Verbatim

If you had the only telephone in the world, who would you call? Networks seem to grow more valuable to a user proportionately with the number of other users he or she can call. In a network with N users, each sees a value proportional to the N-1 others, so the total value of the [...]

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I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.
Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, 1988.

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Relationships are all there is. Everything in the universe only exists because it is in relationship to everything else. Nothing exists in isolation. We [...]

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LOW at my problem bending, Another problem comes, Larger than mine, serener, Involving statelier sums; I check my busy pencil, My ciphers slip away, Wherefore, my baffled fingers, Time Eternity?
Emily Dickinson, Part Five: The Single Hound, LXXX, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1924; from Bartleby.com

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MUCH madness is divinest sense To a discerning eye; Much sense the starkest madness. ’T is the majority In this, as all, prevails. Assent, and you are sane; Demur,—you ’re straightway dangerous, And handled with a chain.
Emily Dickinson, Part One: Life, IX, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 1924; from Bartleby.com

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Proprioception, the perception of movement and spatial orientation arising from stimuli inside the body, is a medical concept. Although the name for it is not well known, the phenomemon is familiar to all of us. Our proprioceptors incessantly inform us that we are standing up, inclining our head, squinting our eyes, or clenching our fists. [...]

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Any taxonomic scheme has problems. We tend to label and dismiss anything once we assign it a category. Our classifications blind us to the wildness of natrual organization by supplying coneptual boxes to fit our preconceived ideas. They should reflect our study of nature. The two-tiered five-kingdom system will always need revision. Whatever its difficulties, [...]

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These antiquated terms - “blue-green algae,” “protozoa,” “higher animals,” “lower plants,” and many others - remain in use despite their penchant to propagate biological malaise and ignorance. The use of these insults to the living benefits those people whose budgets, class notes, and social organization depend on their continuity. I suggest that one reason Wallin’s [...]

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Many circumstances conspire to extinguish scientific discoveries, especially those that cause discomfort about our culture’s sacred norms. As a speciies, we cling to the familiar, comforting conformities of the mainstream. However, “convention” penetrates more deeply than we tend to admit. Even if we lack a proper name for and knowledge of the history of any [...]

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Does a concert hall ask to be next to an opera house? Can the two feed on one another? Will anybody ever visit them both, gluttonously, in a single evening, or even buy tickets from one after going to a performance in the other? In Vienna, London, Paris, each of the performing arts has found [...]

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Another·favourite concept of the CIAM theorists and others is the separation of recreation from everything else. This has crystallized in our real cities in the form of playgrounds. The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgment of the fact that ‘play’ exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has [...]

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