prototype biocomputers use slime molds to solve a range of geometrical problems. The slime mold networks can be modified\u2014for instance, by cutting a connection\u2014to alter the set of \u201clogical functions\u201d implemented by the network. Adamatzky\u2019s idea of a \u201cfungal computer\u201d is just an application of slime-mold computing to another type of network-based organism. As Adamatzky observes, the mycelial networks of some species of fungus are more convenient for computing than slime molds. They form longer-lived networks and don\u2019t morph into new shapes quite so quickly. They are also larger, with more junctions between hyphae. It is at these junctions\u2014what Olsson described as \u201cdecision gates,\u201d and what Adamatzky describes as \u201celementary processors\u201d\u2014that signals from different branches of the network would interact and combine. Adamatzky estimates that a network of honey fungus stretching over fifteen hectares would have nearly a trillion such processing units. For Adamatzky, the point of fungal computers is not to replace silicon chips. Fungal reactions are too slow for that. Rather, he thinks humans could use mycelium growing in an ecosystem as a \u201clarge-scale environmental sensor.\u201d Fungal networks, he reasons, are monitoring a large number of data streams as part of their everyday existence. If we could plug into mycelial networks and interpret the signals they use to process information, we could learn more about what was happening in an ecosystem. Fungi could report changes in soil quality, water purity, pollution, or any other features of the environment that they are sensitive to.\n", "But how we define intelligence and cognition is a question of taste. For many, the brain-centric view is too limited. The idea that a neat line can be drawn that separates nonhumans from humans with \u201creal minds\u201d and \u201creal comprehension\u201d has been curtly dismissed by the philosopher Daniel Dennett as an \u201carchaic myth.\u201d Brains didn\u2019t evolve their tricks from scratch, and many of their characteristics reflect more ancient processes that existed long before recognizable brains arose.\n", "Charles Darwin, writing in 1871, took a pragmatic line. \u201cIntelligence is based on how efficient a species becomes at doing the things they need to survive.\u201d\n", "understand life to be an entangled whole. Today, the idea that all things are interconnected has been so well-used that it has collapsed into a clich\u00e9.\n", "he presented the radical notion that lichens were not a single organism, as had long been assumed. Instead, he argued that they were composed of two quite different entities: a fungus and an alga.\n", "Lichens mine minerals from rock in a twofold process known as \u201cweathering.\u201d First, they physically break up surfaces by the force of their growth. Second, they deploy an arsenal of powerful acids and mineral-binding compounds to dissolve and digest the rock. Lichens\u2019 ability to weather makes them a geological force, yet they do more than dissolve the physical features of the world. When lichens die and decompose, they give rise to the first soils in new ecosystems. Lichens are how the inanimate mineral mass within rocks is able to cross over into the metabolic cycles of the living.\n", "The capacity of lichens to survive in space has since been demonstrated in a number of studies, and the findings are broadly the same. The hardiest lichen species can recover their metabolic activity in full within twenty-four hours of being rehydrated and are able to repair much of the \u201cspace-induced\u201d damage they may have sustained. In fact, the toughest species\u2014Circinaria gyrosa\u2014has such high survival rates that three recent studies decided to expose samples to even higher levels of radiation than they receive in space, to test them to their \u201cuttermost limits of survival.\u201d Sure enough, a dose of radiation could kill the lichens, but the amount required to disrupt their cells was enormous. Lichen samples exposed to six kilograys of gamma irradiation\u2014six times the standard dose for food sterilization in the United States and twelve thousand times the lethal dose for humans\u2014were entirely untroubled. When the dose was doubled to twelve kilograys\u2014two and a half times the lethal dose for tardigrades\u2014the lichens\u2019 ability to reproduce was impaired, although they survived and continued to photosynthesize with no apparent problems.\n", "Margulis argued that some of the most significant moments in evolution had resulted from the coming together\u2014and staying together\u2014of different organisms. Eukaryotes arose when a single-celled organism engulfed a bacterium, which continued to live symbiotically inside it. Mitochondria were the descendants of these bacteria. Chloroplasts were the descendants of photosynthetic bacteria that had been engulfed by an early eukaryotic cell. All complex life that followed, human life included, was a story of the long-lasting \u201cintimacy of strangers.\u201d\n", "Lichens don\u2019t reenact the origin of the eukaryotic cell exactly, but as Goward remarks, they certainly \u201crhyme\u201d with it. Lichens are cosmopolitan bodies, a place where lives meet. A fungus can\u2019t photosynthesize by itself, but by partnering with an alga or photosynthetic bacterium it can acquire this ability horizontally. Similarly, an alga or photosynthetic bacterium can\u2019t grow tough layers of protective tissue or digest rock, but by partnering with a fungus it gains access to these capabilities\u2014suddenly.\n", "Recent findings from the Deep Carbon Observatory report that more than half of all Earth\u2019s bacteria and archaea\u2014so called \u201cinfra-terrestrials\u201d\u2014exist kilometers below the planet\u2019s surface, where they live under intense pressure and extreme heat. These subsurface worlds are as diverse as the Amazon rainforest and contain billions of tons of microbes, hundreds of times the collective weight of all the humans on the planet.\n", "Lichens have evolved independently between nine and twelve times since. Today, one in five of all known fungal species form lichens, or \u201clichenize.\u201d Some fungi (such as Penicillium molds) used to lichenize but don\u2019t anymore; they have de-lichenized. Some fungi have switched to different types of photosynthetic partner\u2014or re-lichenized\u2014over the course of their evolutionary histories. For some fungi, lichenization remains a lifestyle choice; they can live as lichens or not depending on their circumstances.\n", "Researchers have long hypothesized that lichens might involve additional symbiotic partners. After all, lichens don\u2019t contain microbiomes. They are microbiomes, packed with fungi and bacteria besides the two established players. Nonetheless, until 2016, no new stable partnerships had been described. One of the \u201ccontaminants\u201d Spribille discovered\u2014a single-celled yeast\u2014turned out to be more than a temporary resident. It is found in lichens across six continents and can make such a substantial contribution to lichens\u2019 physiology as to give them the appearance of an entirely different species. This yeast was a crucial third partner in the symbiosis. Spribille\u2019s bombshell finding was only the beginning. Two years later, he and his team found that wolf lichens\u2014some of the best-studied species\u2014contain yet another fungal species, a fourth fungal partner. Lichens\u2019 identity splintered into even smaller shards. Yet this is still an oversimplification, Spribille told me. \u201cThe situation is infinitely more complex than anything we\u2019ve published. The \u2018basic set\u2019 of partners is different for every lichen group. Some have more bacteria, some fewer; some have one yeast species, some have two, or none. Interestingly, we have yet to find any lichen that matches the traditional definition of one fungus and one alga.\u201d\n", "lichens are queer beings that present ways for humans to think beyond a rigid binary framework: The identity of lichens is a question rather than an answer known in advance. In turn, Spribille has found queer theory a helpful framework to apply to lichens. \u201cThe human binary view has made it difficult to ask questions that aren\u2019t binary,\u201d he explained. \u201cOur strictures about sexuality make it difficult to ask questions about sexuality, and so on. We ask questions from the perspective of our cultural context. And this makes it extremely difficult to ask questions about complex symbioses like lichens because we think of ourselves as autonomous individuals and so find it hard to relate.\u201d\n", "We can\u2019t be defined on anatomical grounds because our bodies are shared with microbes and consist of more microbial cells than our \u201cown\u201d\u2014cows can\u2019t eat grass, for example, but their microbial populations can, and cows\u2019 bodies have evolved to house the microbes that sustain them. Neither can we be defined developmentally, as the organism that proceeds from the fertilization of an animal egg, because we depend, like all mammals, on our symbiotic partners to direct parts of our developmental programs. Nor is it possible to define us genetically, as bodies made up of cells that share an identical genome\u2014many of our symbiotic microbial partners are inherited from our mothers alongside our \u201cown\u201d DNA, and at points in our evolutionary history, microbial associates have permanently insinuated themselves into the cells of their hosts: Our mitochondria have their own genome as do plants\u2019 chloroplasts, and at least eight percent of the human genome originated in viruses (we can even swap cells with other humans when we grow into \u201cchimeras,\u201d formed when mothers and fetuses exchange cells or genetic material in utero). Nor can our immune systems be taken as a measure of individuality, although our immune cells are often thought of as answering this question for us by distinguishing \u201cself\u201d from \u201cnonself.\u201d Immune systems are as concerned with managing our relationships with our resident microbes as fighting off external attackers and appear to have evolved to enable colonization by microbes rather than prevent it. Where does this leave you? Or perhaps y\u2019all?\n", "Some researchers use the term \u201cholobiont\u201d to refer to an assemblage of different organisms that behaves as a unit.\n", "Instead, the fungus\u2019s approach appears to be pharmacological. The researchers suspect that the fungus is able to puppeteer the ants\u2019 movements by secreting chemicals that act on their muscles and central nervous system even if the fungus does not have a physical presence in their brains. Exactly what chemicals these are isn\u2019t known. Nor is it known whether the fungus is able to cut the ant\u2019s brain off from its body and coordinate its muscle contractions directly. However, Ophiocordyceps is closely related to the ergot fungi, from which the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann originally isolated the compounds used to make LSD, and is able to produce the family of chemicals that LSD derives from\u2014a group known as \u201cergot alkaloids.\u201d\n", "A number of the horrors depicted by the Renaissance painter Hieronymus Bosch are thought to have been inspired by the symptoms of ergot poisoning, and some hypothesize that the numerous outbreaks of \u201cdancing mania\u201d between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which hundreds of townspeople took to dancing for days without rest, were caused by convulsive ergotism.\n", "There are many variations on the \u201cstoned ape\u201d hypothesis, but as with most origin stories it is difficult to prove either way.\n", "ACCOUNTS OF PSYCHEDELIC experiences frequently involve hybrid beings and interspecies transformations. Myths and fairy tales, too, are full of composite animals from werewolves and centaurs to sphinxes and chimeras. Ovid\u2019s Metamorphoses is a catalogue of transformations from one creature into another and even includes a land where \u201cmen grew from rainswept fungus.\u201d\n", "Once inside the body, psilocybin is converted to the chemical psilocin. Psilocin slips into the workings of the brain by stimulating receptors normally stimulated by the neurotransmitter serotonin. By mimicking one of our most widely used chemical messengers, psilocybin, like LSD, infiltrates our nervous systems, intervenes directly in the passage of electrical signals around our bodies, and can even change the growth and structure of neurons.\n", "Psychedelic Research Programme gave subjects psilocybin and monitored the activity of their brains. Their findings were surprising. The scans revealed that psilocybin didn\u2019t increase the activity of the brain as one might expect, given its dramatic effects on people\u2019s minds and cognition. Rather, it reduced the activity of certain key areas.\n", "Two studies published in 2018 suggest that psilocybin did provide a benefit to the fungi that could make it. Analysis of the DNA of psilocybin-producing fungal species reveals that the ability to make psilocybin evolved more than once. More surprising was the finding that the cluster of genes needed to make psilocybin has jumped between fungal lineages by horizontal gene transfer several times over the course of its history. As we\u2019ve seen, horizontal gene transfer is the process by which genes and the characteristics they underpin move between organisms without the need to have sex and produce offspring. It is an everyday occurrence in bacteria\u2014and how antibiotic resistance can spread rapidly through bacterial populations\u2014but it is rare in mushroom-forming fungi. It is even more rare for complex clusters of metabolic genes to remain intact as they jump between species. The fact that the psilocybin gene cluster remained in one piece as it moved around suggests that it provided a significant advantage to any fungi who expressed it. If it didn\u2019t, the trait would have quickly degenerated.\n", "The earliest plants were little more than puddles of green tissue, with no roots or other specialized structures. Over time, they evolved coarse fleshy organs to house their fungal associates, who scavenged the soil for nutrients and water. By the time the first roots evolved, the mycorrhizal association was already some fifty million years old. Mycorrhizal fungi are the roots of all subsequent life on land. The word mycorrhiza has it right. Roots (rhiza) followed fungi (mykes) into being.\n", "Globally, the total length of mycorrhizal hyphae in the top ten centimeters of soil is around half the width of our galaxy (4.5 \u00d7 1017 kilometers of hyphae, versus 9.5 \u00d7 1017 kilometers of space). If these hyphae were ironed into a flat sheet, their combined surface area would cover every inch of dry land on Earth two and a half times over. However, fungi don\u2019t stay still. Mycorrhizal hyphae die back and regrow so rapidly\u2014between ten and sixty times per year\u2014that over a million years their cumulative length would exceed the diameter of the known universe (4.8 \u00d7 1010 light years of hyphae, versus 9.1 \u00d7 109 light years in the known universe). Given that mycorrhizal fungi have been around for some five hundred million years and aren\u2019t restricted to the top ten centimeters of soil, these figures are certainly underestimates.\n", "\u201cThe levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere drop off dramatically at the same time as land plants are evolving increasingly complex structures,\u201d Field explained. The surge in plant productivity in turn depended on their mycorrhizal partners. It\u2019s a predictable sequence of events. One of the biggest limits to plant growth is a scarcity of the nutrient phosphorus. One of the things that mycorrhizal fungi do best\u2014one of their most prominent metabolic \u201csongs\u201d\u2014is to mine phosphorus from the soil and transfer it to their plant partners. If plants are fertilized with phosphorus, they grow more. The more plants grow, the more they draw down carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The more plants live, the more plants die, and the more carbon is buried in soils and sediments. The more carbon that is buried, the less there is in the atmosphere. Phosphorus is only part of the story. Mycorrhizal fungi deploy acids and high pressure to burrow into solid rock. With their help, plants in the Devonian period were able to mine minerals like calcium and silica. Once unlocked, these minerals react with carbon dioxide, pulling it out of the atmosphere. The resulting compounds\u2014carbonates and silicates\u2014find their way into the oceans where they are used by marine organisms to make their shells. When the organisms die, the shells sink and pile up hundreds of meters thick on the ocean floor, which becomes an enormous burial ground for carbon. Add all of this up and climates start to change.\n", "Are plants and fungi making decisions, albeit brainless ones, I wondered. \u201cI use the word decision all the time,\u201d Kiers told me. \u201cThere\u2019s a set of options, and somehow information has to be integrated and one of the options has to be chosen. I think that a lot of what we are doing is studying micro-scale decisions.\u201d There are many ways that these choices could unfold. \u201cAre there absolute decisions being made in every hyphal tip?\u201d Kiers mused. \u201cOr is it all relative, in which case what happens would depend on what else is happening across the network.\u201d Intrigued by these questions, and having read Thomas Piketty\u2019s work on wealth inequality in human societies, Kiers began thinking about the role of inequality within fungal networks. She and her team exposed a single mycorrhizal fungus to an unequal supply of phosphorus. One part of the mycelium had access to a big patch of phosphorus. Another part had access to a small patch. She was interested in how this would affect the fungus\u2019s trading decisions in different parts of the same network. Some recognizable patterns emerged. In parts of a mycelial network where phosphorus was scarce, the plant paid a higher \u201cprice,\u201d supplying more carbon to the fungus for every unit of phosphorus it received. Where phosphorus was more readily available, the fungus received a less favorable \u201cexchange rate.\u201d The \u201cprice\u201d of phosphorus seemed to be governed by the familiar dynamics of supply and demand. Most surprising was the way that the fungus coordinated its trading behavior across the network. Kiers identified a strategy of \u201cbuy low, sell high.\u201d The fungus actively transported phosphorus\u2014using its dynamic microtubule \u201cmotors\u201d\u2014from areas of abundance, where it fetched a low price when exchanged with a plant root, to areas of scarcity, where it was in higher demand and fetched a higher price. By doing so, the fungus was able to transfer a greater proportion of its phosphorus to the plant at the more favorable exchange rate, thus receiving larger quantities of carbon in return.\n", "The Vertical Earth Kilometer is a brass pole one kilometer long buried in the ground. The only visible part of it is the very end of the pole: a brass circle that lies flat on the floor and looks like a coin. He described the imaginative vertigo it had triggered in him, the sense of floating on the surface of an ocean of land, looking down into its depths.\n", "\u201cFire if he raises his hand,\u201d said Holmes, quietly. We were within a boat\u2019s-length by this time, and almost within touch of our quarry. I can see the two of them now as they stood, the white man with his legs far apart, shrieking out curses, and the unhallowed dwarf with his hideous face, and his strong yellow teeth gnashing at us in the light of our lantern.\n", "Why care about the fungi if we have made them redundant? Mycorrhizal fungi do more than feed plants. The researchers at Agroscope describe them as keystone organisms but some prefer the term \u201cecosystem engineers.\u201d Mycorrhizal mycelium is a sticky living seam that holds soil together; remove the fungi, and the ground washes away. Mycorrhizal fungi increase the volume of water that the soil can absorb, reducing the quantity of nutrients leached out of the soil by rainfall by as much as fifty percent. Of the carbon that is found in soils\u2014which, remarkably, amounts to twice the amount of carbon found in plants and the atmosphere combined\u2014a substantial proportion is bound up in tough organic compounds produced by mycorrhizal fungi. The carbon that floods into the soil through mycorrhizal channels supports intricate food webs. Besides the hundreds or thousands of meters of fungal mycelium in a teaspoon of healthy soil, there are more bacteria, protists, insects, and arthropods than the number of humans who have ever lived on Earth.\n", "IN ALL PHYSICAL systems, energy moves \u201cdownhill,\u201d from where there is more to where there is less. Heat travels from the hot sun into cold space. A truffle\u2019s scent drifts from areas of high concentration to lower concentration. Neither has to be actively transported. As long as there is an energetic slope, energy will move from the source (at the top) to the sink (at the bottom). What matters most is how steep the slope is between the two.\n", "In another study of birch and Douglas fir in Canadian forests, the direction of carbon transfer switched twice in the course of a single growing season. In the spring, when the fir\u2014an evergreen\u2014was photosynthesizing and the leafless birch was just bursting its buds, the birch behaved as a sink, and carbon flowed into it out of the fir. In the summer, when the birch was in full leaf, and the fir found itself in the shaded understory, the direction of carbon flow changed, moving downhill out of the birch and into the fir. In the autumn, when the birch started to drop its leaves, the trees switched roles again, and carbon moved downhill from the fir into the birch. Resources passed from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity.\n", "A mycorrhizal fungus that can keep its various plants alive is at an advantage: a diverse portfolio of plant partners insures it against the death of one of them. If a fungus depends on several orchids, and one of them won\u2019t be able to supply it with carbon until it grows larger, the fungus will benefit by supporting the young orchid while it grows\u2014to let it \u201ctake now,\u201d provided it will \u201cpay later.\u201d Adopting a myco-centric perspective helps to avoid the problem of altruism. It also positions fungi front and center: brokers of entanglement able to mediate the interactions between plants according to their own fungal needs.\n", "In some cases, it appears to make little difference to a plant whether it has its own private fungal network or whether it shares a fungal network with other plants\u2014although in these situations the fungus still benefits from forming a shared network by gaining access to a larger number of plant partners. In some cases, belonging to a shared network can bring outright disadvantages to plants. Fungi are in control of the supply of minerals they obtain from the soil and can preferentially trade these nutrients with their larger plant partners, which are both more abundant sources of carbon and stronger sinks for soil minerals. These asymmetries can magnify the competitive advantage of larger plants over smaller plants that share the network. In these situations, smaller plants start\n", "In some cases, it appears to make little difference to a plant whether it has its own private fungal network or whether it shares a fungal network with other plants\u2014although in these situations the fungus still benefits from forming a shared network by gaining access to a larger number of plant partners. In some cases, belonging to a shared network can bring outright disadvantages to plants. Fungi are in control of the supply of minerals they obtain from the soil and can preferentially trade these nutrients with their larger plant partners, which are both more abundant sources of carbon and stronger sinks for soil minerals. These asymmetries can magnify the competitive advantage of larger plants over smaller plants that share the network. In these situations, smaller plants start to benefit only when their connections to the network are severed, or when the bigger plants that share the network\u2014and which have been extracting a disproportionately large quantity of nutrients\u2014are cut back.\n", "Are we able to release ourselves from these metaphors, think outside the skull, and learn to talk about wood wide webs without leaning on one of our well-worn human totems? Are we able to let shared mycorrhizal networks be questions, rather than answers known in advance? \u201cI try just to look at the system and let the lichen be a lichen.\u201d Discussions of wood wide webs often lead me back to the words of Toby Spribille, the researcher who keeps discovering new partners in the lichen symbiosis. Wood wide webs aren\u2019t lichens\u2014although to think of them as enormous lichens that we can walk around in brings welcome variety to the range of metaphors currently on offer. Nonetheless, I wonder if we can learn something from Spribille\u2019s patience. Are we able to stand back, look at the system, and let the polyphonic swarms of plants and fungi and bacteria that make up our homes and our worlds be themselves, and quite unlike anything else? What would that do to our minds?\n", "290 to 360 million years ago, the earliest wood-producing plants spread across the tropics in swampy forests, supported by their mycorrhizal fungal partners. These forests grew and died, pulling huge quantities of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. And for tens of millions of years, much of this plant matter didn\u2019t decompose. Layers of dead and un-rotted forest built up, storing so much carbon that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels crashed, and the planet entered a period of global cooling. Plants had caused the climate crisis, and plants were hit the hardest by it: Huge areas of tropical forest were wiped out in an extinction event known as the Carboniferous rainforest collapse. How had wood become a climate-change-inducing pollutant? From a plant perspective wood was, and remains, a brilliant structural innovation. As plant life boomed, the jostle for light intensified, and plants grew taller to reach it. The taller they became, the greater their need for structural support. Wood was plants\u2019 answer to this problem.\n", "Today, fungal decomposition\u2014much of it of woody plant matter\u2014is one of the largest sources of carbon emissions, emitting about eighty-five gigatons of carbon to the atmosphere every year. In 2018, the combustion of fossil fuels by humans emitted around ten gigatons.\n", "Researchers have found that the omnivorous Pleurotus mycelium\u2014a white rot fungus that fruits into edible oyster mushrooms\u2014can grow happily on a diet of used diapers. Over the course of two months, diapers introduced to Pleurotus lost about eighty-five percent of their starting mass when the plastic covering was removed, compared with a mere five percent in fungus-free controls. What\u2019s more, the mushrooms produced were healthy and free from human diseases. Similar projects are underway in India. By cultivating Pleurotus on agricultural waste\u2014by enzymatically combusting the material\u2014less biomass is thermally combusted and air quality is improved.\n", "Wood is a hybrid material. Cellulose\u2014a feature of all plant cells, whether woody or not\u2014is one of the ingredients and the most abundant polymer on earth. Lignin is another ingredient, and the second most abundant. Lignin is what makes wood wood. It is stronger than cellulose and more complex. Whereas cellulose is made up of orderly chains of glucose molecules, lignin is a haphazard matrix of molecular rings. To this day, only a small number of organisms have worked out how to decompose lignin. By far the most prolific group are the white rot fungi\u2014so-called because in decomposition they bleach wood a pale color. Most enzymes\u2014biological catalysts that living organisms use to conduct chemical reactions\u2014lock onto specific molecular shapes. Faced with lignin, this approach is hopeless; its chemical structure is too irregular. White rot fungi work around the problem using nonspecific enzymes that don\u2019t depend on shape. These \u201cperoxidases\u201d release a torrent of highly reactive molecules, known as \u201cfree radicals,\u201d which crack open lignin\u2019s tightly bonded structure in a process known as \u201cenzymatic combustion.\u201d\n", "The transformational power of yeast has long been personified as a divine energy, spirit, or god. How could it escape this treatment? Alcohol and inebriation are some of the oldest magics. An invisible force conjures wine from fruit, beer from grain, mead from nectar.\n", "\u201cAgainst the naming of fungi,\u201d the mycologist Nicholas Money went so far as to suggest that the concept of fungal species should be abandoned altogether.\n", "plants and mycorrhizal fungi are no longer thought of as behaving either mutualistically or parasitically. Even in the relationship between a single mycorrhizal fungus and a single plant, give and take is fluid. Instead of a rigid dichotomy, researchers describe a mutualism-to-parasitism continuum. Shared mycorrhizal networks can facilitate cooperation and also competition. Nutrients can move through the soil via fungal connections, but so can poisons. The narrative possibilities are richer. We have to shift perspectives and find comfort in\u2014or just endure\u2014uncertainty.\n", "Is it anthropomorphic to describe a mushroom\u2019s emergence in the same language used to describe human male sexual arousal? Or is it mycomorphic to describe human male sexual arousal in the same language used to describe a mushroom\u2019s growth? Which way does the arrow point? If you say that a plant \u201clearns,\u201d \u201cdecides,\u201d \u201ccommunicates,\u201d or \u201cremembers,\u201d are you humanizing the plant or vegetalizing a set of human concepts?\n", "Primates aren\u2019t the only animals attracted by alcohol. Malaysian tree shrews\u2014small mammals with feathery tails\u2014climb into the flower buds of the bertram palm and drink fermented nectar in quantities that scaled to body weight would intoxicate a human. The plume of alcoholic vapors produced by yeasts attract the tree shrews to the palm flowers. Bertram palms depend on tree shrews to pollinate them, and their flower buds have evolved into specialized fermentation vessels\u2014structures that harbor communities of yeast and encourage such rapid fermentation that their nectar froths and bubbles. Tree shrews for their part have evolved a remarkable ability to detoxify the alcohol and appear not to suffer from any negative effects of inebriation.\n", "About ten million years ago, the enzyme our bodies use to detoxify alcohol, known as alcohol dehydrogenase, or ADH4, underwent a single mutation that left it forty times more efficient. The mutation occurred in the last common ancestor we shared with gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos. Without a modified ADH4, even small quantities of alcohol are poisonous. With a modified ADH4, alcohol can be consumed safely and used by our bodies as a source of energy. Long before our ancestors became human, and long before we evolved stories to make cultural and spiritual sense of alcohol and the cultures of yeast that produce it, we evolved the enzyme to make metabolic sense of them. Why would the ability to metabolize alcohol arise so many millions of years before humans developed technologies of fermentation? Researchers point out that ADH4 upgraded at a time when our primate ancestors were spending less time in trees and adapting to life on the ground. The ability to metabolize alcohol, they speculate, played a crucial role in the ability of primates to make a living on the forest floor by opening up a new dietary niche: overripe, fermented fruit that had fallen from trees. The ADH4 mutation provides support for the \u201cdrunken monkey hypothesis,\u201d proposed by the biologist Robert Dudley to explain the origins of humans\u2019 fondness for alcohol. In this view, humans are tempted by alcohol because our primate ancestors were. The scent of alcohol produced by yeasts was a reliable way to find ripe fruit as it rotted on the ground. Both our human attraction to alcohol and the entire ecology of gods and goddesses that oversee fermentation and intoxication are remnants of a much more ancient fascination.\n", "of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged firemen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.\n", "I have watched copulating couples moving along darkened freeways at night, men and women on the verge of orgasm, their cars speeding in a series of inviting trajectories towards the flashing headlamps of the oncoming traffic stream. Young men alone behind the wheels of their first cars, near-wrecks picked up in scrap-yards, masturbate as they move on worn tyres to aimless destinations.\n", "I waited for someone to reassure me as I sat there, dressed in another man's blood while the urine of his young widow formed rainbows around my rescuers' feet.\n", "This obsession with the sexual possibilities of everything around me had been jerked loose from my mind by the crash. I imagined the ward filled with convalescing air-disaster victims, each of their minds a brothel of images. The crash between our two cars was a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union. The injuries of still-to-be-admitted patients beckoned to me, an immense encyclopedia of accessible dreams.\n", "I had thought for hours about the dead man, visualizing the effects of his death on his wife and family. I had thought of his last moments alive, frantic milliseconds of pain and violence in which he had been catapulted from a pleasant domestic interlude into a concertina of metallized death.\n", "My brief stay at the hospital had already convinced me that the medical profession was an open door to anyone nursing a grudge against the human race.\n", "Karen's eyes gazed at my scarred scalp. 'It's hard to believe he was ever on television.' I outstared Karen with an effort. She watched me like a predatory animal behind the silver bars of her mouth.\n", "I had never spoken to this tired woman, and felt that I should launch into a formal apology for her husband's death and the appalling act of violence which had involved us. At the same time, her gloved hand on the scarred chrome aroused a feeling of sharp sexual excitement.\n", "His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers - a curve of exposed breast, the soft cushion of a buttock, the hair-lined arch of a damp perineum - but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car.\n", "he struck me as being a strange mixture of personal hauntedness, complete confinement in his own panicky universe, and yet at the same time open to all kinds of experiences from the outer world.\n", "We had entered an immense traffic jam. From the junction of the motorway and Western Avenue to the ascent ramp of the flyover the traffic lanes were packed with vehicles, windshields leaching out the molten colours of the sun setting above the western suburbs of London. Brake-lights flared in the evening air, glowing in the huge pool of cellulosed bodies. Vaughan sat with one arm out of the passenger window. He slapped the door impatiently, pounding the panel with his fist. To our right the high wall of a double-decker airline coach formed a cliff of faces. The passengers at the windows resembled rows of the dead looking down at us from the galleries of a columbarium. The enormous energy of the twentieth century, enough to drive the planet into a new orbit around a happier star, was being expended to maintain this immense motionless pause.\n", "Gabrielle turned in her seat, revolving her body around me, so that I could explore the wounds of her right hip. For the first time I felt no trace of pity for this crippled woman, but celebrated with her the excitements of these abstract vents let into her body by sections of her own automobile.\n", "I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections.\n", "9 - Being quiet Brim-fill the bowl, it\u2019ll spill over. Keep sharpening the blade, you\u2019ll soon blunt it. Nobody can protect a house full of gold and jade. Wealth, status, pride, are their own ruin. To do good, work well, and lie low is the way of the blessing.\n", "George looked down at his feet. \u201cBus driver give us a bum steer,\u201d he said. \u201cWe hadda walk ten miles. Says we was here when we wasn\u2019t. We couldn\u2019t get no rides in the morning.\u201d\n", "For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They were going to the town.\n", "She could see it all so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed. It was in that moment\u2019s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child.\n", "So off they strolled down the garden in the usual direction, past the tennis lawn, past the pampas grass, to that break in the thick hedge, guarded by red-hot pokers like brasiers of clear burning coal, between which the blue waters of the bay looked bluer than ever. They came there regularly every evening drawn by some need. It was as if the water floated off and set sailing thoughts which had grown stagnant on dry land, and gave to their bodies even some sort of physical relief.\n", "And Mr. Bankes felt aged and saddened and somehow put into the wrong by her about his friendship. He must have dried and shrunk.\n", "\u2018Oh but,\u2019 said Lily, \u2018think of his work!\u2019 Whenever she \u2018thought of his work\u2019 she always saw clearly before her a large kitchen table. It was Andrew\u2019s doing. She asked him what his father\u2019s books were about. \u2018Subject and object and the nature of reality\u2019, Andrew had said. And when she said Heavens, she had no notion what that meant, \u2018Think of a kitchen table then\u2019, he told her, \u2018when you\u2019re not there\u2019. So she always saw, when she thought of Mr. Ramsay\u2019s work, a scrubbed kitchen table. It lodged now in the fork of a pear tree, for they had reached the orchard. And with a painful effort of concentration, she focused her mind, not upon the silver-bossed bark of the tree, or upon its fish-shaped leaves, but upon a phantom kitchen table, one of those scrubbed board tables, grained and knotted, whose virtue seems to have been laid bare by years of muscular integrity, which stuck there, its four legs in air.\n", "Naturally, if one\u2019s days were passed in this seeing of angular essences, this reducing of lovely evenings, with all their flamingo clouds and blue and silver to a white deal four-legged table (and it was a mark of the finest minds so to do), naturally one could not be judged like an ordinary person.\n", "\u2019Nature has but little clay\u2019, said Mr. Bankes once, hearing her voice on the telephone, and much moved by it though she was only telling him a fact about a train, \u2018like that of which she moulded you.\u2019\n", "She was quite ready to take his word for it, she said. Only then they need not cut sandwiches \u2013 that was all. They came to her, naturally, since she was a woman, all day long with this and that; one wanting this, another that; the children were growing up; she often felt she was nothing but a sponge sopped full of human emotions.\n", "it was at this moment when she was fretted thus ignobly in the wake of her exaltation,\n", "it was painful to be reminded of the inadequacy of human relationships, that the most perfect was flawed, and could not bear the examination which, loving her husband, with her instinct for truth, she turned upon it;\n", "Hours he would spend thus, with his pipe, of an evening, thinking up and down and in and out of the old familiar lanes and commons, which were all stuck about with the history of that campaign there, the life of this statesman here, with poems and with anecdotes, with figures too, this thinker, that soldier; all very brisk and clear; but at length the lane, the field, the common, the fruitful nut-tree and the flowering hedge led him on to that further turn of the road where he dismounted always, tied his horse to a tree, and proceeded on foot alone. He reached the edge of the lawn and looked out on the bay beneath.\n", "to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea-bird, alone. It was his power, his gift, suddenly to shed all superfluities, to shrink and diminish so that he looked barer and felt sparer, even physically, yet lost none of his intensity of mind, and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on \u2013 that was his fate,\n", "how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.\n", "She was off like a bird, bullet, or arrow, impelled by what desire, shot by whom, at what directed, who could say? What, what? Mrs. Ramsay pondered, watching her. It might be a vision \u2013 of a shell, of a wheelbarrow, of a fairy kingdom on the far side of the hedge; or it might be the glory of speed; no one knew.\n", "\u2018Poor little place,\u2019 he murmured with a sigh. She heard him. He said the most melancholy things, but she noticed that directly he had said them he always seemed more cheerful than usual. All this phrase-making was a game, she thought, for if she had said half what he said, she would have blown her brains out by now. It annoyed her, this phrase-making, and she said to him, in a matter-of-fact way, that it was a perfectly lovely evening. And what was he groaning about, she asked, half laughing, half complaining, for she guessed what he was thinking \u2013 he would have written better books if he had not married.\n", "Nancy waded out to her own rocks and searched her own pools and let that couple look after themselves. She crouched low down and touched the smooth rubber-like sea anemones, who were stuck like lumps of jelly to the side of the rock. Brooding, she changed the pool into the sea, and made the minnows into sharks and whales, and cast vast clouds over this tiny world by holding her hand against the sun, and so brought darkness and desolation, like God himself, to millions of ignorant and innocent creatures, and then took her hand away suddenly and let the sun stream down.\n", "all must be done to a turn.\n", "What damned rot they talk,\n", "he never let himself get into a groove. He had friends in all circles\u2026\n", "\u2018How you must detest dining in this bear garden,\u2019 she said, making use, as she did when she was distracted, of her social manner. So, when there is a strife of tongues at some meeting, the chairman, to obtain unity, suggests that every one shall speak in French. Perhaps it is bad French; French may not contain the words that express the speaker\u2019s thoughts; nevertheless speaking French imposes some order, some uniformity. Replying to her in the same language, Mr. Bankes said, \u2018No, not at all,\u2019 and Mr. Tansley, who had no knowledge of this language, even spoken thus in words of one syllable, at once suspected its insincerity. They did talk nonsense, he thought, the Ramsays; and he pounced on this fresh instance with joy, making a note which, one of these days, he would read aloud, to one or two friends. There, in a society where one could say what one liked he would sarcastically describe \u2018staying with the Ramsays\u2019 and what nonsense they talked. It was worth while doing it once, he would say; but not again. The women bored one so, he would say. Of course Ramsay had dished himself by marrying a beautiful woman and having eight children. It would shape itself something like that, but now, at this moment, sitting stuck there with an empty seat beside him nothing had shaped itself at all. It was all in scraps and fragments.\n", "He felt extremely, even physically, uncomfortable. He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again. They were talking about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his opinion? What did they know about the fishing industry? Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man\u2019s desire to impress himself lying dark in the mist of his flesh \u2013 that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, \u2018can\u2019t paint, can\u2019t write\u2019, why should I help him to relieve himself? There is a code of behaviour she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation may be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old-maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there smiling.\n", "She had done the usual trick \u2013 been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr. Bankes) were between men and women.\n", "There was a swirl of snow over the fields and the line where sky and earth met could not be seen.", "the wind smoked more of the cigarette than he did","For even if we can send satellites into the outer solar system—and even as financial markets and cyberspace know no boundaries—the Hindu Kush still constitutes a formidable barrier.","Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve tell us, belongs to the “crush zone”","Following from this revulsion came charges of “appeasement” by the West, appeasement of Slobodan Milosevic: an evil communist politician who, in order for himself and his party to survive politically following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and retain their villas and and hunting lodges and other perks of office, rebranded himself as a rabid Serbian nationalist, igniting a second Holocaust of sorts. The appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938 quickly became the reigning analogy of the 1990s.","Vietnam is an analogy that thrives following national trauma. For realism is not exciting. It is respected only after the seeming lack of it has made a situation demonstrably worse. Indeed, just look at Iraq, with almost five thousand American dead (and with over thirty thousand seriously wounded) and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, at a cost of over a trillion dollars. Even were Iraq to evolve into a semi-stable democracy and an implicit ally of the United States, the cost has been so excessive that, as others have noted, it is candidly difficult to see the ethical value in the achievement.","Vietnam is an analogy that thrives following national trauma. For realism is not exciting. It is respected only after the seeming lack of it has made a situation demonstrably worse. Indeed, just look at Iraq, with almost five thousand American dead (and with over thirty thousand seriously wounded) and perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, at a cost of over a trillion dollars. Even were Iraq to evolve into a semi-stable democracy and an implicit ally of the United States, the cost has been so excessive that, as others have noted, it is candidly difficult to see the ethical value in the achievement. Iraq undermined a key element in the mind-set of some: that the projection of American power always had a moral result. But others understood that the untamed use of power by any state, even a freedom-loving democratic one like America, was not necessarily virtuous.","How extraordinarily lucky Minta is! She is marrying a man who has a gold watch in a wash-leather bag!","The “tramp” comes with the locomotive, and almshouses and prisons are as surely the marks of “material progress” as are costly dwellings, rich warehouses, and magnificent churches.","Why, in spite of increase in productive power, do wages tend to a minimum which will give but a bare living? The answer of the current political economy is, that wages are fixed by the ratio between the number of laborers and the amount of capital devoted to the employment of labor, and constantly tend to the lowest amount on which laborers will consent to live and reproduce, because the increase in the number of laborers tends naturally to follow and overtake any increase in capital. The increase of the divisor being thus held in check only by the possibilities of the quotient, the dividend may be increased to infinity without greater result.","she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet.","he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears.","It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking, which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.","there came to the wakeful, the hopeful, walking the beach, stirring the pool, imaginations of the strangest kind – of flesh turned to atoms which drove before the wind, of stars flashing in their hearts, of cliff, sea, cloud, and sky brought purposely together to assemble outwardly the scattered parts of the vision within. In those mirrors, the minds of men, in those pools of uneasy water, in which clouds for ever turn and shadows form, dreams persisted, and it was impossible to resist the strange intimation which every gull, flower, tree, man and woman, and the white earth itself seemed to declare (but if questioned at once to withdraw) that good triumphs, happiness prevails, order rules;","In spring the garden urns, casually filled with windblown plants, were gay as ever. Violets came and daffodils. But the stillness and the brightness of the day were as strange as the chaos and tumult of night, with the trees standing there, and the flowers standing there, looking before them, looking up, yet beholding nothing, eyeless, and so terrible.","with the tea hot in her, she unwound her ball of memories,","“What beautiful boots!” she exclaimed. She was ashamed of herself. To praise his boots when he asked her to solace his soul; when he had shown her his bleeding hands, his lacerated heart, and asked her to pity them, then to say, cheerfully, “Ah, but what beautiful boots you wear!” deserved, she knew, and she looked up expecting to get it, in one of his sudden roars of ill-temper, complete annihilation. Instead, Mr. Ramsay smiled. His pall, his draperies, his infirmities fell from him. Ah yes, he said, holding his foot up for her to look at, they were first-rate boots. There was only one man in England who could make boots like that. Boots are among the chief curses of mankind, he said. “Bootmakers make it their business,” he exclaimed, “to cripple and torture the human foot.” They are also the most obstinate and perverse of mankind. It had taken him the best part of his youth to get boots made as they should be made. He would have her observe (he lifted his right foot and then his left) that she had never seen boots made quite that shape before. They were made of the finest leather in the world, also. Most leather was mere brown paper and cardboard. He looked complacently at his foot, still held in the air. They had reached, she felt, a sunny island where peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone, the blessed island of good boots.","her easel, rammed into the earth so nervously, was at the wrong angle. And now that she had put that right, and in so doing had subdued the impertinences and irrelevances that plucked her attention and made her remember how she was such and such a person, had such and such relations to people, she took her hand and raised her brush.","Harry couldn't claim it had all gone just as planned. It had all gone just as completely made up on the spot.","Well met on this fairest of evenings","on Ancient Earth, as it would be remembered someday.","Not every change is an improvement, but every improvement is a change,","these fading days","there are higher rules than rules.","“Oh bother,” she said to herself","It was very simple actually, you just went where the evil was, that was all it ever took to be a hero.","Most books didn't say “And then they refused to give up, no matter how sensible it would have been, because that would've been too embarrassing”; but a great deal of history made a lot more sense that way.","the trouble with passing up opportunities was that it was habit-forming.","recited the proverb","“When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.","the tombstones of countries","grinned mirthlessly","“A strange word, innocence. It means lack of knowledge, like the innocence of a child, and also means lack of guilt. Only those entirely ignorant can lack all responsibility for the consequences of their actions. He knows not what he does, and therefore can be without harmful intent; so says that word.”","You can only arrive at mastery by practicing the techniques you have learned, facing challenges and apprehending them, using to the fullest the tools you have been taught, until they shatter in your hands and you are left in the midst of wreckage absolute… I cannot create masters. I have never known how to create masters. Go, then, and fail… You have been shaped into something that may emerge from the wreckage, determined to remake your Art. I cannot create masters, but if you had not been taught, your chances would be less. The higher road begins after the Art seems to fail you; though the reality will be that it was you who failed your Art.","Consider Mr. Spock of Star Trek, a naive archetype of rationality. Spock's emotional state is always set to “calm,” even when wildly inappropriate. He often gives many significant digits for probabilities that are grossly uncalibrated. (E.g., “Captain, if you steer the Enterprise directly into that black hole, our probability of surviving is only 2.234%.” Yet nine times out of ten the Enterprise is not destroyed. What kind of tragic fool gives four significant digits for a figure that is off by two orders of magnitude?)","Burton et al. report that when dams and levees are built, they reduce the frequency of floods, and thus apparently create a false sense of security, leading to reduced precautions.4 While building dams decreases the frequency of floods, damage per flood is afterward so much greater that average yearly damage increases. The wise would extrapolate from a memory of small hazards to the possibility of large hazards. Instead, past experience of small hazards seems to set a perceived upper bound on risk. A society well-protected against minor hazards takes no action against major risks, building on flood plains once the regular minor floods are eliminated.","Adding detail can make a scenario SOUND MORE PLAUSIBLE, even though the event necessarily BECOMES LESS PROBABLE.","When I observe failures of explanation, I usually see the explainer taking one step back, when they need to take two or more steps back. Or listeners assume that things should be visible in one step, when they take two or more steps to explain. Both sides act as if they expect very short inferential distances from universal knowledge to any new knowledge.","Supporters of the Strong AI Hypothesis insisted that consciousness was a property of certain algorithms -- a result of information being processed in certain ways, regardless of what machine, or organ, was used to perform the task. A computer model which manipulated data about itself and its “surroundings” in essentially the same way as an organic brain would have to possess essentially the same mental states. “Simulated consciousness” was as oxymoronic as “simulated addition.” Opponents replied that when you modeled a hurricane, nobody got wet. When you modeled a fusion power plant, no energy was produced. When you modeled digestion and metabolism, no nutrients were consumed -- no real digestion took place. So, when you modeled the human brain, why should you expect real thought to occur? A computer running a Copy might be able to generate plausible descriptions of human behavior in hypothetical scenarios -- and even appear to carry on a conversation, by correctly predicting what a human would have done in the same situation -- but that hardly made the machine itself conscious. Paul had rapidly decided that this whole debate was a distraction. For any human, absolute proof of a Copy's sentience was impossible. For any Copy, the truth was self-evident: cogito ergo sum. End of discussion.","Recomputed over and over again, a Copy was a sequence of snapshots, frames of a movie -- or frames of computer animation. But . . . when, exactly, did these snapshots give rise to conscious thought? While they were being computed? Or in the brief interludes when they sat in the computer's memory, unchanging, doing nothing but representing one static instant of the Copy's life?","if the computations behind all this had been performed over millennia, by people flicking abacus beads, would he have felt exactly the same? It was outrageous to admit it -- but the answer had to be yes.","scornfully eschewed all the mollycoddling refinements","“We're one possible solution to a giant cosmic anagram . . . but it would be ludicrous to believe that we're the only one.”","The details hovered maddeningly on the verge of recollection.","he'd bellowed with shock and delight when, in the middle of their physically plausible foreplay, an invisible second Kate, twenty times his size, had picked him up in one hand, raised him to her mouth, and licked his body from toes to forehead like a sweet-toothed giant taking the icing off a man-shaped cake.","I'm not passing through the eye of any needle."]

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