After much reflection, we are coming to the conclusion, preliminary and perhaps arbitrary, that the self, the so-called I that emerges out of the combination of all the inputs and processing and outpu...
A hundred times I have thought: New York is a catastrophe, and fifty times: it is a beautiful catastrophe. —Le
A greedy algorithm is an algorithm that shortcuts a full analysis in order to choose quickly an option that appears to work in the situation immediately at hand. They are often used by humans.
No one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.
This gave her the confidence to start speaking more explicitly about the left wing of the Democratic Party, a burgeoning national movement, and how they intended to usurp the business chickenshits amo...
As if you are already dead.’ What’s that? A Japanese saying. Live as if you are already dead.
A collection that included, among other items, an Allen wrench set, some pliers, a power drill, several clamps, some hacksaws, an impact-wrench set, a brace of cold-tolerant bungie cords, assorted fil...
You’re not a conventional man. No! He hooted. I never claimed to be! Except before certain selection committees of course. A conventional man! Ah, ha ha ha ha ha!—the conventional men get Maya. That i...
Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting? The reason is simpl...
Where there is faction, there is conflict; where there is conflict, there is anger. And anger distorts judgment.
When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk...
What was worry, after all, but a kind of fear? It was fear for the future. And in fact the future was bound to bring its share of bad things, there was no avoiding that. So worry was really a hopeless...
Well-established law, going back to Roman law, to the Justinian Code in fact, turned out to be weirdly clear on the status of the intertidal. It’s crazy to read, like Roman futurology: The things whic...
Thus when Hiroko came up and said, Nadia, this crescent wrench is absolutely frozen in this position, Nadia sang to her, That’s the only thing I’m thinking of— baby! and took the crescent wrench and s...
This is the thing itself, there are no words for this. This is what words ask for.
They talked and talked and talked. Twenty-four biomes, ten thousand conversations. Talk talk talk. As they talked, it began to come clear to them that they had no very effective method of governance,...
The sensation passed, and after a bit of thought he decided it must have been that the decelerating car had passed momentarily through one g. An image came to him, of running out a long pier, wet unev...
Strangely enough, without names they were still things. He could see them and think about them in terms of shapes, or numbers. Formula of description. Various combinations of conic sections and the si...
So they went on being brilliant and accomplished enough to stand out, but normal enough to get along. They were old enough to have learned a great deal, but young enough to endure the physical rigors...
Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.