#you see what I mean when I say there's so many public domain species that could be just as popular for horror as xenomorphs

[rjalker]

Cat and Mouse by Ralph Williams, from Astounding Science Fiction June 1959.

10,300 words long.

@thenixkat @kariachi I think you both might like this one.

@walks-the-ages read this

Note: The original version on Project Gutenberg uses a weird variation of the N slur to describe a tree trunk??? for some reason??? I got rid of that.

Can also be listend to on youtube as part of this collection, and on the regular librivox website probably. Still includes the weird usage of the N slur though.

___

The Harn first came to the Warden's attention through its effect on the game population of an area in World 7 of the Warden's sector. A natural ecology was being maintained on World 7 as a control for experimental seedings of intelligent life-forms in other similar worlds. How the Harn got there, the Warden never knew. In its free-moving larval state, the Harn was a ticklike creature which might have sifted through a natural inter-dimensional rift; or it might have come through as a hitchhiker on some legitimate traveler, possibly even the Warden himself.

In any event, it was there now. Free of natural enemies and competition, it had expanded enormously. So far, the effect in the control world was localized, but this would not be the case when the Harn seeded. Prompt action was indicated.

The Warden's inclination and training was in the direction of avoiding direct intervention in the ecology of the worlds under his jurisdiction, even in the field of predator control. He considered introduction of natural enemies of the Harn from its own world, and decided against it. That cure was as bad, if not worse, than the disease itself.

There was, however, in one adjacent world, a life-form not normally associated with the Harn; but which analysis indicated would be inimical to it, and reasonably amenable to control.

It was worth trying, anyway.

___

(Read-more was here)

October 3rd, Ed Brown got up to the base cabin of his trap line with his winter's outfit.

He hung an N. C. Company calendar on the wall and started marking off the days.

October 8th, the hole into the other world opened.

In the meantime, of course, Ed had not been idle. All summer the cabin had stood empty. He got his bedding, stove, and other cabin gear down from the cache and made the place livable. The mice were thick, a good fur sign, but a nuisance otherwise. Down in the cellar hole, when he went to clear it out for the new spud crop, he found burrowings everywhere.

Well, old Tom would take care of that in short order. Tom was a big, black, bobtailed cat eleven years old who had lived with Ed since he was a kitten. Not having any feline companionship to distract him, his only interest was hunting mice. Generally he killed a lot more than he could eat, racking the surplus in neat piles beside the trail, on the doorstep, or on a slab in the cellar. He was the best mouser in interior Alaska.

Ed propped the cellar hatch with a stick so old Tom could come and go as he pleased, and went on about his chores, working with a methodical efficiency that matched Tom's and went with his thinning gray hair and forty years in the woods. He dug the spuds he had planted that spring. He made a swing around his beaver lakes, tallying the blankets in each house. He took the canoe and moved supplies to his upper cabin. He harvested some fat mallards that had moved down on the river with the coming of skim ice on the lakes. He bucked up firewood and stacked it to move into camp with the first snow.

On the fifth morning, as he was going down to the boat landing with a pail for water, he found the hole into the other world.

Ed had never seen a hole into another world, of course, nor even heard of such a thing. He was as surprised as any one would naturally be to find one not fifty feet from their front door.

Still, his experience had been all in the direction of believing what his eyes told him. He had seen a lot of strange things in his life, and one more didn't strain him too much. He stood stockstill where he had first noticed the hole and studied it warily.

It was two steps off the trail to the left, right beside the old leaning birch, a rectangular piece of scenery that did not fit. It looked to be, as nearly as he could judge, about man-size, six by three. At the bottom it was easy enough to see where this world left off and that one began. On the left side the two worlds matched pretty well, but on the right side there was a stump in this world, the moss-covered relic of a centuries old tree, while that world continued level, so that the stump was neatly sliced in two. Also, the vegetation was different, mossy on this side, grassy on that.

On up around the hole, though, it was harder to tell. There was no clear-cut line, just the difference in what you could see through it. In the other world, the ground seemed to fall away, with low scrubby brush in the foreground. Then, a mile or so away, there were rising hills with hardwood forests of some kind, still green with summer, covering them.

Ed stepped cautiously to one side. The view through the hole narrowed, as if it faced the trail squarely. He edged around the old birch to get behind it, and from that side there was no hole, just the same old Alaskan scenery, birch and rose bushes and spruce. From the front, though, it was still there.

He cut an alder shoot about eight feet long, trimmed it, and poked it through the hole. It went through easily enough. He prodded at the sod in the other world, digging up small tufts. When he pulled the stick back, some of the other world dirt was on the sharp end. It looked and smelled just about like any dirt.

Old Tom came stretching out into the morning sun and stalked over to investigate. After a careful inspection of the hole he settled down with his paws tucked under him to watch. Ed took a flat round can from his pocket, lined his lip frugally with snuff, and sat down on the up-ended bucket to watch too. At the moment, that seemed the likeliest thing to do.

It was nearly swarming time, the Harn had many things to preoccupy it, but it spared one unit to watch the hole into the other world. So far, nothing much had happened. A large biped had found the opening from the other side. It had been joined by a smaller quadruped; but neither showed any indication yet of coming through. The sun was shining through the hole, a large young yellow sun, and the air was crisp, with sharp interesting odors.

The biped ejected a thin squirt of brown liquid through the hole—venom of some sort, apparently. The Harn hastily drew back out of range.

The hole into the other world stayed there, as unobtrusively fixed as if it had been there since the beginning of time. Nothing came through, and nothing moved in the other world but leaves stirring now and then with a breeze, clouds drifting across the sky. Ed began to realize it was getting late in the morning, and he had not yet had breakfast. He left old Tom to watch the hole, got stiffly to his feet and went on down the trail to get the pail of water he had started for. From the cabin door, he could still see the hole into the other world. He kept one eye on it while he cooked breakfast.

As he was finishing his second cup of coffee, he noticed the view into the other world becoming duller, dimming in a peculiar fashion. He left the dirty dishes and went over to look more closely. What was happening, he found, was just that it was getting dark in the other world. The effect was strange, much like looking out the door of a brightly lighted room at dusk. The edges of the hole cast a very clearly marked shadow now, and outside this shaft of sunlight the view faded, until a few yards away it was impossible to make out any detail.

Presently the stars came out. Ed was not an astronomer, but he had a woodsman's knowledge of the sky. He could find nothing familiar in any of the stars he saw. In some way, that was more unsettling than the hole itself had been.

After he had finished the dishes, he cut two gee-pole spruce, trimmed them, and stuck one on each side of the hole. He got some thin thread he used to tie beaver snares and wove it back and forth between the poles, rigging a tin can alarm. It seemed likely someone or something had put the hole there, it had not just happened. If anything came through, Ed wanted to know about it. Just to make extra sure, he got some number three traps and made a few blind sets in front of the hole.

Then he went back to his chores. Whatever was going to happen with the hole would happen when it happened, and winter was still coming.

He set some babiche to soak for mending his snowshoes. He ran the net he had set at the edge of the eddy for late silvers and took out two fish. Old Tom had pretty well cleaned up the mice in the cellar hole, but they were still burrowing around the sills of the lean-to. Ed took a shovel and opened up a hole so Tom could get under the lean-to floor. He got out his needles, palm, thread, and wax; and mended his winter moccasins.

Off and on, he checked the hole into the other world. There was nothing but the slow progression of alien stars across the sky. Finally old Tom grew bored and left to investigate the hole under the lean-to. Shortly there were scutterings and squeakings as evidence that he, too, had got back to business.

Toward evening, Ed got to wondering how a living creature would take transition into the other world. He had no intention of trying it himself until he knew a lot more about it, but he thought he might be able to scare up a surrogate. Out by the wood pile some live-traps were piled under a spruce, from the time when Ed had been catching marten for the Fish and Wildlife to transplant. One was still in pretty fair shape. He patched it up and set it among the cottonwoods at the head of the bar, where there were some rabbit trails.

When he went to bed it was still dark in the other world. He left the cabin door ajar so he could see it from his bed and set his shotgun, loaded with 00 buck, handy.

Nearing sixty, Ed was not a sound sleeper, even when he had nothing on his mind. About ten it started to get light in the other world, and that woke him up. He padded out to look, but there was no change, it looked about the same as yesterday. He went back to bed.

The next morning there was a rabbit in the live-trap. With a pole, Ed pushed the trap with the rabbit in it through into the other world and watched. Nothing happened. After a while the rabbit began nibbling at some spears of grass that pushed through the wire of the cage. Ed pulled it back and examined the rabbit carefully. It seemed healthy and about as happy as a rabbit could expect to be in a cage.

It did not get dark in the other world till about noon, that day; and about seven, when it was dark in both worlds, Ed heard the jangle of the tin can alarm, followed by the snap of one of the steel traps.

He took a flashlight and found a small hoofed animal, hardly bigger than old Tom, rearing and bucking with a broken leg in the trap. It had sharp little spike horns, only a few inches long, but mean. Ed got several painful jabs before he got the animal tied up and out of the trap. He restrung the alarm, then took his catch into the cabin to examine.

It was herbivorous and adult, from the looks of its teeth and hoofs, though it only weighed about fifteen pounds. As an approximation, Ed decided it was female. When he killed it and opened it up, at first glance it looked reasonably familiar, on closer study less so.

The blood, anyway, was red; not blue or yellow or green; and the bones were bones, just odd-shaped.

Ed cut off a slice of heart and tossed it to old Tom. The cat sniffed it dubiously and then decided he liked it. He meowed for more. Ed gave it to him and fried a small sliver of ham. It smelled and tasted fine, but Ed contented himself with a single delicate nibble, pending further developments. Anyway, it was beginning to look like a little exploration would be feasible.

The Harn, also, was well-satisfied with the way things were going. It had been a strain to pass up the juicy little quadruped in the cage, but the inhabitants of the other world seemed shy, and the Harn did not wish to frighten them. At least, it knew now that life could come through the hole, and the small herbivore it had herded through confirmed that passage in the opposite direction was equally possible—plus a gratis demonstration of the other world's pitiful defenses. At swarming time, the whole new world would be open to embryo Harn, as well as this world it presently occupied.

It looked like a really notable swarming. The Harn budded three more planters on the forcing stem, to be ready to take full advantage of it.

It got light in the other world at one in the morning that night. Ed had the days there pretty well pegged now. They were roughly twenty-seven hours, of which about thirteen hours were dark. Not too high a latitude, apparently, and probably late summer by the looks of the vegetation.

He got up a little before daylight and looked at the rabbit and old Tom. Both seemed to be doing nicely. Old Tom was hungry for more otherworld meat. Ed gave it to him and made up a light pack. After some thought, he took the .450 bear gun he used for back-up when guiding. Whatever he ran into over there, the .450—a model 71 throwing a 400 grain slug at 2100 fps—should handle it.

The first step through into the other world was a queasy one, but it turned out to be much the same as any other step. The only difference was that now he was in the other world looking back. From this side, the stump at the threshold was sliced sharply, but it had been kicked down a little when he came through, and what with shoving the cage through and pulling it back, so that some clods of moss and dirt were scattered in the other world. For some reason, that made Ed feel better, it seemed to make the joining of the two worlds a little more permanent.

Still, it had come sudden, and it might go sudden. Ed went back into his own world and got an ax, a saw, more ammunition, salt, a heavy sleeping robe, a few other possibles. He brought them through and piled them in the other world, covering them with a scrap of old tarp. He cut a couple of poles, peeled them, and stuck them in the ground to mark the hole from this side.

Then he looked around.

He stood on the shoulder of a hill, in a game trail that ran down toward a stream below, in what seemed to be a fairly recent burn. There were charred stumps, and the growth was small stuff, with some saplings pushing up through. There was timber in the valley below, though, and on the hills beyond, deciduous, somewhat like oak. South was where east had been in his own world, and the sun seemed smaller, but brighter. The sky was a very dark blue. He seemed lighter in this world, there was a spring in his step he had not known for twenty years. He looked at his compass. It checked with the direction of the sun.

He studied the trail. It had seen a lot of use, but less in recent weeks. There were sharp hoof-prints of the animal he had caught, larger hoof-prints, vague pad-marks of various sizes, but nothing that looked human. The trail went under a charred tree trunk at a height that was not comfortable for a man, and the spacing of the steps around the gnarled roots of an old slump did not fit a man's stride.

He did not notice the Harn creature at all—which was understandable, it was well camouflaged.

He worked circumspectly down the trail, staying a little off it, studying tracks and droppings, noticing evidences of browsing on the shrubs—mostly old—pausing to examine tufts of hair and an occasional feather. Halfway down the slope he flushed a bird about ptarmigan-size, grayish brown in color.

The trail was more marked where it went into the timber. It wound through the trees for a few hundred yards and came out on a canoe-sized stream. Here it forked. One trail crossed the stream and went up the hill on the other side, the other followed the stream up the valley.

The Harn followed Ed's movements, observing carefully. It needed a specimen from the other world, and this biped would serve nicely, but it might as well learn as much as possible about him first. It could always pick him up some time before he returned to his own world. Just to make sure, it sent a stinging unit to guard the entrance.

All his life, except for a short period in France, Ed had been a hunter, never hunted. Still, you don't grow old in the woods by jumping without looking. Coming into a new situation, he was wary as an old wolf. There was a little shoulder right above the fork in the trail. He stood there for several minutes, looking things over, and then went down and crossed the stream at the next riffle, above the ford. By doing so, although he did not know it, he missed the trap the Harn maintained at the ford for chance passers-by.

On the other side of the creek, the trail ran angling off downstream, skirted a small lake hidden in the trees, climbed over another low shoulder and dropped into a second valley. As Ed followed along it, he began to notice a few more signs of life—birds, small scurriers on the ground and in tree tops—and this set him thinking. The country had a picked-over feel to it, a hunted and trapped-out feel, worse where he had first come through, but still noticeable here.

The Harn did not like to cross water, it could, but it did not like to.

Ed looked at the sun. It was getting down in the sky. If there was any activity at all around here, the ford at dusk would be as likely a place as any to find it. He worked back along the ridge to a point above where he judged the ford to be. The breeze was drawing up the valley, but favoring the other side a little. He dropped down and crossed the stream a quarter mile above the ford, climbed well above the trail and worked along the hillside until he was in a position where he could watch both the ford and the fork in the trail. He squatted down against a tree in a comfortable position, laid his gun across his knees, and rummaged in his pack for the cold flapjacks, wrapped around slices of duck breast, which he had packed for lunch.

After he had finished eating he drank from his canteen—the water in this world might be good, it might not, there was no point in taking chances till he could try it on the cat—and took an economical chew of snuff. He settled back to wait.

The Harn had lost Ed after he crossed the creek—it used a fallen tree quite a way further up for its own crossing—and did not pick him up again until just before he crossed back. Now, however, he had been immobile for several minutes. This looked like about as good a time as any to make the pickup. The Harn had a stinging unit just about positioned, and it had dispatched a carrier to stand by.

After a while, sitting there, Ed began to feel uneasy. The timber was big here, and open underneath, almost parklike. The nearest cover was fifty or sixty yards off to his left, a little tangle of brush where a tree had fallen and let a shaft of sunlight through.

It looked possible, but it didn't feel quite right. Still, it was about the only place anything big enough to bother him could hide. The feeling was getting stronger, the back hairs on Ed's neck were starting to stand up now. Without visible movement, or even noticing himself that he was doing it, he let awareness run over his body, checking the position and stiffness of his legs—he had been sitting there quite a while—the balance of the gun across his knees, the nearness of his thumb to the hammer.

Thoughtfully, still studying the patch of brush, he spat a thin stream over his left shoulder at a pile of leaves a few feet away.

Thinking about it later, Ed could almost have sworn the tobacco juice sizzled as it hit. Actually, this was probably imaginary. The stinging unit was not that sensitive to tobacco, though it was sensitive enough. As the drops splattered it, the pile of leaves erupted with a snuffling hiss like an overloaded teakettle into a tornado of bucking, twisting activity.

Ed's reflexes were not quite as fast as they had been when he was young, but they were better educated. Also, he was already keyed-up. Almost as it started, the flurry in the leaves stopped with the roar of his rifle. Fired like that, the heavy gun just about took his hand off, but he did not notice it at the moment. He came erect in a quick scramble, jacking in a fresh round as he did so. The scene took on that strange timeless aspect it often does in moments of emergency, with a man's whole being focused on the fleeting now—you know, in an academic sort of way, that things are moving fast, you are moving fast yourself, but there seems plenty of time to make decisions, to look things over and decide what has to be done, to move precisely, with minimum effort and maximum effect.

Whatever the thing at his feet was, it was out of the picture now—it had not even twitched after the heavy bullet tore through it. There was a stomping rush in the little thicket he had been watching. Ed took two long quick steps to one side to clear a couple of trees, threw up the gun and fired as something flashed across a thin spot in the brush. He heard the whack of the bullet in flesh and fired again. Ordinarily he did not like to shoot at things he could not see clearly, but this did not seem the time to be overly finicky. There was no further movement in the brush.

He stood there several long moments, listening, and there was no further movement anywhere. He eased the hammer down, fed in three rounds to replace those he had used, and walked slowly back to the first thing he had shot.

At that range, the bullet had not opened up, but it had not needed to. It had practically exploded the creature anyway—the .450 has two tons of striking energy at the muzzle. From what was left, Ed deduced a smallish, rabbit-sized thing, smooth-skinned, muscular, many-legged, flattish, mottled to camouflage perfectly in the leaves. There was a head at one end, mostly undamaged since it had been at the end of a long muscular neck, with a pair of glazing beady eyes and a surprisingly small mouth. When Ed pressed on the muscles at the base of the skull, the mouth gaped roundly and a two-inch long spine slid smoothly out of an inconspicuous slot just below it.

At middling distances or better, Ed could still see as well as ever, but close up he needed help. He got out his pocket magnifier and studied the spine. It looked hollow, grooved back for a distance from the point. A drop of milky looking substance trembled on its tip.

Ed nodded thoughtfully to himself. This was what had made him uneasy, he was pretty sure. What was the thing in the brush, then? Innocent bystander? He got stiffly to his feet, conscious now of the ache in his wrist that had taken most of the recoil of the first shot, the torn web between his right thumb and forefinger where the hammer spur had bitten in; and walked over to the thicket.

The thing in the brush was larger, quite a bit larger, and the bullets had not torn it up so badly. It lay sprawled with three of its eight legs doubled under it, a bear-sized animal with a gaping, cavernous, toothless mouth out of all proportion to the slender body which seemed designed mainly as a frame for the muscular legs. It was not quite dead. As Ed came up it struggled feebly to get up, but one of the heavy slugs had evidently hit the spine, or whatever carried communications to the hindquarters. It fell back, shuddering convulsively, and suddenly regurgitated a small, furry animal.

Ed stepped back quickly to bring his rifle to bear, but the newest arrival was obviously already dead.

He turned his attention back to the larger animal. It, too, was dead now. There was an obvious family resemblance to the smaller one he had shot in the leaves. Both were smooth-skinned, many-legged, and now that he looked closely he could see this one had two mouths, a small one just under the nostrils, purse-lipped and tiny in its huge face but quite like that of the other creature. Neither looked even remotely like anything he had ever seen before.

He laid down his rifle and took out his knife.

Ten minutes later, he knew quite a bit about the thing, but what he knew did not make much sense. In the first place, its blood was green, a yellowish pussy green. In the second place, the larger mouth, complete with jaws and impressive musculature, opened not into a digestive system, but into a large closed pouch which comprised most of the animal's torso. There was no proper digestive system at all, only a rudimentary gut, heavily laced with blood vessels, terminating at one end in the small second mouth, at the other in an even smaller anus. Otherwise, the thing had no insides except a good pair of lungs and a stout heart—none at all. Bone, muscle, lung, heart—plus the ridiculously inadequate gut—that was it.

What about the small, furry, animal then; the one the other had been carrying in its pouch? There was nothing much out-of-the-way about it—a feline sort of carnivore, something like a marten. The fur looked interesting, and he skinned it out, casing the hide. On the left ham, the skin was punctured and there was a swollen, bluish area—about the sort of wound that would be made by the fang of the first thing he had shot. Ed squatted back on his heels, studying it and putting two and two together. What two and two made was pretty hard to believe, but it fitted the evidence.

He wiped his knife carefully on the grass, put it back in its sheath, and got to his feet. Suddenly, the feeling that he was not alone recurred. He looked quickly around.

Back where he had shot the first thing, a man in forest-green whipcord trousers and jacket was leaning over, hands on knees, looking at the remains. The man looked up and met Ed's eyes. He nodded casually and walked over to the second thing, prodded it with his toe. After a long moment he nodded again to Ed, smiled briefly, and winked out.

Ed stared at the empty air where the other man had been, mouth open. It was just a little too much. A lot of things had happened to him in the last few days, he had been able to take most of them more or less as they came along, but after all, he wasn't a chicken any more, he was pushing sixty, and there is a limit to what a man should have to put up with at that age. The thought of his snug cabin, with a good fire going, moosemeat bubbling in the pot, the gas lantern hissing, and the bottle of Hudson's Bay rum he had tucked under the eaves against just such an occasion as this, was suddenly very appealing.

Besides, it was getting late, and he didn't think he cared to be stumbling around this world in the dark.

He elbowed his pack up, hooked the left shoulder strap, and headed for home, staying off the trail in ordinary caution and watching his footing, but moving pretty fast just the same.

Actually, he need not have been so careful.

The Harn had been surprised and shocked by the explosive violence of the man's reaction to a routine harvesting maneuver. It was a relatively young Harn, but it retained memories of its own world, where there were also nasty, violent things which killed Harn. It was not pleasant to think that it might have evoked some such monster in this hitherto peaceful place.

Then, to top that, there had been the sudden appearance of the Warden. The Harn, of course, saw the Warden not as a man, but in its true aspect, which was not at all friendly.

All in all, this did not seem the moment to start any new adventures. The Harn pulled in all its mobile units, including the stinger it had left at the hole into the other world. It huddled protectively together in its nest, considering these new developments.

By ten that evening, Ed, in conference with old Tom and the bottle of Hudson's Bay, had done considerable hard thinking, pro and con.

Of course, he didn't have to go into the other world, just because the hole was there. He could block it off, seal it up with timbers and forget it.

He sat there and thought about this, absently smoothing the strange fur on his knee. For an old-timer like himself, things weren't too hot in this world. Fur didn't bring much of a price any more, and he couldn't get it in as he had when he was younger. His wants were simple, but there was a certain rock-bottom minimum he had to have. Too, the winters were starting to bother him a little, the arthritis in his hands was getting worse every year, times he hardly had the strength in his left hand, which was the worst, to hold an ax. Another five, ten, years and it would be the Pioneers' Home for him—if he did not get stove up or sick sooner and die right here in the cabin, too helpless to cut wood for the fire. He had helped bury enough others, bed and all when they didn't come down the river at breakup and somebody had to go up and look for them, to know it was possible.

The other world was milder, it had game and fur—good fur, too, from the looks of it, something new that could lick any mutation or synthetic on the market, and the income tax had still left a few fellows who could pay through the nose to see their women look nice.

And, the country was new. He'd never thought he'd have a crack at a new country again, a new, good country. Often, he'd thought how lucky people had been who were born a hundred and fifty years ago, moving into an easy, rich country like the Ohio or Kentucky when it was new, instead of the bitter North.

The Harn would be a nuisance—Ed did not think of it as the Harn, of course, but just as "they"—but he supposed he could find a way to clean them out. A man generally could, if varmints got troublesome enough.

And the man in forest-green whipcord, well, he could have been just an hallucination. Ed did not really believe in hallucinations, but he had heard about them, and there was always a first time.

Ed sighed, looked at the clock, measured the bottle with his eye—still better than three quarters full.

All in all, he guessed, he'd leave the door into the other world open.

He put old Tom out and went to bed.

The first order of business seemed to be to get better acquainted with the Harn, and first thing in the morning he set about it. He took the rabbit out of the live box and tethered it in a spot in the other world close to the hole, where raw earth had been exposed by a big blowdown, sweeping the ground afterward to clear it of tracks.

Getting better acquainted with the Harn, though, did not mean he had to have it come in and crawl in bed with him.

Before going to bed the night before, he had set half a can of snuff to steep in some water. He loaded a bug gun with this and sprayed the ground around the hole into the other world. From the reaction yesterday, he judged the stinging units did not like tobacco juice, and this should discourage them from coming through.

He checked his bear snares and found three in good enough shape to satisfy him—the large Harn beast, he suspected, would be about like a grizzly to hold. Three would hardly be enough for a serious trapping program. Ed made his own snares from old aircraft control cable, using a lock of his own devising which slid smoothly and cinched down tight and permanently. He got out his roll of wire and box of locks and started making up some more, sitting where he could watch the rabbit he had staked out.

By the middle of the afternoon the snares were done, but there had been no action with the rabbit, nor was there for the rest of the day.

In the morning, though, it was gone. There were three new sets of tracks in the bare spot—two smaller ones, either of which would have fitted the stinging unit, and what looked like a carrier's. The action was clear enough. The small things had prowled around the rabbit for some time, stopping frequently as if uncertain and suspicious. Finally, one had moved in, with a little flurry of action when it met the rabbit. Then it had moved back and squatted again.

The big tracks came directly to the rabbit and went right out again. They were heavy enough to be clear in the grass beyond the bare spot.

Ed went back to the cabin and rummaged till he found a pair of snakeproof pants a Stateside sport had once given him—heavy duck with an interlining of woven wire. They were heavy and uncomfortable to wear, and about as useless as wings on a pig in Alaska, where there are no snakes; but they had been brand-new and expensive when given to him, and he had put them away, thinking vaguely he might find a use for them some day. It looked like that day might be now.

He slipped them on, took his rifle and hunting pack, and set out to follow the animal that had taken the rabbit.

The trail showed well in the morning dew, going straight away along the hillside as if the thing were headed some place definite. Ed followed along for a quarter mile or so, then found himself on a fairly well beaten path, which presently joined another, and then another, till it was a definitely well used trail. It began to look to him like the thing might have a den of some sort, and he might be getting pretty close to it. He left the trail and climbed up into a lone tall tree, fire-scorched but still struggling for life. From there, he could follow the trail pretty well with his glasses for a couple of hundred yards before he lost it. Finally, he settled on a spot under an old burnt stump as a likely spot for the den.

He focused the glasses carefully and after a few minutes saw a flash of movement there, as if something had slipped in or out. Nothing else happened for about an hour. Then the grass along one of the trails began to wave and a large beast, similar to the one he had shot, trotted into sight. It slipped in under the stump and disappeared.

For the rest of the morning, nothing went in or out.

There was a very good reason for this, and Ed was it.

All night and day after he shot the stinging unit and the carrier unit, the Harn had stayed in its nest. By the second evening, it was getting hungry. It ventured out and found a few morsels, but the organized hunting network it ordinarily maintained had been disrupted, it had lost track of things, and the pickings were poor. Then it stumbled on the rabbit Ed had staked out.

Its first impulse was to leave the rabbit strictly alone. In spite of its early promise, the other world had so far given nothing but trouble. On the other hand, the rabbit was meat, and very good meat, by the smell and looks of it....

The Harn kept its observation unit prowling irresolutely around the target for half the night before it finally gave in to appetite and sent in a stinger to finish the rabbit off, a carrier to pick it up.

It was still uneasy about this when it noticed Ed near the nest the next morning, confirming its fears. It promptly broke up the net it had been re-establishing and pulled all units back in. Maybe if it left him strictly alone, he might still go on about his business, whatever that was, and let the Harn get back to its harvesting.

By noon, Ed was getting pretty stiff sitting in the tree. He climbed down and eased over toward the stump, watching where he set his feet. He was pretty sure the snakeproof pants would stop the stingers, but he saw no point in putting them to the test until he had to.

About fifty yards away, he got a good view, and it did look like there might be a sizable hole under the stump. He studied it carefully with the glasses. There was a smooth-beaten mound in front, and exposed roots were worn slick.

As he got closer, he noticed an unpleasant smell, and near the mouth of the den he got a sudden whiff that almost gagged him—a sour, acid, carrion stink like a buzzard's nest. He moved back a little. The hole was wide and fairly high, two or three feet, but too dark to see back into. Still, he had a sense of something stirring there not too far back.

Ed had considerable respect for caves and dens with unseen occupants—he had once helped carry in the bodies of two men who had poked a stick into a spring grizzly's den. At the same time, he wanted pretty badly to know what was in there. He suspected there was a good deal more than what he had already seen.

The bug gun loaded with tobacco juice was in his pack, and a flashlight, a small light one designed for a lady's purse which he always carried when away from camp. He got them out and leaned his rifle against a root sticking out just to the left of the den. Taking the bug gun in his left hand and the flashlight in his right, he stooped over to shine the light in, keeping as well clear of the entrance as possible.

All in all, he must have got about a five-second look, which is a lot longer than it sounds when things are happening.

His first impression was a jumble—eyes, scurrying movement, and bulk. Then things started to shape up. About ten feet back from the entrance was a huge, flattish, naked, scabrous bulk, pimpled with finger-sized teats. Clustered around and behind this were a tangle of slinging units, carrier units, observation units. Some had their mouths fixed to teats.

For a long second or two the scene stayed frozen.

Then the front edge of the bulk split and began to gape. Ed found himself looking down a manhole-sized gullet into a shallow puddle of slime with bits of bone sticking up here and there. Toward the near end a soggy mass of fur that might have been the rabbit seemed to be visibly melting down. At the same moment, the tangle of lesser monsters sorted themselves out and a wave of stingers came boiling out at him.

Ed dropped the flashlight, gave two mighty pumps of the bug gun, and jumped clear of the entrance. For a moment, the den mouth boiled with stingers, hissing and bucking in agony. Ed sprayed them heavily again, snatched up his rifle, and ran, looking back over his shoulder. The stingers showed no inclination to follow, though, the tobacco juice seemed to be keeping them well occupied for the moment.

Halfway home, Ed had to stop and rest for a moment while he took a spell of shuddering and gagging as a sudden picture of the slimy gullet came into his mind, with Ed Brown laying where the rabbit had been, melting down into a stinking soup of bones and gobbets of flesh.

When he got to the hole, his arrangement of tin cans, traps, and tobacco juice no longer looked nearly as secure as it had. He got his ax and cut two stout posts, framing the hole; built a stout slab door and hung it from them. Then he drove stakes close together at the threshold, to foil any attempts to dig under, and trimmed a sill tight to the door.

His feeling in this matter, as it happened, was sound.

The Harn was beginning to develop a pretty strong dislike for Ed Brown. Three of its stinging units were dead, and most of the rest were in poor shape, thanks to the tobacco spray. It had got a little whiff of the stuff itself, not enough to do any serious damage ordinarily, but right now, so close to swarming time—

Ed was going to have to go.

So far, in this world, the Harn had needed only the three basic types of mobile units. There were other standard types, however, for dealing with more complicated situations. As it happened, a couple of carrier embryos were at just about the right stage. With a little forcing, they could be brought on in not too long a time. Meanwhile, the Harn would do what it could with the material available.

When Ed came through the next day to set his snares, the Harn was prepared to test his snakeproof pants. They held, which was disconcerting to the Harn, but it was a hard creature to convince, once thoroughly aroused. Ed was not too sure of how well the pants would stand up to persistent assault himself. After the third ambush, he took to spraying suspicious looking spots with tobacco juice. He shot two more stingers in this way, but it slowed him up quite a bit. It took him all day to make four sets.

In the next three days he made a dozen sets and caught two carriers. Then, the fourth day, as he adjusted a snare, a seeming root suddenly came to life and slashed at his hand. He was wearing gloves to keep his scent from the snares, and the fang caught the glove and just grazed the ball of his left thumb. The hatchet he had been using to cut a toggle was lying by his knee. He snatched it up and chopped the stinger before it could strike again, then yanked off the glove and looked at his hand. A thin scratch, beaded with drops of blood, showed on the flesh. Unhesitatingly, he drew the razor edge of the hatchet across it, sucked and spat, sucked and spat again and again. Then he started for home.

He barely made it. By the time he got to the hole, he was a very sick man. He latched the door, stumbled into the cabin and fell on the bed.

It was several days before he was able to be about again, his hand still partly paralyzed.

During that time, the situation changed. The Harn took the offensive.

Ed's first notice of this was a rhythmic crashing outside the cabin. He managed to crawl to where he could see the gate he had built to block the hole into the other world. It was shaking from repeated batterings from the other side. Dragging his rifle with his good hand, he scrabbled down to where he could see through the chinks in the slab door. Two of the carrier units were there, taking turns slamming their full weight against it. He had built that gate skookum, but not to take something like that.

He noted carefully where they were hitting it, then backed off twenty feet and laid the .450 across a log. He let them hit the door twice more to get the timing before he loosed off a shot, at the moment of impact. The battering stopped abruptly, and through the chinks he could see a bulk piled against the gate.

For a while there was no more action. Then, after a few tentative butts at the door, the battering started again. This time, Ed wasn't so lucky. The battering stopped when he fired, but he got an impression that the carrier ran off. He thought he might have hit it, but not mortally.

In an hour or so the Harn was back, and it kept coming back. Ed began to worry about his ammunition, which was not unlimited. Ordinarily, two or three boxes lasted him through the winter. He got his .30-06, for which he had a sugar sack full of military ammunition. The light full-patch stuff did not have the discouraging effect of the .450, though, and he had to shoot a lot oftener.

Another thing, he wasn't getting any rest, which was bad in his already weakened condition. Every time he dozed off the battering would start again, and he would have to wake up and snap a few shots through the door. He held pretty much on one spot, not wanting to shoot the door to pieces, but the Harn noticed this, and started hitting the door in other places.

The second day of the attack, the door came down. It had been pretty shaky for some time, and Ed had got the cabin ready for a siege, filling butter kegs with water and nailing up the windows. As the Harn poured through, he shot several and then broke for the cabin. A carrier ran at him full tilt, bent on bowling him over. Once off his feet, he would have been easy meat for one of the stingers. He sidestepped, swung his shotgun up in one hand—he had kept it handy for the close fighting—and blew the carrier's spine in half. He had to kick it aside to slam the cabin door.

For a few minutes, then, things were pretty hectic. Ed went from one to another of the loopholes he had cut, blasting first with the shotgun as the Harn crowded around, then using the .30 as they grew more cautious.

After the first rush, it was obvious to the Harn that the cabin was going to be a tough nut to crack. On the other hand, there was no rush about it either. Necessarily, it had let its hunting go the past several days while it concentrated on Ed. It was pretty hungry, and it was in rich pickings now—Ed had always kept from disturbing game close to the cabin, partly because he liked to see it around, and partly because he had an idea that some day he might be in a fix where he couldn't travel very well, and would want meat close to hand. The Harn felt no such compunctions. The stinging units spread through the woods, and shortly a steady procession of loaded carriers began to stream back through the hole. Ed picked off the first few, but then the Harn found it could route them up the river trail in such a way that he got only a glimpse as they flashed through the hole. After that he did not hit very many.

Ed stopped shooting. He was getting short on ammunition for the .30 now, too. He counted up. There were eighteen rounds for the .450, half a box of 220 grain soft point for the .30 plus about the same amount of military stuff, and a handful of shotgun shells. Of course, there was still the .30 Luger with a couple of boxes, and the .22; but they were not much account for this kind of work.

He looked at the cabin door. It was stout, built of hewed three-inch slabs, but it wouldn't last forever against the kind of beating the gate had got. Even if it did, he was going to run out of water eventually.

Ed thought about that for a while, sitting at the table staring at the little pile of cartridges. He was going to be run out of here sooner or later, he might as well pick his own time, and now seemed about as good as any, while the Harn was busy exploring and hunting.

He sighed and got up to rummage around the cabin. The snakeproof pants had done real good, but he did not trust them entirely. There was some sheet iron laid over the ceiling joists, which he had brought up to make new stoves for his line camps. He got this down and cut it into small pieces. Around the edges he drilled a number of small holes. Then he got out his mending gear and began sewing the plates, in an overlapping pattern, to the legs of the snakeproof pants and to an old pair of moccasins. When he finished, he was pretty well armored as far as his crotch. It was an awkward outfit to move around in, but as long as he was able to stay on his feet, he figured he would be reasonably secure from the stingers. As for the bigger ones, he would just have to depend on seeing them first, and the .450.

Next, he needed some gasoline. The fuel cache was under a big spruce, about twenty yards from the door. He made the round of his loopholes. There were no Harn in sight, they were apparently ignoring him for now. He slipped out the door, closing it securely behind him, and started for the cache.

As he stepped out, a stinger came from under the sill log and lashed at his foot. He killed it with the ax beside the door, saving a cartridge, and went on, walking fairly fast but planting his feet carefully, a little awkward in his armor. He picked up a five-gallon can of gas, a quart of motor oil, and the twenty feet of garden hose he used for siphoning gas down the bank to the boat. On the way back, another stinger hit him. He kicked it aside, not wanting to set down his load, and it came at him again and again. Just outside the door, he finally caught it under a heel and methodically trampled it to death. Then he snatched open the door, tossed the stuff inside, and pulled it quickly shut behind him.

So far, good enough.

He lashed the gas can solidly to his packboard, slipped the end of the hose into the flexible spout and wired it tight. Then he cut up an old wool undershirt and wrapped the pieces around miscellaneous junk—old nuts and bolts, chunks of leadline, anything to make up half a dozen packages of good throwing heft. He soaked these in oil and stowed them in a musette bag which he snapped to the D-rings of the pack.

One of the metal plates on his moccasin was hanging by a thread, probably he had torn it loose in the scuffle at the door. They weren't going to take too much kicking and banging around, he could see, and once he was on his way, it wouldn't be a very good idea to be caught bending over with his bare hands at ground level to fix them. On the other hand, he couldn't be using all his cartridges on the stingers, either, he had to save them for the carriers. He thought about this some while mending the moccasin, and decided to take the bug gun. It might not kill the stingers, but it ought to discourage them enough so they wouldn't keep pestering him.

With his bad left arm, he had trouble getting the pack on his back. He finally managed by swinging it up on the table first. It was not too much of a load, forty or fifty pounds he guessed. Still, shaky as he was, it was about as much as he could manage. He had intended to just try it on for size, but after he got it up he thought: well, why not now? He picked up the .450, stowed the extra cartridges in his pocket, checked to make sure he had matches, hung the bug gun on his belt, and opened the door.

It was just getting dusk, but the other world was in broad daylight, the days and nights were almost completely reversed again. As he stepped through the hole, the first stinger struck. He gave it a good squirt of tobacco juice. It went bucking and twisting off and he went on, stepping carefully and solidly.

Luckily, most of the Harn was foraging in the new world. Two more stingers ambushed him, but the tobacco juice got rid of them, and he had no serious trouble till he got close to the den. Two carriers came out and rushed him there. He shot them both and then killed the stinger that was pecking at his shins. He moved quickly now, he had an idea that in about a minute all hell would break loose. He swung the pack down on the uphill side of the den, wet the musette bag with a quick spray of gas, tossed it over his shoulder, jammed the free end of the hose into the den mouth and stabbed the can with his knife to vent it. As the gas poured into the den he lit one of his oil and gas soaked bombs and ran around in front, lighting one after another from the one in his hand and tossing them into the den. The musette bag caught fire and he snatched it from his shoulder and tossed it after the bombs. A whoof and a sheet of flame blew out.

About fifty yards away there was a slender, popplelike tree. Ed had thought if he could make that, he would be reasonably secure while the Harn burned. He ran for it as hard as he could, beating at the flames that had spattered on him from the burning gas, but he never made it.

Harn were erupting everywhere. A carrier suddenly came charging out of the brush to his left. While Ed dealt with that one, the Harn played its ace in the hole. The two special units it had been developing to deal with Ed were not quite done yet, but they were done enough to work for the few minutes the Harn needed them. Ed heard a coughing grunt behind him and spun around to see something new crawling out of the flame and smoke at the den entrance.

This one was a roughly carrier shaped creature, but half again as large, built for killing. It had powerful fanged jaws and its eight feet were armed with knifelike, disemboweling claws. As it came at Ed in a lumbering rush, another came crawling out after it.

Ed shot four times, as fast as he could work the action. The heavy slugs did the job, but not quite well enough. With its dying lunge the thing got to him and tossed him ten feet like a rag doll. He lit on his bad hand and felt the wrist bones go.

As he struggled to get up, digging his elbow in and using one hand, he saw a stinger darting in at him. He had lost both the bug gun and his rifle when the fighting unit swiped him. He swiveled on his hips and kicked the stinger away. Then he saw the second fighting unit coming. He forgot about the stinger. It still might get to him, but, if it did, it would be too late to matter.

He drew his knife, managed to get to one knee, and crouched there like an old gray rat, stubbly lips drawn back from worn teeth in a grin of pain and rage. This was one he wasn't going to win, he guessed.

Ten feet away, the fighting unit suddenly ran down like a clockwork toy. It toppled over, skidded past him under its own momentum, and lay there kicking spasmodically. Ed glared at it uncomprehendingly. It arched its neck back to almost touch its haunches, stiffened, and was still.

Ed looked around. The stinger was dead too, three feet from his shoulder, and half a dozen more which had been making for him. A cloud of greasy, stinking smoke was rolling out of the den. The Harn was dead.

Ed put his knife away and lay back. He did not quite pass out, but things got pretty dim.

After a while he got hold of himself and sat up. He was not too surprised to see the man in forest green prodding at the bodies of the fighting units. The stranger looked at the smoke still oozing from the den and nodded approvingly. Then he came over and looked at Ed. He clacked his tongue in concern and bent over, touching Ed's wrist. Ed noticed there was now a cast on it, and it didn't hurt so much. There was also a plastic binding around his ribs and shoulder, where the claws of the first fighter had raked as it tossed him. That was a mighty neat trick, because the rags of his shirt were still buttoned around him, and he was pretty sure it had not been off at any time.

The stranger smiled at Ed, patted him on the shoulder, and disappeared. He seemed to be a busy sort of fellow, Ed thought, with not much time for visiting.

Ed felt quite a bit better now, enough better to gather up what was left of his gear and start home. He was glad to find old Tom waiting for him there. The cat had taken to the woods when the attack on the gate first started, he didn't like shooting, and Ed had worried that the Harn might have got him.

Ed slept till noon the next day, got up and cooked a dozen flapjacks and a pound of bacon. After breakfast, he sat around for an hour or so drinking coffee. Then he spent the rest of the afternoon puttering around the cabin.

He packed away the snakeproof pants, disassembled the flame-thrower, picked up the traps by the hole.

Old Tom seemed to have pretty well cleaned up the mice under the lean-to. Ed took his shovel and filled in the hole he had dug for the cat to get at them.

He went to bed early. Tomorrow he would take a long hike around the new world, scout out the fur and game, plan his trap-line and pick cabin sites.

The next morning, though, the hole into the other world was gone.

The posts which had marked it were sheared neatly in half. The remains of the door still hung there, battered and sagging; but it swung open on nothing but Alaska, when Ed stepped through he found himself standing beside the old leaning birch.

He tried it several times before he convinced himself.

He walked slowly back toward the cabin, feeling old and uncertain, not quite knowing what to do with himself. Old Tom was over by the lean-to, sniffing and pawing tentatively at the fresh earth where Ed had filled in the hole. As Ed came up, he came over to rub against Ed's leg.

They went into the cabin and Ed started fixing breakfast.

[useless-catalanfacts]

Are cats important in Catalunya? Barcelona's mascot (they sadly never use) is a cat, and the mascot for the Olympic games in Barna was a cat too. Or is it just coincidence? :eyesemoji:

Hello!

First of all, I'm very glad to see someone getting the city's shortened named right (Barna). I had almost accepted that it's a lost battle to get foreigners to stop calling it Barça! (Barça means the football team, not the city).

Cats are used as a symbol of Catalonia sometimes, because Catalonia is shortened to "Cat": think for example how the internet domain for sites in the Catalan language is ".cat", how the government of Catalonia is named Generalitat de Catalunya but gets shortened to "GenCat", or how some people cover the E of Spain in the driving plate with a sticker saying "CAT" (this last one used to be very popular in the 2000s and until the early 2010s but stopped because the police got serious in fining the people who had it).

Example of what a Spanish licence plate looks like (all EU countries have the blue band with 1, 2 or 3 letters that identify what EU country it's from) and an example of a plate with the CAT (Catalunya) sticker over the E (España) band.

For this reason, a cat was used for years as a symbol of Catalonia:

It was created by a Catalan independentist organization Lliga Anticolonial (Anti-colonial League) in the late 1990s or early 2000s as a response to the symbolic occupation of the Toro de Osborne (Osborne Bull). For context, the Osborne Bull is this:

The bull is a symbol of Spain. These gigantic (14 metres tall!) billboards in the shape of the bull species used in bullfighting (a Spanish tradition of torturing and slowly killing a bull in public while people cheer, seen as a national symbol of Spain and Spanish manhood) were set up by an alcohol brand since the 1950s. There were dozens of them, next to the highways and roads everywhere in the state of Spain, and this silhouette quickly became a symbol of Spain just as much as the Spanish flag. In fact, you'll find many Spanish flags used by fascists include this bull silhouette at the centre. There are also all types of merch with it and Spanish nationalists often put a sticker in their cars with this silhouette (used to be very popular in the early 2000s, the stickers in cars in general have stopped being so popular nowadays).

In the 1990s, there were new laws in Spain against billboards on roads/highways, because adverts distract drivers and result in accidents. However, this bull had become such a symbol of Spanish nationalism that they made an exception for it. All the billboards in certain places were taken down except for the Osborne bulls.

Meanwhile, as you can imagine many people in the nations occupied by Spain were not happy to have these giant symbols of Spanish nationalism around our land, it feels like a symbol of occupation. Like a "remember we own you". For this reason, independentist groups in the Catalan Countries and the Basque Country often cut down the bulls or sprayed murals and political slogans of liberation on them. When the new laws against billboards came, everyone was expecting to finally have to stop seeing our land branded with these symbols of occupation, but as I said before the Spanish courts did an exception. Then, more people than ever before decided to get organized to cut down the bulls, but they kept putting them back up and persecuting the "vandals", and the Spanish Justice System even gave the Osborne Bull billboard in El Bruc the legal condition of national heritage to legally protect it and be able to persecute activists who protested against it more! (El Bruc is a town in Catalonia that is very symbolic for Catalan people because of the folk tale of the Catalan resistance against French invasion that is one of the most widespread folk tales in Catalonia, but in this town the Spanish Army has had its biggest army headquarters in Catalonia so it has become a place of occupation and stronghold of the Spanish army).

During all of this battle of symbols, the occupied nations came up with their own symbol to symbolize their resistance: the cat and donkey in Catalonia, the cow in Galiza, and the ardi latxa sheep in the Basque Country. Organizations sold stickers of these symbols to raise money for good causes related to our cultures.

(I explained why this autochthonous species of donkey is a symbol of Catalonia in this previous post).

But, in the end, cutting down the bull billboards was successful and many weren't put back up. The last bull billboards in Catalonia was cut down by activists in 2002. Nowadays, you can still find about 100 bull billboards around Spain, but not in Catalonia.

The cat and donkey kept being popular for some more years, but eventually they lost popularity once the bulls were out of our daily lives. For some reason though, the donkey has remained popular as a symbol of Catalan-ness in Northern Catalonia (the part of Catalonia annexed by France, so the one that never had the Osborne Bull in the first place!). If you visit Northern Catalonia, you'll still find many cars with the donkey sticker and many souvenirs with the donkey.

There's the reason why the cat is a symbol of Catalonia, it used to be a very popular one but it has lost popularity nowadays. I must say that it's with this ask that I've seen Barça's mascot for the first time. I didn't even know they had one, but yes, it's a cat. But the mascot for the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona (called Cobi) was supposed to be a dog drawn in cubist style. But you're right that it looks like a cat 😅

[encyclopika]

Animal Crossing Fish - Explained #226

Brought to you by a marine biologist getting back on her feet...

CLICK HERE FOR THE AC FISH EXPLAINED MASTERPOST!

I know I've been gone for a while - it's not because of the new Pokemon game, although it helped. I'm back to finish up what I started. So, today, let's start with a blank slate - the white versions of the guppy, the freshwater angelfish, and the koi. [Long post warning because pictures!!!]

Specifically, these fish are the White Tuxedo Guppy, the White Butterfly Koi, and the White Angelfish. All three appeared once in AC Pocket Camp for its Fishing Tourney #27. The theme was "weddings" and occurred in June of 2020, so explains why they're all white.

We've already covered the taxonomy and delved deeper into these species elsewhere in the series. They are here -> Guppy, Koi, and Angelfish. For review, all three of these fish are freshwater species, native to different river systems, and all are species humans like to keep ornamentally. Likewise, these white versions represent specially bred specimens that not only feature a strange white coloring, but also different fin lengths and shapes. This is especially true for the butterfly koi, specifically known for its long, graceful fins.

But I want to take a "minute" to talk about pigments in the animal kingdom and then the certain genetic anomalies that fuck it up. So lets talk about pigment - what is it and what does it do? To sum it up very quickly, biological pigments, or biochromes, are molecules produced within specialized cells that absorb and reflect certain wavelengths of light, aka, they give animal skin, eyes, fur, etc. color. These colors assist animals in their daily lives, by providing camouflage for animals so that their prey or their predators don't see them coming or going, respectively. Other animals display color to communicate, either to attract a mate or tell a rival to back off. Pigments can even protect the skin from UV radiation (as is the function of melanin in human skin). This is all grade school science class stuff, but it's really important to ecology. Color and color patterns can tell you so much about how an animal lives its life, even without observation. But like all living functions, pigment can get messed up, too, and in a lot of ways.

By Stephenkniatt at English Wikipedia - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., Public Domain

Perhaps the most famous pigment disorder is albinism. This disorder is characterized by an absence of pigmentation, turning the animal white (in plants, albinism is from the absence of chlorophyll). The term albinism has many incomplete definitions, however, we typically recognize it as a lack of melanin, which results in an all-white body and red eyes. It is especially apparent in mammals, where melanin is the only pigment we make! This disorder comes with a lot of drawbacks for any animal - an all-white body means they've lost the functions of their species' coloration, they have poor vision and eye development, hearing disorders, and, in some studies, the disorder is found to be "semi-lethal", generally reducing the life span. Fortunately, I don't think the ACPC wedding fish have this condition.

By The original uploader was Dawson at English Wikipedia. - Transferred from en.wikipedia to Commons., CC BY-SA 2.5,

I think our fish for today are Leucistic, in that they have a loss of much of their pigments, but not all. For the fish and for the snake above, pigment is absent in the scales, but the eyes are just fine. Leucism is often mistaken for albinism. The big difference between them is the severity and the pigments lost - albinism is a total lack of melanin, but leucism affects all the types of pigments found in the animal kingdom and at different intensities, and therefore can appear "partial", as seen in piebald individuals. And yes, all sorts of albinism and leucism are specifically bred for in the pet trade.

Erythrism is when an individual is strangely more red than usual. I don't have a lot to say about this one but to look it up on Google "erythristic animals" and see how utterly magical they look. Pink bugs are a guarantee.

Then there's Melanism, the exact opposite of albinism/leucism - it is the increased production of melanin, making an animal's skin, etc. very very dark, or completely black. Sometimes melanism gets out of hand and also dyes the inside of the animal black, as is the case with Ayem Cemani breed of chicken. Also worth a Google search: "melanistic animals". Enjoy.

And there you have it. Fascinating stuff, no?

[jttwaudiodrama]

This is a very thorough explanation (do read it) but just to elaborate a little bit more since a similar question was also sent to us a while back.

First of all, if you are looking for validation for some original idea you have for your own work, just go ahead, not our business. We have no interest in gatekeeping something that's in the public domain. If you worry this may potentially be offensive to the Chinese audience, stop worrying. Chinese readers of JttW have done way more reimagining than you would have in your lifetime. Whether or not we like it on a personal level, this is not something that would offend us.

Second, going back to Production Notes Episode 8, the very real hierarchy between the other three disciples who were given religious names and the young dragon who wasn’t should not be overlooked.

Like we said many times before, dragons are treated as a separate species in JttW from humans. There are real limitations to what roles they can take up even in the world of the divine. When humans, or creatures in human-like form like Wu Kong, are accepted into Buddhism, they can become monks. But for non-human beings like the dragon prince, that option is simply not available. Which is why we said he “didn’t become a monk”. That certainly was not something Guan Yin promised he would be either. The initial idea was to turn him into a tool of transportation with no other apparent obligations attached.

Of course, in practice he is not so different from a monk (eats only vegetables, i.e. grass), but that doesn’t mean the title was ever granted to him. I have family who are casual Buddhists who still eat meat, and of course got married and have kids. Nobody would consider them “monks”. And to say they have “joined the religion” would also feel like an exaggeration. It’s kind of like that for the dragon.

As for 八部 Aṣṭasenā or Eight Legions, this very concept is reserved for non-human deities who serve as guards for Buddha. So when the young dragon prince eventually becomes 八部天龍 (heavenly dragon of the eight legions), he’s basically joining this group of non-human deities. But again, that’s a role awarded to him based on the fact that he completed the journey. And you bet his new obligations would still be very different from conventional monks/Bodhisattva.

And remember how we touched on the word “皈依 convert” in Production Notes Episode 7? This word is used very loosely in the story, so always take context into consideration. Not every appearance of the word 皈依 means someone is being converted to a religion. It sometimes just means “obey”, “submit” or “believe”.

Always remember JttW was created by the grassroot and went through centuries of evolution before being written down as a book. So a lot of the terms are not used in the precise/academic manner that we would have preferred to base any research on. If you see contradictions or inconsistencies in the story, don’t overthink, it’s just the natural part of being created by the collective.

Also, it’s just getting way ahead of ourselves if we dumped every piece of info about the dragon horse in Production Notes 8. So please understand that this part of our series aims to only lightly touch on elements relevant to the corresponding chapter. When the character shows up again, naturally we will elaborate more.

And if you want our earnest answer for the original question: Regardless of whether the young dragon was ever officially made a Buddhist (which strictly speaking, still feels like a very human terms for us but anyway), or whether this process can be undone (in practice, you can unbecome a monk to get married), in the context of JttW, having been through this journey of enlightenment and awarded a prestigious role by Buddha himself, the young dragon would no longer be interested in worldly matters like marriage or romance. The same goes with all other members on the team.

Is the White Dragon Horse Buddhist?

I was recently contacted by a reader on my main external blog. Part of their question asked:

I heard on the Fifth Monkey [@jttwaudiodrama] production notes for Part 8 that the White Dragon Horse wasn’t really converted to Buddhism and thus never “left his family” and obligations. Would this make him eligible for marriage...?

My answer:

There is some inconsistency in the White Dragon Horse’s story. I can’t recall him officially taking vows during the journey, but the Buddha states in chapter 100 that he had (at some point):

Then he [the Buddha] said to the white horse, “You were originally the prince of Dragon King Guangjin of the Western Ocean. Because you disobeyed your father’s command and committed the crime of unfiliality, you were to be executed. Fortunately you made submission to the Law and accepted our vows ... (Wu & Yu, 2012, vol. 4, p. 382). 又叫那白馬：「汝本是西洋大海廣晉龍王之子，因汝違逆父命，犯了不孝之罪。幸得皈身皈法，皈我沙門 ...

He is then elevated in rank to become an Aṣṭasenā, a group of eight celestial beings said to be "in attendance when the Buddha speaks the Mahayana sutras" (Buswell & Lopez, 2014, p. 74). The Buddha continues:

... Because you carried the sage monk daily on your back during his journey to the West and because you also took the holy scriptures back to the East, you too have made merit. I hereby grant you promotion and appoint you one of the dragon[ horses] belonging to the Eight Classes of Supernatural Beings (Wu & Yu, 2012, vol. 4, p. 382). ... 每日家虧你馱負聖僧來西，又虧你馱負聖經去東，亦有功者，加陞汝職正果，為八部天龍馬。」

After transforming back into a dragon, he takes his place atop a Huabiao pillar in paradise:

The elder, his three disciples, and the horse all kowtowed to thank the Buddha, who ordered some of the guardians to take the horse to the Dragon-Transforming Pool at the back of the Spirit Mountain. After being pushed into the pool, the horse stretched himself, and in a little while he shed his coat, horns began to grow on his head, golden scales appeared all over his body, and silver whiskers emerged on his cheeks. His whole body shrouded in auspicious air and his four paws wrapped in hallowed clouds, he soared out of the pool and circled inside the monastery gate, on top of one of the Pillars that Support Heaven (Wu & Yu, 2012, vol. 4, p. 382). 長老四眾，俱各叩頭謝恩。馬亦謝恩訖。仍命揭諦引了馬，下靈山後崖化龍池邊，將馬推入池中。須臾間，那馬打個展身，即退了毛皮，換了頭角，渾身上長起金鱗，腮頷下生出銀鬚，一身瑞氣，四爪祥雲，飛出化龍池，盤繞在山門裡擎天華表柱上。

A huabiao pillar in Xinghai Square, Dalian City, Liaoning Province, China. Via Wikipedia.

A detail of the huabiao dragon finial. Via Wikipedia.

And lastly, JTTW refers to him as a bodhisattva:

I submit to the Bodhisattva of Vast Strength, the Heavenly Dragon of Eight Divisions of Supernatural Beings (Wu & Yu, 2012, vol. 4, p. 385). 南無八部天龍廣力菩薩。

So given this info, I don’t think he would be involved in a relationship.

Sources:

Buswell, R. E. , & Lopez, D. S. (2014). The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism. Princeton University Press.

Wu, C., & Yu, A. C. (2012). The Journey to the West (Vols. 1-4) (Rev. ed.). Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.

[fatehbaz]

On soil degradation and the use of non-native plants as weapons to change landscapes and sever cultural relationships to land; and on the dramatically under-reported but massive scale of anthropogenic environmental change wrought by early empires and “civilizations” in the Bronze Age, Iron Age, and ancient world (including the Fertile Crescent, Rome, and early China): I didn’t want to add to an already long post.

This is a Roman mosaic, from when Rome controlled Syria, depicting an elephant (presumably the Asian species, Elephas maximus) interacting with a tiger (the Caspian tiger, a distinct subspecies of tiger, lived in Mesopotamia, the shores of the Black Sea, and Anatolia up until the mid-1900s). This mosaic is striking to me, because I guess you could say that this is clear evidence of the higher biodiversity and more-dynamic ecology of the Fertile Crescent in the recent past, until expanding militarism and empire led to extensive devegetation. After all, does the popular consciousness really associate elephants and tigers with the modern-day eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia? Not really. But for the majority of human existence, lions, tigers, elephants, and cheetah were all living alongside each other in Mesopotamia. Pretty cool.

Anyway, I wanted to respond to this:

Which was in response to a thing I posted:

Pina: Thanks for the addition! I don’t know much about the technicality Rome’s devegetation of the Mediterranean periphery, but - like you - I’ve read some cool articles about it, and then forgotten to bookmark them. (I know that I have at least one good article in print form, about Roman devegetation; I’m going to try to find it.) I’m glad you mentioned it!

The first image is in the public domain and depicts a rhino-shaped ritual wine vessel made of bronze, from about 1100 to 1050 BC, during the Shang era. (The piece is housed at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.) The second image is another bronze wine vessel from a site in Shaanxi Province, this time inlaid with gold and hailing from later in history during the Western Han period, about 205 BC to 10 AD. (Photo by Wikimedia user Babel/Stone.) The rhinos in both of these pieces are depicted with two horns, meaning that they likely depict the Sumatran rhinoceros; this is corroborated by the existence of fossil remains of Sumatran rhinos from across China prior to 1000 AD.

On devegetation in the ancient world:

Yes, it feels like the ecological effects of empires prior to the Middle Ages are not just “under-discussed,” but dramatically overlooked. Some “quintessential and iconic African fauna” like lions and cheetahs lived throughout the Fertile Crescent, until devegetation during the late Bronze Age and, a few centuries later, the ascent of Rome. Caspian tigers (a distinct subspecies of tiger) also lived nearby, in Anatolia, the Caucasus, the shores of the Black Sea, and Persia - right up until the 20th century, in fact! (Other iconic species present on the periphery of ancient Mesopotamia were Asian elephants; leopards are still present.) Aside from the devegetation of the Fertile Crescent and the later landscape modifications of Rome, I also don’t see a lot of popular discussion (there is academic discussion, though, obviously) of ecological change in Zhou-era and early imperial China, either. While early Mesopotamia is famous for the amount of social prestige ascribed to irrigators and engineers, who were evidently essential to maintaining the domesticated crops so important to “hydraulic civilization,” early China (apparently) also revered irrigators and engineers. At least according to folklore and written histories, before the Han period, seasonal floods, especially in the Yangtze watershed, would regularly destroy human settlements. Also, there far more tigers, leopards, rhinos, and elephants present; rhinos and elephants lived as far north as the Yellow River until empire really expanded, and the animals lived as far north as the Yangtze River into the European Renaissance era. So, those people with the technical expertise to “tame the wilderness” by damming rivers or calming floodwaters were given prestige and sometimes treated as folk heroes. [Chinese history is not a subject that I really know a lot about. I’m just relaying the observations made in one of the better books on environmental history in East Asia, which is Mark Elvin’s The Retreat of the Elephants - 2006.]

------

On empires’ use of soil degradation to “sever connections to land” and “indirectly” destroy alternative or resisting cultures:

Seems that empire uses ecological degradation to enact a “severing of relations” (in Zoe Todd’s words). Basically: If you destroy somebody’s gardens, then they have to come to you to buy food. Furthermore, destroying someone’s connection to land will also harm their cultural traditions rooted in that land, eliminating a threat to the imperial cultural hegemony and erasing “alternative possibilities and futures” from the collective imaginary. (And destroying the imagination doesn’t just harm the invaded cultures, it also prevents the relatively privileged people living in the metropole or imperial core from “achieving consciousness” or whatever, wherein someone living in 150 AD Rome or 1890s New York City might imagine an alternative system and potentially dismantle the empire from within.)

It’s violence; destroying soil, cutting forests, it’s violence. But when empires destroy soil, they get to maintain a little bit of plausible deniability: “Ohhh, it’s not like we outright killed anybody, we just accidentally degraded the soil and now you can’t grow your own food. Damn, guess you have to rely on our market now, which also means you have to assimilate/integrate into our culture.”

Europe, the US, and the World Bank did this in West Africa after “independence.” They said “oh, yea, sure, we’ll formally liberate you from colonial rule.” But since the palm and sugar plantations were already installed, and many of the ungulate herds of the savanna had already been killed, what were new West African nations supposed to do? Miraculously resurrect the complex web of microorganism lifeforms in the soil? So what the US and its proxies are essentially doing is saying: “If you want loans, you have to keep the plantations and also install supermarkets to sell Coca-Cola.”

Todd: “The Anthropocene as the extension and enactment of colonial logic systematically erases difference, by way of genocide and forced integration and through projects of climate change that imply the radical transformation of the biosphere. Colonialism, especially settler colonialism – which in the Americas simultaneously employed the twinned processes of dispossession and chattel slavery – was always about changing the land, transforming the earth itself, including the creatures, the plants, the soil composition and the atmosphere.” [Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017.]

-----

On the use of non-native plants as a sort of “biological weapon”:

The use of non-native plants and agriculture to enforce colonization and empire is the whole focus of this influential book from Alfred Crosby. (I have some issues/criticisms of some of his work/theories, but his work is generally interesting.) Crosby popularized the term “neo-Europes,” and he proposes that European empires attempted to subjugate the native ecology of landscapes in Turtle Island, Latin America, Australia, etc., while attempting to introduce European species, cattle ranches, pastures, dairy farms, gardens, etc. in an effort to “recreate” a European landscape.

-----

Speaking of Rome’s devegetation of the Mediterranean: One of the famous cases of Roman devegetation that made the rounds recently was that of silphium. A couple of excerpts:

[From: The Original Seed Pod That May Have Inspired the Heart Shape This historical botanical theory has its roots in ancient contraceptive practices.” Cara Giaimo for Atlas Obscure, 13 February 2017.]

Silphium, which once grew rampant in the ancient Greek city of Cyrene, in North Africa, was likely a type of giant fennel, with crunchy stalks and small clumps of yellow flowers. From its stem and roots, it emitted a pungent sap that Pliny the Elder called “among the most precious gifts presented to us by Nature.”

According to the numismatist T.V. Buttrey, exports of the plant and its resins made Cyrene the richest city on the continent at the time. It was so valuable, in fact, that Cyrenians began printing it on their money. Silver coins from the 6th century B.C. are imprinted with images of the plant’s stalk -- a thick column with flowers on top and leaves sticking out -- and its seed pods, which look pretty familiar: 

[End of excerpt.]

Silphium is extinct now. There is a lot of conjecture about what, specifically, caused the extinction. But it looks like the expansion of Rome across the North African coast of the Mediterranean, and Rome’s development leading to soil degradation, is a likely cause.

-----

Thanks @pinabutterjam​  :3

The scale of ecological imperialism’s effects ... planetary, no escape. It’s exhausting.

[demi-shoggoth]

COVID-19 Reading Log

No idea if there’s any interest in this, but putting this out here.

With my vastly increased amount of time stuck at home (that is to say, all of it), it’s given me the opportunity to read more. And although I’m probably never going to catch up completely on my “To Read” pile, I have put a decent dent in it. So I will be periodically chronicling the books I have read. So far, in the last two and a half weeks, I have read...

1. Moths: A complete Guide to Biology and Behavior by David C. Lees and Alberto Zilli. Published by the Smithsonian, this book is lavishly illustrated with color photos depicting moth structures and behaviors. A good overview of the biology of Lepidoptera that aren’t butterflies (which are most of them). The copy came from the library with a neat little insert of errata, mostly for image captions and missing citations. Which suggests that the editorial process wasn’t as tidy as it could have been. The writing style is fluid and light for some decent technical detail. Some types of moths serve as possible inspiration for future monster—moths with tusks, caterpillars that stack their severed head capsules on their heads and use them as bludgeons, giant puss moth caterpillars with venomous hairs.

2. Hackmaster: Hacklopedia: Rustlers of the Night by Jolly R. Blackburn, et. al. A Hackmaster monster book I didn’t know existed until I found it used in a Half Price Books. It is a print on demand product only, and is a compilation of monsters from the back matter of the Knights of the Dinner Table comic book and a few modules. Size more like a trade paperback for a comic than it is for an RPG supplement. Creatures are the usual mix for Hackmaster—some conversions from AD&D, some gag monsters, some original creatures. Some toxic misogyny (the “gargirls”, or female gargoyles, are particularly bad). Lots of fire themed monsters—apparently from a City of Brass themed adventure. High concentration of good critters, especially in the back half. I will be converting plenty of these to Pathfinder.

3. When the Earth Had Two Moons by Erik Asphang. This one was a bit of a chore to get through. It’s about the early history of the solar system and how we know what we know. Some cool concepts and science are here. There are models of collisions between massive (planet sized) objects showing how they can warp, fuse or shear apart. The ideas of what conditions are like on the surface and below the surface of planets (both in our own solar system and outside of it) are captivating and weird. But the writing style is disorganized. Concepts are jumped back and forth between, and there’s no logical flow of ideas from one to the next. There are better books about astrophysics for lay readers out there, but it wasn’t exactly bad. Just not great.

4. What’s Eating You? by Eugene H. Kaplan. I honestly am not sure if I’ve already read this book and just forgotten about it, or if this is the first time. Books about parasites do tend to repeat the same anecdotes (Jewish grandmothers contracting fish tapeworm while preparing gefilte fish, the cycle of infection for Guinea worm, a personal connection to the ubiquitous pinworm). The most striking thing about the book are the illustrations—they are stippled and depict parasites, life history stages, and people infected with parasites. Many of the people are in homage to or parodies of classical art. The author’s attitude towards people living in developing countries seems paternalistic, which is an unpleasant running theme in the background of this book. Maybe skip this one—seek out Parasite Rex or People, Parasites and Plowshares for similar, better books.

5. The Wonders by John Woolf. The topic of the book is on the Victorian era and freak show performers. The main focus on the book is Charles Stratton, who performed under the name General Tom Thumb with PT Barnum. I suspect that the project started as a biography of Stratton, and then changed focus when the author realized he couldn’t find enough verifiable material for a full length book. Other performers who receive biographical information are Chang and Eng Bunker, who are the reason conjoined twins are still referred to as “Siamese Twins” to this day; Daniel Lambert, who influenced the depiction of John Bull as fat; Joice Heth, who was advertised by Barnum as the world’s oldest woman (and cruelly exploited—her chapters are difficult reading); and Julia Pastrana (whose manager was even crueler, and weirder, than Barnum). The writing flows well, and is highly empathetic to the performers. Parts of these stories are ones I’ve read before in other books, but Woolf has a good eye for detail and for connecting the people he writes about to the events of the era. The sexualization of non-normal bodies is covered extensively in the book. The sexualization of “Tom Thumb” when he was a child performer was especially alarming and troubling. Highly recommended—best book I’ve read so far in quarantine.

6. Life in the Dark by Danté Fenolio. This was a pleasant surprise. Specifically, that the book didn’t focus solely on abyssal life, which is what I expected going in. Other creatures adapted to low light environments, such as cave dwelling species, burrowers and even parasites are covered as well. It’s mostly a photo book, with captions describing the animals and their adaptations, but each chapter has a few pages of text introducing it. The photography is uniformly excellent, and the book sent me down a few rabbit holes looking up the interrelatedness of different groups of fish. My only complaint is the final chapter—chapters on the need for conservation work are de rigueur in books about the natural world these days, but the text in this one is somewhat overwrought (and the last photograph, of a sunset over the ocean, doesn’t help matters).

7. Skeleton Keys by Riley Black, writing as Brian Switek. This is a book I’ve been meaning to read for some time. The book is about skeletons—the evolution of the vertebrate skeleton, the structure of the human skeleton and the cultural significance of it. It is heavily informed by the real world events surrounding it. As the header implies, Black came out as trans shortly after writing the book (the second, paperback edition calls Brian Switek her “pen name”). The idea of “osteological sex” correlated with pelvis shape is strongly stressed in the text as not the same thing as either sex or gender, and references exist to gender identity and personal perception when referring to people both ancient and modern. Black is a good writer—I’ve enjoyed all of her books. I would have preferred the book be illustrated, though. The only illustrations in the book are chapter plates borrowed from public domain osteology texts. I understand the practical considerations, but it’s slightly disappointing. Still, definitely recommended.

8. Monster, She Wrote by Lisa Kröger and Melanie R. Anderson. This is not exactly the book I was expecting. The subtitle is “the women who pioneered horror and speculative fiction”. I was expecting a series of short biographical sketches of a dozen or so earlier writers in those genres; something more like the approach to the various performers in The Wonders. Instead, it covers a few dozen women, from Margaret Cavendish to the modern day. And while it does give some biographical information, it is much more a recommended reading list than anything else. Fun, but I was hoping for something more substantive.

9. Invasive Plants by Sylvan Ramsey Kaufman and Wallace Kaufman. It’s a field guide. The photographs are nice, but it’s a field guide, so not exactly gripping reading. What struck me the most was how many of the plants covered I recognized from my backyard growing up. The authors are on the East Coast (in Maryland), and the East and South get a bit more attention than other parts of the country. As someone who is intimately familiar with some of the invasive plants of California, some that weren’t in the book (Sahara mustard and ice plant especially) struck me as notable omissions. It was cool to see references to plants I’ve worked on and scientists I’ve worked with in the sources.

10. Life through the Ages II by Mark Witton. This is a loose sequel to Charles Knight’s Life through the Ages; it’s designed to be a look at the state of paleoart and paleontology in the early 21th century, the way Knight’s book was a look at the ideas of the mid-20th century. The paintings in the book are gorgeous and well-informed, as Witton’s work generally is. About half of them have appeared on his blog in various forms previously, but some of the best are debuting here. Some of the paintings that stand out the most to me are a very grand stromatolite; an Atropodenatus howling at a suggestively shaped rock that strikes me as being influenced by Bradbury’s “The Fog Horn” and Harryhausen’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms; an Opthamalosaurus swimming by a coastline studded with dead trees that look much like the decaying columns of an ancient civilization; a Georgiacetus mother watching over her calf rolling around on a rocky shore; and a Neanderthal family protecting their curious child from getting too close to a wooly mammoth.  

[sunshineandsisyphus]

I don't know if this is the right thing to ask or anything, but I'm new to worshipping the God's. Is it okay if I can't give them offerings ofter or at all? Is it okay if my prayers are short and to all of them) I haven't found a specific God/Goddess that connects yet like everyone else seems to have) basically do you think you can give a few tips to a newcomer? It's okay if you can't.

Of course I can, I’m always happy to give tips! To your question about the offerings, it’s absolutely ok if you can’t give physical offerings. There are a lot of really subtle ways that you can offer things to the Theoi. Like to sing in the car or at home? You can offer your voice to Apollo. Cooking something? Offer the act of cooking to Hestia. This blog in and of itself is one of the ways I give offerings, e-shrines are relative popular, especially among worshippers who can’t have a physical altar for any reason. Sometimes I’ll offer a portion of whatever I’m eating to the gods just in my head, then eat it on their behalf. And even if none of that is possible for any reason, the Theoi will still love you. They understand that we’re only human and that we can’t be perfect because of the inherent limitations of our species. You don’t have to do full rituals every time you want to think about them, even just seeing a pretty flower and thinking of Persephone or someone else are ways to show your love and devotion.

As for prayers, it’s absolutely ok if they’re short. I’m not a terribly poetic person, so while I’ll occasionally write longer prayers for a specific god if the mood strikes me, more often than not, my prayers tend to be informal and short, and I haven’t been smote yet. Mad respect to the people who do have beautiful and complex prayers for each interaction with a god, but it’s by no means a requirement. For the prayers being to the entire pantheon rather than a specific diety, that’s also completely ok, especially when you’re still learning about them. As you develop more relationships with the Theoi and learn more about their domains, you might start to pray to specific gods for specific things, but to offer up a prayer of general respect and praise to all of them is perfectly ok.

There seems to be an attitude on tumblr that it’s important that you develop deep relationships with certain gods quickly, and while a lot of Hellenic polytheists do feel drawn to one god or goddess in particular, it’s a big pantheon. You don’t have to have everything figured out, especially not right away. No one started out on this path knowing exactly how it would end up. Be adaptable to change. It’s also not necessary to be called to a specific diety in order to worship them. I have particularly close relationships to Apollo and Hermes, and while Hermes found me, I actively sought out the relationship with Apollo without him ever initiating contact. This religion is a two-way street: sometimes the gods find us and sometimes we find them. If you want to focus more on certain Theoi, you can choose who without being specifically called, but you also don’t have to do that. You don’t have to find a specific god or goddess that you connect with, and to not have any specific god or goddess does not make you any less of a Hellenic polytheist than anyone else.

The best tips I can offer are research and open-mindedness. There is so much to this religion. It has an incredibly rich mythos and there’s always something new you can learn. Theoi.com is a great resource online, and Edith Hamilton’s book on mythology is a really good read. The more you know about the gods, the more likely you are to notice them in your everyday life, which brings me to my second point. Be open-minded. Rarely do the gods do what we expect them to do. They can present themselves in so many little ways in our day to day lives that we may not even notice. Watch your surroundings. Take a walk through the woods and just listen. Sit outside and feel the sun and the breeze. Go to a public place and see the people going about their lives, maybe laughing, maybe crying, but all living. Every moment that we have is a gift from the gods, and they want you to enjoy the beautiful world that they’ve given us. Let them be present in your life and they’ll come.

I definitely don’t have all the answers, and be skeptical of anyone who says that they do. Religion is a very individualized undertaking, so trust yourself and your intuition. Best of luck on your journey down this path. If you have any more questions, my ask box is always open 💙

[go-diane-winchester]

Why Misha chose destiel

One heller was very affronted that I was critical of Misha.  Now, on Tumblr there are many anti tags.  Jensen has one.  Jared has one.  Even little Jack Kline, poor baby, has one.  Only the Misha fans demand passionately, as to how we could possibly see anything wrong with this ''smol bean''.  They are very shocked with others for having an anti-Misha tag.  And they get angry with me for not using the anti-Misha tag and blasting his bad behavior in the public domain.  Why should there not be an anti-Misha tag?  And why must you go in there, read all the posts and then complain?  And why must you complain to me about not using the anti-tags?  Hellers are very confusing people.  Anywho, this one, who thinks Misha is ready for sainthood, sent me many messages about a post where I exposed another heller for going into the anti-tags and hijacking the post.  That post is called ''Looking for negativity in the anti-tags and screeching when you find it''.  You can read her drivel there.  This is one of the messages. 

Why is heller hate Misha's fault?

Misha has been on the show for ten years.  In those ten years, Jensen never told him about NJCon?  He never told Misha about Jaxcon?  He never told Misha about the incessant shipping questions that he deals with.  Misha never asked J2 why there is no shipping and sexuality questions allowed at cons?  Really?  I think he did.  And I think Misha said the same thing heller snowflakes say.  "But Jensen, if you don't go along they will call you a bigot."  And they do.  They kicked up such a fuss about it, and mass media became aware of it.  Universities are aware of it.  Jensen's reputation is in tatters.  So Jensen [Misha's best friend, apparently] never told him about the homophobia accusations.  What kind of a person lets his friend roast on a spit like that, but still saying things like this to incite his filthy goons ''Jensen and I don't write much destiel because we live it''.  Oh, it's so funny.  Misha is such a kidder, right? 

One weird thing I noticed about Misha is that he never distracts from destiel.  Even when he was asked about Megstiel, he said two things.  First ''Meg is the only one who ever flirted with Cas, well other than Dean'' [This is queer baiting]  and second ''Cas has eyes only for Dean''.  He actively killed the Megstiel idea despite the fact that it was his only legitimate canon ship, in favor of a non-canon ship.  What a stupid thing to do?  Why would you do that, if you don't have any agenda?  I have noticed he never pushes sastiel, his only other pairing, unless Jared is on stage with him, flirting with him, in good fun.  Because, with Jared right in front of him, he cant push any destiel and he cant ignore sastiel.  But when he is by himself, he doesn't like to push sastiel.  And I always wondered why.  I mean, Jared is sexually a little more brave than Jensen.  Jared is certainly more touchy-feely than Jensen.  Jared is more likely to kiss another guy on the mouth and not blush about it the way Jensen would.  If Misha had pushed sastiel and not destiel, I think Jared would be less shy in helping to make it canon.  Jensen is shy and no, that is not homophobia.

So why not push sastiel.  I think its because when Misha first came to the show.  J2 and wincest were the big pairings.  If he wanted to create a niche, he had to choose one J or the other.  Although,  he stumbled onto destiel first because that is what he said.  But then when you realize that there is another better ship available with a less shy co-star, why not take that one?  Why take the abrasive, difficult one who doesn't want to be touched?  Misha angers me but I would never call him stupid.  He is not stupid.  He was smart enough to intern at the white house.  So the guy is an idiot.  If he goes up against one J, he is essentially competing with the other.  Even though I protect both my boys equally, I am going to do something that the stans will hate.  I am going to pick up faults in the Js.  Just bear with me okay.  I have to do this.  Besides, no human being is flawless.  Jensen is extremely standoffish.  His personality is a litte cold with people he considers strangers.  However, between the two Js, he is the one that has the most recognition in his field.  Jensen has collected many nominations and awards during his acting career than Jared has.  Jared has equal footing with Misha.  Jared and Misha have the same amount of accolades attached to their acting careers. 

Dean is a louder, far more showier character than Sam is.  In fact, despite being of different ''species'', personality-wise Sam and Castiel are very similar.  Jared suffers from clinical depression, and as someone who suffers from a similar condition, I know something obscure about our types.  We are sometimes disheveled creatures.  Unlike Jensen who is healthier and always makes an appearance, with every strand of hair in place, Jared is sometimes completely untidy and wears a beanie.  Sometimes his clothing looks creased.  I can actually gauge how healthy he is during a panel, just by looking at his attire.  Misha is probably not aware of this.  And this is not a critique of his view on mental health.  Although I have receipts of his hellers mocking mental health.  Between the two Js, Jensen is the one who is difficult to compete with, because Misha is going to have to compete with his acting, his character and his looks.  Jared [and by extension Sam] is an easier option. 

Did they discuss destiel in private?

That is a good question.  Have anyone on staff ever discussed destiel.  Because the only one who seems enthusiastic about it, is Misha.  When Jensen was asked but the Dean Cas dynamic at a previous Jib panel, he said that there have not been that many Dean Cas scenes, which he enjoyed, because he felt the Dean Cas thing was getting out of proportion, and he knew he and Misha didn't play their characters like that.  When Misha was notified of this, he exclaimed ''that motherf*cker''.  So you tell me.  Why the discrepancy?  Why is Jensen saying one thing and when Misha is confronted with it, he reacts terribly.  Oh but he's just joking right? 

Misha was told that there was no need to entertain shipping questions.  He waves that rule during his panel and I have noticed at the recent Denvercon, that nobody asked him about destiel so he nonchalantly mentions Cockles.  Why would you do that, but when you are asked a destiel question, you call the shippers perverts?  You are the one encouraging them.  He doesn't respect the destiel shippers.  He uses them to keep him relevant.  What do the other people affiliated with Supernatural say?  Look at their tweets.  Jim Michaels, Guy Norman Bee, Adam Glass, Eric Kripke, Chad Kennedy, Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles all say that there is no destiel.  The only one who says otherwise is Misha Collins.  When Samantha Smith was asked about destiel, she didn't acknowledge it and the fans attacked her on twitter.  Didn't she notify Misha of this?  She kept it to herself?  For what?  The only person who doesn't amend or dispute destiel [as far as I know] is Bob Singer, a slithering snake in the grass, and Sera Gamble's hugest headache whilst she was the show runner.

Does Misha enjoy any harassment that is caused by his meddling?

I have receipts of abusive tweets sent to Jared where he was also tagged.  Jared doesn't respond.  There may be two reasons.  Firstly, unlike Misha, Jared is a full time actor of Supernatural.  He simply doesn't have the time to look through thousands of tweets per day.  I have receipts of Misha reading his tweets and responding to them.  Another equally feasible reason might be that Jared [and I know my condition so I can vouch for this one] has no control over his mouth.  Even though he has the full right to call out bad customer services, there are other tweets that I acknowledge that he shouldn't have sent.  Jared is one of my babies.  But I can acknowledge when he has put himself in a difficult situation.  That is why he constantly says that Jensen tells him ''Dude, you are better than this''.  Jensen even said during a panel ''don't just acknowledge that you will do wrong.  Learn from your mistakes.''  I think Jensen sat Jared down and spoke to him about this.  I think Jared listened because apparently, Jared's online activity has dropped dramatically since.  Personally, I think people like Jared and me shouldn't be on twitter etc.  Its not good for us.  Studies show that SM actually exacerbates depression. 

Jared said, at a recent con, that he is aware that he cant please everyone, so he wont.  I am happy to hear that, because it means heller's online taunts are not messing him up the way they used to.  The biggest proof of Misha's awareness of the situation is William Shatner.  Shatner tweeted that Jared is aware of fans who want him off the show.  Shatner called them out as destiel shippers, and boy did the hellers converge on him for it.  Receipts are on other posts.  So Shatner is friends with Misha, he even participated in Gishwhes, and knows the truth which he blasted on a media outlet, and despite following Shatner and Jared, Misha still doesn't know any of this? Really?  Shatner never spoke to Misha about this?   

So Misha follows Jensen on Twitter, but didn't get an inkling of the filth being spewed at Jensen, only by Misha's fans, because Jensen said Destiel doesn't exist at Jaxcon?  So he read nothing?  And Jensen didn't tell him?  But they are supposed to be good friends, right?  Wouldn't you tell your best friend that you were being bullied by his fans?  What kind of friendship is that?  When Jensen broke down behind the scenes at Jibcon, when he met a fan [that is the officlal explanation] Misha witnessed it, so why would he bring up the same topic when Jensen is on stage, already emotionally fragile.  And then he sits there and watches Jensen fall apart.  It happened in front of his face, backstage.  Why would he pick up the topic again when he is onstage?  If you are such a loving, caring person [and destiel is cockle's fault apparently] why would you do something that heartless.  Fans, including myself, were angry that Daniela came on stage, and poured them brimming glasses of whisky.  She never did that before, to my knowledge.  They had always poured their own drinks and never so much. 

Some people guesstimate that Daniela shipped destiel too, which is why Jibcon was such a ''dance monkey dance'' type of environment.  Remember Misha's fake orgasm and the Hitch dialogue reading.  They didn't choose that.  Jibcon is planned the way it is.  That is probably why 6 months after Jaxcon, Jensen wasn't looking forward to the panel, and he fell apart as soon as it arrived.  Either Daniela poured them alcohol to make Jensen lose his inhibitions more, or she could see that he was tense and wanted him to loosen up.  We may never know because after so many years of Jibcon being seen as a destiel con [a perception she never corrected] after Jensen broke down on stage and Jared cut the panel short, suddenly Jibcon was never a destiel con.  Suddenly she banned shipping questions at Jibcon.  Suddenly the Cockles panel became the J2M panel.  I think Jared told her off after the last Cockles panel.  So suddenly she is neutral now.  And Misha saw none of this?  Really?  He must be the dumbest person ever to have all this happening around him, that he doesn't know.  So he doesn't follow Daniela online?  He didn't see the fighting?  Stop making excuses for him.

[phroyd]

I don’t really have heroes, but if I did, Noam Chomsky would be at the top of my list. Who else has achieved such lofty scientific and moral standing? Linus Pauling, perhaps, and Einstein. Chomsky’s arguments about the roots of language, which he first set forth in the late 1950s, triggered a revolution in our modern understanding of the mind. Since the 1960s, when he protested the Vietnam War, Chomsky has also been a ferocious political critic, denouncing abuses of power wherever he sees them. Chomsky, who turns 90 on December 7, remains busy. He spent last month in Brazil speaking out against far-right politician Jair Bolsonaro, and he recently discussed the migrant caravan on the radio show “Democracy Now.” Chomsky, whom I first interviewed in 1990 (see my profile here), has had an enormous influence on my scientific and political views. His statement that we may always "learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology” could serve as an epigraph for my most recent book, Mind-Body Problems. Below he responds to my emailed questions with characteristic clarity and force. -- John Horgan

Do you ever chill out?

Would rather skip personal matters.

Your ideas about language have evolved over the decades. In what ways, if any, have they remained the same?

Some of the earliest assumptions, then tentative and only partially formed, have proven quite robust, among them that the human language capacity is a species property in a double sense: virtually uniform among humans apart from serious pathology, and unique to humans in its essential properties.  The most basic property of the language faculty is that each internal language generates an unbounded array of structured expressions, each of which yields an interpretation at the interface with other cognitive systems (basically a linguistically-articulated thought) and can be externalized in some sensorimotor system, usually speech, in ways that allow others to access our thoughts – a property of language that Galileo and his contemporaries rightly regarded with awe and wonder.  Basic ideas about the mechanisms that have these remarkable properties have also proven fairly stable, though there has been great progress in refining them and reducing them to principles simple enough to provide sound explanations for many surprising aspects of language and to suggest a plausible evolutionary scenario.  From the outset, 65 years ago, the languages investigated closely were typologically varied, and in tandem with theoretical advances inquiry has proceeded to unprecedented typological range and depth.

Your claims about the innateness of language helped inspire evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics, which attempt to trace human thought behavior to their biological roots. And yet you’ve been critical of these fields. Why?

Not so much of the fields, which are surely legitimate and important, but of some of the practices within them.

You once said we will probably “always learn more about human life and human personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” Is that still your view?

Another thought that has proven robust.

John Ioannidis and other scholars have discovered that many peer-reviewed scientific claims cannot be replicated. Do you have an explanation, and possible cure, for the so-called replication crisis?

Nothing beyond the obvious.  Sometimes failure of replication has to do with complexity of what is being studied and with inadequate tools and ideas.  The intense pressure to publish and sometimes ugly competitiveness are other factors.  As compared with other domains, the scientific culture is quite admirable I think, though hardly without flaws that can and should be corrected.

Do you take seriously the Singularity, the idea that artificial intelligence and other fields will soon radically transform humanity?

One can certainly imagine how, in principle, systems that can detect patterns with massive data processing might find hitherto unknown ways of constructing theories that surpass those within the reach of human intelligence.  And that could have all sorts of effects.  But among the concerns we face, this doesn’t seem to me to rank high.  Even tasks mastered almost reflexively by infants are far beyond the capacities of contemporary AI.

In his recent book Enlightenment Now, your former MIT colleague Steven Pinker argues that life has gotten better and better, morally and materially, and he scolds other intellectuals for knocking western civilization. What's your view of his perspective?

I don’t find these broad-brush observations very helpful or informative.  The devil is in the details.

There is work on these matters that seems to me much more compelling.  In his very important study on the rise and fall of American growth, Robert Gordon observes that there was virtually no economic growth for millennia until 1770, slow growth for another century, and then a “special century” until 1970, dependent largely on specific inventions.  Since the 1970s the picture is much more mixed: in the US, with actual decline in real wages for non-supervisory workers over 40 years and even increased death rates in recent years.  These are among the features of the neoliberal era that have led to the rise of the kind of “morbid symptoms” that Gramsci warned about from Mussolini’s prison cell, as we see all too clearly in the western world today.  Elsewhere we find different patterns.  Thus Russia suffered severe economic decline and demographic collapse when market reforms were introduced in the ‘90s.  China has been different again.  As Amartya Sen has shown, Maoist China saved about 100 million people – not a small number – as compared with democratic capitalist India from independence to 1980, not from “enlightenment” in the usual sense, but from rural health programs and other reforms.  And since then it has undergone spectacular growth and provided the bulk of the reduction in global poverty, in a society that’s not a model of enlightened values.  Nazi Germany experienced very rapid growth in the ‘30s, not a triumph of enlightenment.  There are numerous other complexities that are of major significance, but that disappear in unanalyzed statistical tables.

As for “moral growth,” there are even greater complexities.  The American Revolution introduced the novel and important idea (put aside the fact) that “we the people” should take control of our fate –- and at the same time developed the most vicious system of slavery in human history, the foundation of much of US-British wealth and economic development.   Or take Germany again.  In the 1920s, it was at the peak of western civilization in the arts, the sciences and mathematics, and even political development, regarded as a model of democracy.  Ten years later it was descending to the depths of human savagery.  A decade later it was recovering what had been lost.

As for the Enlightenment and modern science, no serious analyst can question their major achievements – or overlook their role in the age of discovery that brought untold horrors to much of the world, devastating the Western Hemisphere and Africa, crushing the leading world centers of civilization in India and China.

With all that, a good case can be made I think that moral horizons are, overall, slowly widening, including recent years, when the activism of the ‘60s has had a considerable civilizing effect in many areas.

Pinker, Richard Wrangham and Edward Wilson have suggested that human males are innately warlike. Do you agree? Can humanity move past militarism once and for all?

Since humans (males and females) are sometimes warlike, it follows that their intrinsic nature permits this outcome under certain circumstances.  Under other circumstances they prefer peace – normally I think.  But it’s highly misleading to say that they are “innately warlike” or “innately peaceloving.” I don’t know of any argument showing that we cannot create circumstances under which warlike tendencies will be suppressed – as has often been the case in history.

Are you a pacifist? Is violence sometimes justified in pursuit of justice?

Not an absolute pacifist.  I didn’t object to entering World War II after Japan attacked military bases in two virtual colonies and Germany declared war, and in fact thought that the US should have intervened more forcefully before.  But it’s also worth bearing in mind that the Nazi plague could have been contained before it led to war.

Why did you recently call the Republican Party “the most dangerous organization in world history”?

Take its leader, who recently applied to the government of Ireland for a permit to build a huge wall to protect his golf course, appealing to the threat of global warming, while at the same time he withdrew from international efforts to address the grim threat and is using every means at his disposal to accelerate it.  Or take his colleagues, the participants in the 2016 Republican primaries.  Without exception, they either denied that what is happening is happening – though any ignorance is self-induced – or said maybe it is but we shouldn’t do anything about it.  The moral depths were reached by the respected “adult in the room,” Ohio governor John Kasich, who agreed that it is happening but added that “we are going to burn [coal] in Ohio and we are not going to apologize for it.” Or take a recent publication of Trump’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, a detailed study recommending an end to regulations on emissions. It presented a rational argument: extrapolating current trends, by the end of the century we’ll be over the cliff and automotive emissions don’t contribute very much to the catastrophe – the assumption being that everyone is as criminally insane as we are and won’t try to avoid the crisis.  In brief, let’s rob while the planet burns, putting poor Nero in the shadows.

This surely qualifies as a contender for the most evil document in history.

There have been many monsters in the past, but it would be hard to find one who was dedicated to undermining the prospects for organized human society, not in the distant future -- in order to put a few more dollars in overstuffed pockets.

And it doesn’t end there. The same can be said about the major banks that are increasing investments in fossil fuels, knowing very well what they are doing.  Or, for that matter, the regular articles in the major media and business press reporting US success in rapidly increasing oil and gas production, with commentary on energy independence, sometimes local environmental effects, but regularly without a phrase on the impact on global warming – a truly existential threat.  Same in the election campaign.  Not a word about the issue that is merely the most crucial one in human history.

Hardly a day passes without new information about the severity of the threat.  As I’m writing, a new study appeared in Nature showing that retention of heat in the oceans has been greatly underestimated, meaning that the total carbon budget is much less than had been assumed in the recent, and sufficiently ominous, IPCC report. The study calculates that maximum emissions would have to be reduced by 25% to avoid warming of 2 degrees (C), well above the danger point.  At the same time polls show that -- doubtless influenced by their leaders who they trust more than the evil media -- half of Republicans deny that global warming is even taking place, and of the rest, almost half reject any human responsibility.  Words fail.

Wasn’t Richard Nixon worse than Donald Trump?

Nixon had a mixed record.  In some respects, he was the last liberal president: OSHA and EPA for example.  On the other hand, he committed terrible crimes.  Arguably the worst was the bombing of rural Cambodia, a proposed article of impeachment but voted down though it was incomparably more important than the others.  And the article was much too weak, focusing on the secrecy.  There has been little attention to the orders that Nixon delivered, relayed to the Pentagon by his faithful servant Henry Kissinger: “A massive bombing campaign in Cambodia. Anything that flies on anything that moves.” It is not easy to find comparable orders for genocide in the archival record.  But all of Nixon’s crimes pale in comparison with the decision to race towards the precipice of environmental catastrophe.

Are the U.S. media doing their job?

It depends on what we think their job is.  They are businesses, so by accepted standards their job is profit.  By other standards, they have a duty to the public to provide “all the news that’s fit to print,” under a concept of “fitness” that is as free as possible from submission to power interests or other distorting factors.  About this there is a great deal to say – I’ve devoted many words to the topic elsewhere, as have many others.  But in today’s strange climate of Trumpian “alternative facts” and “false reality,” it is useful to recognize that with all their flaws, which are many, the mainstream media remain an indispensable source of information about the world.

Can incremental reforms transform the U.S. into a just, prosperous society, or are more drastic measures required? In other words, are you a reformer or a revolutionary?

Both.  Generalizations are misleading; too much depends on specific circumstances.  But some have a fair degree of validity, I think. One is that there is both justification and pressing need for radical changes in the socioeconomic and political orders.  We cannot know to what extent they can be achieved by incremental reforms, which are to be valued on their own.  But unless the great mass of the population comes to believe that needed change cannot be implemented within the existing system, resort to “drastic measures” is likely to be a recipe for disaster.

My students are pretty gloomy about the future. What can I tell them to cheer them up?

Apart from the truly existential threats of nuclear war and global warming – which can be averted – there have been far more difficult challenges in the past than those young people face today, and they have been overcome by dedicated effort and commitment.  The historical record of struggle and achievement gives ample reason to take to heart the slogan that Gramsci made famous: “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”

What’s your utopia?

I don’t have the talent to do more than to suggest what seem to me reasonable guidelines for a better future.  One might argue that Marx was too cautious in keeping to only a few general words about post-capitalist society, but he was right to recognize that it will have to be envisioned and developed by people who have liberated themselves from the bonds of illegitimate authority.

Phroyd

[chamrosh]

I think the most important issue before us with Article 13 now is exactly what the definition they use of copyrighted material is, and exactly what level of nuance is given to it. It’s a vital issue.

The worst is not likely. The worst is never the most likely, but it is always a possibility that requires considering. All decisions should be made with the worst in mind, and with the very worst that one might think of as a possibility being used; is this cost worth the possibility of this gain? If you cannot ask that of yourself with the very worst in mind, you should not be deciding. I see no gain. Plagiarisers will continue to find loopholes, and it will cost more to copyright holders through the loss of positive expression about their goods, and the added costs through article 11 to any form of advertising, than piracy ever did, and piracy will not be the majority of what is stopped. And yet-

If the worst case comes to pass - 

If the definition is an extreme definition -

Are we not allowed to describe trademarks? Company names are copyrighted. How will advertisements work? Surely the MEPs know that internet companies will all collapse without advertisements? But there won’t be an ability to advertise because the company name must be mentioned, and that will be copyrighted, if the definition is an extreme definition. 

There’s a few Polynesian alleles that are copyrighted by US health corporations. Yep, you heard that right. Actual living people’s DNA is copyrighted by something other than themselves. If we’re not allowed to post anything containing copyrighted material... well, can Polynesian people no longer reference their background? Can they not send selfies of themselves, or have pictures taken of them, because their genes are copyrighted and they’re distributing copyrighted material by showing their likeness?

If human DNA can be copyrighted from one heritage, an abomination in itself, might it not be more generally? Do plastic surgery companies own the bodies of those they help, by copyright, due to holding the patents of their techniques? If so, trans people would be restricted in just the same way; alongside anyone who had surgery to lose weight, anyone who had an injury that required surgery to repair their faces, and anyone who just wanted to do the entirely innocent act of a nose-job for their self-confidence.

Might everyone’s bodies be copyrighted already? Might all our likenesses already be owned? And if each person has any part of their body patented, and a bot spots it... and we used that person as reference... well, there’s no use for making art any more. If bodies can be patented, and, as said below, plants can be, what else is there for us to draw that no company will copyright and enforce their copyright? And just the same for writing, for performance, for composing, for singing, for public speech - everything that goes online in any form.

There might be nothing left for us to express ourselves with at all. And at that point, no creative personal will stay. They will be eliminated; through crush of resolve (creating a generation of miserable factory workers, that which our school system so desires), through emigration, and, most likely, by their own despair. Europe, like so much of the world, has a rich history of writing, of poetry, of music, of art, of all creative pursuits. And yet. And yet, a whole generation of creative types will be silenced. Many generations if it is unchanged. All generations if nothing changes. The pleasure in Wordsworth, the beauty of Mozart, the art of Da Vinci - every important creative person’s work throughout our long and rich histories... gone. No more. Ne’er to be repeated. 

Companies have already copyrighted many, and they will stand unopposed. We will not be able to distribute that which has any copyright. We will not be able to access the heritage or our ancestors, and what can make all of us so proud to be a member of each of our countries. In effect, all the history of Europe will be erased. We will be a super-state with no history recognised by any. And history knows, and our neighbours in Asia know how that ends.

Have you ever wondered why tv shows use progressively stupider terms for zombies and superheroes? Because the terms are copyrighted. We will no have access to basic tropes in fiction, because the concepts are copyrighted. We will not be able to write stories, draw art, make any sort of creative medium, that expresses these concepts or uses them.

Quinoa is copyrighted, and the crackdown on copyright worldwide has already resulted in millions of Peruvian people starving to death as two US individuals are the only ones allowed to distribute its trade, while their cultures have been dependent on it for thousands of years. They have no ability to trade it anymore, and without that, millions of people either can’t get the food needed to survive, or can’t get the money to afford the food needed to survive. Entire species can be copyrighted. Will no one be able to show pictures of their food that contain such species? Broiler hen breeds are copyrighted. Will people not be able to show pictures of their dinners when they go out? Will they not be able to post recipes, due to having to use broiler hens to make them? Will people who have hens as pets not be able to show pictures of them online? The same goes for goats, for sheep, for cows... for all livestock. Will farmers not be able to run their websites due to not being allowed to show any of their crops online?

The song “Happy Birthday” is copyrighted. And because a bot would pick out that phrase, would we not be able to send each other basic greetings? Would we need to find more and more obscure references to that term as the bots slowly learned them?

Disney tried to copyright “Day of the Dead” before releasing Coco. Would we not be able to mention our traditional festivals and activities because companies can copyright them?

Sony has copyrighted many of Bach’s pieces; a US company (there’s a running theme here) copyrighting a German-born English-citizen’s music, who died 300 years before their copyright claim. Works fall into the public domain, generally, after about 70 years, without their continual reuse. And yet when a company comes along and takes them out, no one is allowed to use them again; look at Disney’s track record! Works that are public now and anyone can use as a means for something that might be easy to find and recognise our creativity by can be snapped up, hundreds of years later, and all rights to use them removed. And those rights won’t be returned for decades. If Disney made a film now about Jack and the Beanstalk, an EU citizen would now lose the right to draw beans, to draw beanstalks, to draw boys named jack, to draw giants, to draw hens, to draw cows, to draw anything being bartered in a market, to write, to talk, to sing, to express at all our opinions about any of these... for anything up to 100 years.

Would a person who protests article 13 and finds a way around it - by using other languages, by using over technical terms, by encrypting, by hiding, by speaking in code - would they be seen as criminals for wanting some way to speak freely? Would they be seen as accomplices to criminals, due to them “disregarding the law” or some such nonsense? Would using Tor, or a VPN be seen as a sign of a master criminal?

If we set up our means now, how might we not be seen as criminals then?

The ammendment claimed that it would only affect sites run for profit... but wouldn’t any site large enough to make a meaningful composium of our free speech necessitate being for profit? Server space is not free. Server space needs funding, whether by advertising, by subscriptions, or by any other witty means and as soon as it has that funding, it is for profit. As soon as a site becomes able to host anything meaningful, it will be taken away from us, as it will need to make profit, and we will not be allowed to post on it.

We will not be allowed to give our opinions on anything. Doesn’t any serious critique need the ability to reference material directly? How would we be supposed to describe what we even like about a property - a factor that will bring in more revenue for the big companies that this article is designed to protect, and will be stopped entirely if bots are left as our police force, judge, jury, and executioner - without being able to quote from it? Let me restate that, for emphasis; we will be banned from doing activities that allow companies to make profit, because the companies are scared of not making profit. And, at the same time, if something is awful, and it is causing genuine harm, and is legitimately hate speech - we will not be able to comment. We will be silenced, because to prove that they made hate speech will require them to be quoted, and their words are automatically copyrighted as soon as they phrase them.

And how are we meant to be able to formulate opinions properly if we don’t have the ability to share our opinions? That is to say, how are we meant to find out enough information to make informed decisions if we are cut off from sharing what we know and contributing to a hive of knowledge and conversation which allows us to make considered decisions? We won’t be able to discuss things politicians have said, we won’t be able to point out discrepancies and lies and nonsense, and we won’t be able to vote. We won’t be able to make the decisions needed as a precursor to voting. We won’t have access to the information needed for us to make any meaningful protest against the system.

Might this not be exactly what our governments want?

Passive sheep who allow them to be in power permanently, castrating what passes for democracy now entirely? Passive robots with no opinions of their own?

I have not even mentioned the effect this will have on citizens of other areas, but rest assured, you will know.

And when the day comes, and we have had our tongues stripped from our skulls and our eyes blindfolded to the world around us, we will not be able to help anyone else.

If the worst case comes to pass.

If the definition is an extreme definition.

There is no internet, and no future for millions of young people who will not live in the dystopia that we are barreling towards.

If the worst case comes to pass.

If the definition is an extreme definition.

We may as well start speaking New Speak now. This is double plus un good, I desire this stops double plus fast ly. Look at me exercising my right to reference now. I won’t have that route of critique open to me in a season’s time, just like Orwell warned.

If the worst case comes to pass.

If the definition is an extreme definition.

This is no longer a human rights issue. We will not be seen as people any longer. We will be robots. And no one cares about the rights of robots.

[sciencespies]

A Dictionary of Science Fiction Runs From Afrofuturism to Zero-G

https://sciencespies.com/nature/a-dictionary-of-science-fiction-runs-from-afrofuturism-to-zero-g/

A Dictionary of Science Fiction Runs From Afrofuturism to Zero-G

In the summer of 1987, movie audiences first met Robocop in the science fiction classic about violence and corrupt corporate power in a future, dystopian Detroit. But the title word is much older than that, going back at least to a 1957 short story by writer Harlan Ellison, in which a tentacled “robocop” pursues a character. The prefix “robo-,” in turn, dates at least to 1945, when Astounding Science Fiction published a story by A.E. van Vogt mentioning “roboplanes” flying through the sky. “Robo-,” of course, comes from “robot,” a word created by Czech author Karel Čapek in his 1920 play R.U.R.: Rossum’s Universal Robots, about synthetic humans created to perform drudge work who eventually rebel, destroying humanity.

This is the kind of rabbit hole a reader can go down in the Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction, a resource decades in the making that is now available to the public in an accessible form. Lexicographer Jesse Sheidlower started the project years ago, when he was an editor at the Oxford English Dictionary.

The OED is the best-known historical dictionary in the English-speaking world, and Sheidlower notes that it was also a crowdsourcing project long before the internet made it easy. When it was just starting out in the 19th century, he says, the OED put ads in literary magazines looking for volunteers to hunt around old books in search of particular words and their usage.

“People would mark up books, send in the notes,” he says. “To this day, it’s still how the system works to an extent.”

When the internet did arrive, the dictionary’s editors quickly took advantage. For example, Sheidlower says, at one point they were looking for early uses of the word “mutant” in the sense of a genetically mutated being with unusual characteristics or abilities. The earliest they’d found was from 1954, but they were sure earlier examples must be out there. So a freelance editor posted a query on Usenet newsgroups and quickly received an example of a use of the word from 1938.

Soon, the editors started looking for other online projects.

“This was at a time, around 2000, when there was the internet… and people were online, but it wasn’t universal like it is now,” Sheidlower says. “We wanted to do a project where people devoted to a particular field, fans, could make contributions.”

Not only were science fiction fans particularly likely to be online, but they were a valuable source of material. The world’s most prestigious libraries, where OED researchers did much of their work, generally didn’t carry back issues of pulp magazines of the mid-20th century, such as If or Amazing Stories. But many fans, it turns out had cartons full of them.

The new project, researching the history of key words used in science fiction, was written up on early blogs and sites like slashdot. Over the decade that followed, it attracted hundreds of contributors. In 2007, editor Jeff Prucher published a book based on the work, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction.

The project might seem to have run its course, but Sheidlower, who managed the project when he was with the OED, thought there was still work to be done on it. When he left the publication in 2013, he didn’t lose track of the project. Eventually, he got permission to revive it as a personal project. He continued to add terms and references, something made easier by two factors. First, over the past year, the forced inactivity during the pandemic gave him time to work. And second, staff and volunteers of the Internet Archive have uploaded more than 1,000 science fiction pulp magazines, making their entire contents accessible and searchable online.

The May 1939 cover of Amazing Stories, one of the earliest magazines exclusively focused on science fiction

(Robert Fuqua / Ziff-Davis Publishing via Wikimedia Commons under public domain)

Elizabeth Swanstrom, co-editor of the journal Science Fiction Studies and an English scholar at the University of Utah, says the dictionary is “a fantastic resource” not just for fans but for scholars interested in the history of science and technology.

“It’s not uncommon in science fiction to see ideas that are being explored later being put into actual practice” she says.

In some cases, science fiction authors are also scientists who bring real research developments into their writing. Others alter the culture’s understanding of new technologies even without technical expertise. Swanstrom notes that the author William Gibson created the idea of cyberspace back in 1982 and helped found the cyberpunk genre, despite not knowing a huge amount about how computers work.

“The terminology that came out of that genre really shaped culture, and continues to do so” Swanstrom says.

Isiah Lavender III, a professor of English at the University of Georgia and co-editor of the science fiction journal Extrapolation, says the dictionary could help in the academic analysis of issues like the social and economic issues reflected in authors’ depictions of robots. He notes that Čapek’s original robots were essentially enslaved beings with human-like thoughts and feelings. Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics, introduced in 1941, could be seen as reflecting slave codes or the Jim Crow laws that still constrained many black Americans’ lives at that time.

“Having these origin dates in mind can help a student or scholar build a framework to analyze something like the concept of the racial ‘other’ where robots and androids (as well as aliens) are stand-ins for oppressed peoples,” Lavender says.

Lavender notes that the dictionary quotations, derived largely from mid-20th century pulp magazines, don’t reflect the diversity of the science fiction world. Many current black science fiction writers, such as Nalo Hopkinson and N.K. Jemisin, don’t make an appearance.

“From the little bit that I have explored in the dictionary, it comes across as a tool that supports a monochrome future envisioned by the golden age editors of the SFF magazines,” Lavender says. “So it’s problematic in that way.”

Nalo Hopkinson speaks at the 2017 Hugo Awards, a ceremony honoring science fiction works, at Worldcon 75 in Helsinki, Finland.

(Henry Söderlund via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY 4.0)

Sheidlower acknowledges that the dictionary is limited in the authors and terms it references, but he argues that this is a product of its mission: documenting the “core” vocabulary of science fiction that turns up again and again, both in stories and in the real world.

“When writers do more ‘interesting’ things, it becomes harder to include them in what is meant to be a study of the core vocabulary,” he says. “Samuel Delany is quoted a number of times when he’s writing about the usual space-travel stuff, but not much when he goes out of that range. There’s only one quote from [Delany’s dense, stylistically complex] Dhalgren, for example, but a lot from Babel-17, just as the OED has ten times more quotes from Ulysses than from Finnegans Wake.”

In general, Sheidlower says, to qualify for inclusion in the dictionary, a word must either be adopted widely within science fiction or become part of the broader culture. “Ansible”—a word for a device allowing faster-than-light communication coined by Ursula K. LeGuin—makes the cut because other authors also use it. Jemisin’s “orogenes”—people with the ability to control tectonic energy—do not because it’s a concept unique to her Broken Earth trilogy. Similarly, “Wookiee” is in the dictionary because Chewbacca is a familiar cultural figure, but dozens of other named alien species from the Star Wars universe that you can learn about on Wikipedia (or Wookieepedia) don’t merit entries.

Of course, it’s easy to find deep dives about nearly every science fiction universe on Wikipedia or elsewhere on the internet. Sheidlower says the dictionary’s mission is different.

“A dictionary’s not an encyclopedia,” he says. “There’s a reason for encyclopedias and there’s a reason for dictionaries.”

The dictionary is a streamlined way to see how terms have evolved over time, and read historical quotations that illuminate their meaning. It also links many of its quotations to the Internet Archive, where readers can see their context and even read the entire story.

Sheidlower says the dictionary, which he is continuing to update as a hobby, is still a work in progress. He anticipates expanding into related fields such as gaming, comics and anime. He also hopes to systematically add entries and quotations from books that have appeared in the ten years since the original phase of the project wrapped up. While Sheidlower has been doing most of the recent work himself, he is looking for volunteers to help out with tasks like checking citations, looking for quotations and drafting entries.

“I do hope there will be interest here,” he says. “For now, I’m still doing everything myself but the system does allow for other people doing that work.”

#Nature

[kathleenseiber]

When is an invasive species not so?

By Jenny Morber

Caribbean corals sprout off Texas. Pacific salmon tour the Canadian Arctic. Peruvian lowland birds nest at higher elevations.

In the past 100 years, the planet has warmed in the range of 10 times faster than it did on average over the past 5,000. In response, thousands of species are travelling poleward, climbing to higher elevations, and diving deeper into the seas, seeking their preferred environmental conditions. This great migration is challenging traditional ideas about native species, the role of conservation biology and what kind of environment is desirable for the future.

In a 2017 review for Science, University of Tasmania marine ecology professor Gretta Pecl and colleagues wrote, “[C]limate change is impelling a universal redistribution of life on Earth. For marine, freshwater, and terrestrial species alike, the first response to changing climate is often a shift in location.” In fact, Pecl says, data suggest that at least 25% and perhaps as much as 85% of Earth’s estimated 8.7 million species are already shifting ranges in response to climate change.

But when they arrive, will they be welcome? Traditional definitions classify species according to place. “Native” species arrived without human help and usually before widespread human colonisation, so are likely to have natural predators and are unlikely to go rogue. Non-natives are newcomers and suspect. Though 90% cause no lasting damage, 10% become invasive — meaning that they harm the environment, the economy or human health. Last year a multinational report flagged invasive species as a key driver of Earth’s biodiversity crisis.

How we define species is critical, because these definitions influence perceptions, policy and management. The U.S. National Invasive Species Council (NISC) defines a biological invasion as “the process by which non-native species breach biogeographical barriers and extend their range” and states that “preventing the introduction of potentially harmful organisms is … the first line of defense.” But some say excluding newcomers is myopic.

“If you were trying to maintain the status quo, so every time a new species comes in, you chuck it out,” says Camille Parmesan, director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, you could gradually “lose so many that that ecosystem will lose its coherence.” If climate change is driving native species extinct, she says, “you need to allow new ones coming in to take over those same functions.”

As University of Florida conservation ecologist Brett Scheffers and Pecl warned in a 2019 paper in Nature Climate Change, “past management of redistributed species … has yielded mixed actions and results.” They concluded that “we cannot leave the fate of biodiversity critical to human survival to be randomly persecuted, protected or ignored.”

Existing Tools

One approach to managing these climate-driven habitat shifts, suggested by University of California, Irvine marine ecologist Piper Wallingford and colleagues in a recent issue of Nature Climate Change, is for scientists to adapt existing tools like the Environmental Impact Classification of Alien Taxa (EICAT) to assess potential risks associated with moving species. Because range-shifting species pose impacts to communities similar to those of species introduced by humans, the authors argue, new management strategies are unnecessary, and each new arrival can be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Karen Lips, a professor of biology at University of Maryland who was not associated with the study, echoes the idea that each case is so varied and nuanced that trying to fit climate shifting species into a single category with broad management goals may be impractical. “Things may be fine today, but add a new mosquito vector or add a new tick or a new disease, and all of a sudden things spiral out of control,” she says. “The nuance means that the answer to any particular problem might be pretty different.”

In recent years, northern flying squirrels in Canada have found themselves in the company of new neighbours – southern flying squirrels expanding their range as the climate warms. Credit: Public Domain / USFW

Laura Meyerson, a professor in the Department of Natural Resources Science at the University of Rhode Island says scientists should use existing tools to identify and address invasive species to deal with climate-shifting species. “I would like to operate under the precautionary principle and then reevaluate as things shift. You’re sort of shifting one piece in this machinery; as you insert a new species into a system, everything is going to respond,” she says. “Will some of the species that are expanding their ranges because of climate change become problematic? Perhaps they might.”

The reality is that some climate-shifting species may be harmful to some conservation or economic goals while being helpful to others. While sport fisherman are excited about red snapper moving down the East Coast of Australia, for example, if they eat juvenile lobsters in Tasmania they could harm this environmentally and economically important crustacean. “At the end of the day … you’re going to have to look at whether that range expansion has some sort of impact and presumably be more concerned about the negative impacts,” says NISC executive director Stas Burgiel. “Many of the [risk assessment] tools we have are set up to look at negative impact.” As a result, positive effects may be deemphasised or overlooked. “So that notion of cost versus benefit … I don’t think it has played out in this particular context.”

Location, Location, Location

In a companion paper to Wallingford’s, University of Connecticut ecology and evolutionary biology associate professor Mark Urban stressed key differences between invasive species, which are both non-native and harmful, and what he calls “climate tracking species.” Whereas invasive species originate from places very unlike the communities they overtake, he says, climate tracking species expand from largely similar environments, seeking to follow preferred conditions as these environments move. For example, an American pika may relocate to a higher mountain elevation, or a marbled salamander might expand its New England range northward to seek cooler temperatures, but these new locations are not drastically different than the places they had called home before.

Climate tracking species may move faster than their competitors at first, Urban says, but competing species will likely catch up. “Applying perspectives from invasion biology to climate-tracking species … arbitrarily chooses local winners over colonizing losers,” he writes.

Urban stresses that if people prevent range shifts, some climate-tracking species may have nowhere to go. He suggests that humans should even facilitate movement as the planet warms. “The goal in this crazy warming world is to keep everything alive. But it may not be in the same place,” Urban says.

Parmesan echoes Urban, emphasising it’s the distance that makes the difference. “[Invasives] come from a different continent or a different ocean. You’re having these enormous trans-global movements and that’s what ends up causing the species that’s exotic to be invasive,” she says. “Things moving around with climate change is a few hundred miles. Invasive species are moving a few thousand miles.”

In 2019 University of Vienna conservation biology associate professor Franz Essl published a similar argument for species classification beyond the native/non-native dichotomy. Essl uses “neonatives” to refer to species that have expanded outside their native areas and established populations because of climate change but not direct human agency. He argues that these species should be considered as native in their new range.

The marbled salamander, a native of the eastern U.S., is among species whose range could expand northward to accommodate rising temperatures. Credit: Seánín Óg from Flickr, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

They Never Come Alone

Meyerson calls for caution. “I don’t think we should be introducing species” into ecosystems, she says. “I mean, they never come alone. They bring all their friends, their microflora, and maybe parasites and things clinging to their roots or their leaves. … It’s like bringing some mattress off the street into your house.”

Burgiel warns that labeling can have unintended consequences. We in the invasive species field … focus on non-native species that cause harm,” he says. “Some people think that anything that’s not native is invasive, which isn’t necessarily the case.” Because resources are limited and land management and conservation are publicly funded, Burgiel says, it is critical that the public understands how the decisions are being made.

Piero Genovesi, chair of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s Invasive Species Specialist Group, sees the debate about classification — and therefore about management — as a potential distraction from more pressing conservation issues.

“The real bulk of conservation is that we want to focus on the narrow proportion of alien species that are really harmful,” he says. In Hawaii “we don’t discuss species that are there [but aren’t] causing any problem because we don’t even have the energy for dealing with them all. And I can tell you, no one wants to remove [non-native] cypresses from Tuscany. So, I think that some of the discussions are probably not so real in the work that we do in conservation.”

Indigenous frameworks offer another way to look at species searching for a new home in the face of climate change. According to a study published in Sustainability Science in 2018 by Dartmouth American and environmental studies associate professor Nicholas Reo, a citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and Dartmouth anthropology associate professor Laura Ogden, some Anishnaabe people view plants as persons and the arrival of new plants as a natural form of migration, which is not inherently good or bad. They may seek to discover the purpose of new species, at times with animals as their teachers. In their paper Reo and Ogden quote Anishnaabe tribal chairman Aaron Payment as saying, “We are an extension of our natural environment; we’re not separate from it.”

The Need for Collaboration

The successful conservation of Earth’s species in a way that keeps biodiversity functional and healthy will likely depend on collaboration. Without global agreements, one can envision scenarios in which countries try to impede high-value species from moving beyond their borders, or newly arriving species are quickly overharvested.

In Nature Climate Change, Sheffers and Pecl call for a Climate Change Redistribution Treaty that would recognise species redistribution beyond political boundaries and establish governance to deal with it. Treaties already in place, such as the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which regulates trade in wild plants and animals; the Migratory Bird Treaty Act; and the Agreed Measures for the Conservation of Antarctic Fauna and Flora, can help guide these new agreements.

“We are living through the greatest redistribution of life on Earth for … potentially hundreds of thousands of years, so we definitely need to think about how we want to manage that,” Pecl says.

At the heart of these questions are values. Genovesi agrees that conservationists need a vision for the future. “What we do is more to be reactive [to known threats]. … It’s so simple to say that destroying the Amazon is probably not a good idea that you don’t need to think of a step ahead of that.” But, he adds, “I don’t think we have a real answer in terms of okay, this is a threshold of species, or this is the temporal line where we should aim to.” Defining a vision for what success would look like, Genovesi says, “is a question that hasn’t been addressed enough by science and by decision makers.”

At the heart of these questions are values. “All of these perceptions around what’s good and what’s bad, all [are based on] some kind of value system,” Pecl says. “As a whole society, we haven’t talked about what we value and who gets to say what’s of value and what isn’t.”

This is especially important when it comes to marginalised voices, and Pecl says she is concerned because she doesn’t “think we have enough consideration or representation of Indigenous worldviews.” Reo and colleagues wrote in American Indian Quarterly in 2017 that climate change literature and media coverage tend to portray native people as vulnerable and without agency. Yet, says Pecl, “The regions of the world where [biodiversity and ecosystems] are either not declining or are declining at a much slower rate are Indigenous controlled” — suggesting that Indigenous people have potentially managed species more effectively in the past, and may be able to manage changing species distributions in a way that could be informative to others working on these issues.

Meanwhile, researchers such as Lips see species classification as native or other as stemming from a perspective that there is a better environmental time and place to return to. “There is no pristine, there’s no way to go back,” says Lips. “The entire world is always very dynamic and changing. And I think it’s a better idea to consider just simply what is it that we do want, and let’s work on that.”

This article was originally published on Ensia and is republished here with permission under the terms of a Creative Commons’ Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported licence. View the original article here.

Jenny Morber trained as a scientist and engineer at Georgia Tech, US, and now works as a freelance journalist based in the Pacific Northwest.

When is an invasive species not so? published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

[networkingdefinition]

Surveys Quotes

Official Website: Surveys Quotes

• A good aim surveys the present state of experience of pupils, and forming a tentative plan of treatment, keeps the plan constantly in view and yet modifies it as conditions develop. The aim, in short, is experimental, and hence constantly growing as it is tested in action. – John Dewey • A man with deep far-sightedness will survey both the beginning and the end of a situation and continually consider its every facet as important. – Takeda Shingen • A man’s feet should be planted in his country, but his eyes should survey the world.- George Santayana • A new survey found that 12 percent of parents punish their kids by banning social networking sites. The other 88 percent punish their kids by joining social networking sites. – Jimmy Fallon • A new survey indicates that Obama supporters love iPhones. So if you have an iPhone, chances are you are going to be supporting President Obama. In a related story, if you support Governor Chris Christie from New Jersey, chances are you love IHOP. – David Letterman • A new survey out says 64 percent of Americans own a smartphone. Which is interesting because in a related survey, 100 percent of smart phones say they own an American. – Jimmy Fallon • A new survey reveals that women would rather give up sex than give up the remote control for the TV. Men, on the other hand, would be willing to have sex with the remote for the TV. – Conan O’Brien • A new survey shows that the American public is more conservative now than at any point since 1952. The bad news is that all the liberals that died since then are still voting. – Fred Thompson • A perfect Judge will read each work of Wit With the same spirit that its author writ: Survey the Whole, nor seek slight faults to find Where nature moves, and rapture warms the mind. – Alexander Pope • A recent Pew Hispanic survey found that more than 70 percent of illegal immigrants from Mexico are interested in a guest-worker program and then returning home. – John Shadegg • A recent survey or North American males found 42% were overweight, 34% were critically obese and 8% ate the survey. – Banksy • A recent survey stated that the average person’s greatest fear is having to give a speech in public. Somehow this ranked even higher than death which was third on the list. So, you’re telling me that at a funeral, most people would rather be the guy in the coffin than have to stand up and give a eulogy. – Jerry Seinfeld • A stunning survey of the latest evidence for intelligent life on Mars. Mac Tonnies brings a thoughtful, balanced and highly accessible approach to one of the most fascinating enigmas of our time. – Herbie Brennan • A survey asked married women when they most want to have sex. 84 per cent of them said right after their husband is finished. – Jay Leno • A survey carried out across the U.S. between 2004 and 2006 showed that frequent church- or synagogue-goers are more likely to give money to charity.- Jonathan Sacks • A survey has shown that the average man has had sex in a car 15 times. Something to keep in mind next time you’re looking for a used car. – Jay Leno • A survey released today found that men spend twice as much on their mistresses for Christmas as they do on their wives. On the other hand, men spend half their income on the wives when the wife finds out about the mistress. So it all balances out. – Jay Leno • A technical survey that systematize, digest, and appraise the mid century state of psychology. – Stanley Smith Stevens • A telephone survey says that 51 percent of college students drink until they pass out at least once a month. The other 49 percent didn’t answer the phone. – Craig Kilborn • Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. – James Surowiecki • According to a new survey, 40 percent of adults in Mexico say they would move to the United States if they got a chance. The number would have been higher, but the other 60 percent already live here. – Conan O’Brien • According to a new survey, 90% of men say their lover is also their best friend. Which is really kind of disturbing when you consider man’s best friend is his dog. – Jay Leno • According to a new survey, almost half of the voters in Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania say that they do not trust Hillary Clinton. Republicans immediately got together and said, ‘OK, this is a huge opportunity for us. How are we going to screw it up?’ – Jimmy Fallon • According to a new survey, people who get divorced die early. People who stay married live longer. The difference is they just wish they were dead. – David Letterman • According to a new survey, women say they feel more comfortable undressing in front of men than they do undressing in front of other women. They say that women are too judgmental, where, of course, men are just grateful. – Robert De Niro • According to a Public Policy Polling survey, most Americans find lice and colonoscopies more appealing than Capitol Hill. – Ron Fournier • According to a recent survey, kids are receiving an average of 40 cents less from the tooth fairy. That’s right, the economy is so bad that even make-believe people are feeling the pinch. – Conan O’Brien • According to a recent survey, men say the first thing they notice about women is their eyes. And women say the first thing they notice about men is they’re a bunch of liars. – Jay Leno • According to a survey in this week’s Time magazine, 85% of Americans think global warming is happening. The other 15% work for the White House. – Jay Leno • According to one study by the United States Geological survey, 86 percent of oil reserves in the United States are the result not of what is estimated at the time of discovery but of the revisions and additions that come with further development. – Daniel Yergin • According to the National Crime Survey administered by the Bureau of the Census and the National Institute of Justice, it was found that only 12 percent of those who use a gun to resist assault are injured, as are 17 percent of those who use a gun to resist robbery. These percentages are 27 and 25 percent, respectively, if they passively comply with the felon’s demands. Three times as many were injured if they used other means of resistance. – Gary Kleck • Additional federal studies are under way to see if any contamination reaches taps or ground water used for drinking, but the program under which they are conducted, the toxic substances hydrology program of the geological survey, is slated to be eliminated under budget cuts proposed by the Bush administration, government officials said… estrogens and similar compounds are increasingly the focus of research by the Environmental Protection Agency and many scientists because of hints that they alter sexual characteristics in fish and other aquatic species. – Andrew Revkin • After all, a creature without passionate conviction doesn’t cling to extremes. He surveys the scenery and makes sure his outfit doesn’t clash. – Frank Bruni • After starting a blood feud with Fox News, something no Republican presidential candidate has dared to do before, [Donald] Trump seems to have successfully undermine the network in the eyes of its core audience with perception of the Fox News brand among Republican adults hitting its lowest point in three years according to a new YouGov survey. – Chris Hayes • All great expression, which on a superficial survey seems so easy as well as so simple, furnishes after a while, to the faithful observer, its own standard by which to appreciate it. – Margaret Fuller • All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are “scientifically illiterate.” That’s…the same fraction…of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War. – Carl Sagan • Along the way, I’ve worked as a waitress, I’ve done phone surveys, and worked as a receptionist, and for the last twenty years I’ve taught. When I was an actor, the key was to find a job that kept your days free to audition. – Debra Dean • Although the traditional focus of Valentine’s Day is on women and the gifts they desire, this survey found that not only do men like to get gifts for Valentine’s Day, but they also like those gifts to be luxurious. Sixty-three percent of the people we surveyed agreed that this Valentine’s Day, Johnnie Walker Blue Label is a great gift for the men in their lives. – Christopher Parsons • And when midst fallen London, they survey The stone where Alexander’s ashes lay, Shall own with humbled pride the lesson must By Time’s slow finger written in the dust. – Anna Letitia Barbauld • Any survey of the free world’s defense structure cannot fail to impart a feeling of regret that so much of our effort and resources must be devoted to armaments. – Dwight D. Eisenhower • As a great man’s influence never ends, so also there is not definite finality, no end, to a great survey; it runs along for centuries, ever responsive to the strain of the increasing needs of a growing population and an enlarging domain. – Cleveland Abbe • As a Mark brand ambassador, I became extremely cognizant of the devastating statistics about dating abuse and partner violence via the mPowerment campaign and knew I wanted to help change those statistics. mPowerment by Mark and the Avon Foundation for Women funded the No More study, which explored dating abuse, partner violence, and sexual assault. I was honored to be part of it and report the results of the survey in a Capitol Hill briefing. – Ashley Greene • As a scholar who regularly surveys archival material, I think that, a century from now, cultural historians will find David Horowitz’s spiritual and political odyssey paradigmatic for our time. – Camille Paglia • As the most romantic day of the year approaches, and as a brand that is uniquely male, we wanted to find out how men really feel about Valentines Day, and how they want to celebrate it. The Johnnie Walker Blue Label Luxury Survey tells us what gifts men really want versus what gifts women think men want for Valentine’s Day – and the reality is that we’re not as far apart as we like to think. – Christopher Parsons • As we survey all the evidence, the thought insistently arises that some supernatural agency-or, rather, Agency-must be involved. Is it possible that suddenly, without intending to, we have stumbled upon scientific proof of the existence of a Supreme Being? Was it God who stepped in and so providentially crafted the cosmos for our benefit? – George Greenstein • As you may recall, Truman was extremely unpopular when he finally left Washington in 1953, thanks largely to the Korean War. Today, however, he is thought to have been a solidly good president, a ‘Near Great’ even, in the terminology of those surveys of historians they do every now and then. – Thomas Frank • Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey’s opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated. – Paul Nitze • Based on current surveys of public opinion in the United States, it turns out that the majority of Americans think I’ve done a pretty good job. -Barack Obama • Biblical social scientists have an advantage because they know truths about human nature. Those who dismiss the Bible and create surveys that don’t measure crucial factors are the ones who have closed minds. Sometimes the Bible gives us clear answers and sometimes it doesn’t, but it always helps us to ask the right questions. – Marvin Olasky • But because we accept the sanctity of life, the responsibility that comes with freedom and the supreme sacrifice of Christ expressed so well in the hymn: ‘When I survey the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died. My richest gain I count but loss and pour contempt on all my pride.’ – Margaret Thatcher • But honestly, if you do a rigorous survey of my work, I’ll bet you’ll find that biology is a theme far more often than physical science. – David Brin • By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one…. Insofar as we treat man as a part of nature–for instance in a biological survey of evolution–we are precisely not treating him as a historical being. As a historically developing being, he is set over against nature, both as a knower and as a doer. – Owen Barfield • Censure is willingly indulged, because it always implies some superiority: men please themselves with imagining that they have made a deeper search, or wider survey than others, and detected faults and follies which escape vulgar observation. – Samuel Johnson • Combining in our survey then, the whole range of deposits from the most recent to the most ancient group, how striking a succession do they present:- so various yet so uniform-so vast yet so connected. In thus tracing back to the most remote periods in the physical history of our continents, one system of operations, as the means by which many complex formations have been successively produced, the mind becomes impressed with the singleness of nature’s laws; and in this respect, at least, geology is hardly inferior in simplicity to astronomy. – Roderick Murchison • Completing a large or difficult survey can be a very satisfying thing, especially if there have been hurdles or setbacks along the way. In our work, we get to “tick” off jobs quite often, so the sense of completion can also be rewarding. – Mark Mason • Cultural tourism surveys consistently rate San Francisco’s art industry as a core reason for visiting – Gavin Newsom • Don’t wait till you get bigger to put in place key items, such as staff surveys, peer interviewing for hiring and clear standards of behavior [developed by staff]. – Quint Studer • Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten. – Gloria Steinem • Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort. – Andrew Greeley • Experiencing a massage therapy session is its own best advertisement for changing perceptions. A recent national consumer survey found Americans had overwhelmingly positive feelings about their massage experience. Ninety-four percent express favorable feelings. Fully 85 percent expressed very favorable feelings about their most recent massage, with 37 percent rating it a perfect ten-out-of-ten. What is striking is that there are very few detractors. Most of those who haven’t yet received a massage simply haven’t felt a need for it – Bob Benson • Faults are beauties, when survey’d by love. – Theocritus • Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favor. – Samuel Johnson • Few men survey themselves with so much severity as not to admit prejudices in their own favour, which an artful flatterer may gradually strengthen, till wishes for a particular qualification are improved to hopes of attainment, and hopes of attainment to belief of possession. – Samuel Johnson • Financial literacy is not an end in itself, but a step-by-step process. It begins in childhood and continues throughout a person’s life all the way to retirement. Instilling the financial-literacy message in children is especially important, because they will carry it for the rest of their lives. The results of the survey are very encouraging, and we want to do our part to make sure all children develop and strengthen their financial-literacy skills. – George Karl • For Hades is mighty in calling men to account below the earth, and with a mind that records in tablets he surveys all things. – Aeschylus • Forget romantic fiction, a survey has found that most women would rather read a good book than go shopping, have sex, or sleep. – Janet Street-Porter • Forget socialism, capitalism, just-in-time deliveries, salary surveys, and the rest … concentrate on building organizations that accomplish that most difficult of all challenges: to make people look forward to coming to work in the morning. – Ricardo Semler • Global warming activists claim a serious public concern presently exists and the overwhelming majority of scientists agrees humans are creating a global warming crisis. The survey of AMS meteorologists, however, shows no such overwhelming majority exists. Indeed, to the extent we can assign a majority scientific opinion to whether all the necessary components of a global warming crisis exist, the AMS survey shows the majority does not agree humans are creating a global warming crisis. – James Taylor • God gave man an upright countenance to survey the heavens, and to look upward to the stars. – Ovid • He with a graceful pride, While his rider every hand survey’d, Sprung loose, and flew into an escapade; Not moving forward, yet with every bound Pressing, and seeming still to quit his ground. – John Dryden • History is the arbiter of controversy, the monarch of all she surveys. – Lord Acton • Hope is an explorer who surveys the country ahead. That is why we know so much about the Hereafter and so little about the Heretofore. – Ambrose Bierce • How sublime Upon a time-blanch’d cliff to muse, and, while The eagle glories in a sea of air, To mingle with the scene around! – Survey The sun-warm heaven. – Robert Montgomery • Human beings are compelled to adopt a belief system; some paradigm to provide meaning, purpose, and understanding to our lives. A quick survey of the world shows that pretty much any idea will do – it need not reflect reality or truth, merely function to fascinate, distract, and compel. We are designed for belief, not for truth. – Terry Rossio • Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic and he true, by whose light it surveys and shape s their opposites. It is a humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the space which separates the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble. – Edwin Percy Whipple • I actually did a quick survey of how caste plays out in contemporary India. The idea that democracy and development have in some ways eroded caste turned out not to be the case, that it has in fact been entrenched and modernised. – Arundhati Roy • I am somewhat influenced by the years that I’ve spent trying to actually get things done, whether it was reforming education in Arkansas or a survey and Legal Services Corporation board when President [Jimmy ]Carter appointed me and trying to get lawyers for poor people. I have worked in these areas. I know it’s more than just a hope. You’ve got to translate it into a policy that leads to action. – Hillary Clinton • I am the first person to go to Barnes & Noble and buy the new self-help book. I like to fill out the surveys, then I get my friends’ opinions on how I answered to see if I was being honest with myself or not. – Jessica Simpson • I automate some tasks and delegate many others. Doing research, job organization, data processing, field surveys, and plan preparation can be tedious, detailed work. – Mark Mason • I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was a child. I did want to be a cartographer but that was partly because I liked Ordnance Survey maps and when I used to go to my grandparents’ house from Southampton Station one went past the headquarters of the Ordnance Survey. – Jonathan Meades • I don’t hire a lot of number-crunchers, and I don’t trust fancy marketing surveys. I do my own surveys and draw my own conclusions. – Donald Trump • I don’t know if [Barack Obama] saw the latest religion survey, but almost a quarter of the country are Nones. I don’t mean the ones who hit me on the knuckles with a ruler in Sunday School – I mean they put “None” for religion. – Bill Maher • I don’t need somebody behind a desk to tell me what a marketing survey says is funny. I got 3 million miles and 70,000 tickets sold, telling me that I know how to make people laugh. – D. L. Hughley • I don’t think it’s surprising we will have to look for them. I’m confident that when the Iraq Survey Group has done its work we will find what’s happened to those weapons because he had them. – Tony Blair • I feel pain everywhere. A lot of guys in chairs do feel their legs. But if you don’t, there’s a thing called disreflex, so you know if something happens, say, you can’t feel your foot or your leg and your body reacts. You know something’s not right and you survey what’s going on. – Mark Zupan • I had a survey done on my house. 8 out of 10 people said they really rather liked it – Jimmy Carr • I have a lack of fear, whereas in the past the fear of failure was a powerful motivator. Anyway, I have great expectations for the future, but I just don’t know if I’m the monarch of all I survey. – Sylvester Stallone • I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com. – Piers Anthony • I saw a survey and it is that NFL fans are fed up with listening to players talk about politics. – Rush Limbaugh • I sometimes think we ought to bring a bill before Congress changing our national symbol from the eagle to the buffalo, because we are more like the buffalo than the eagle. The eagle is a powerful bird. It flies alone. It rises up into the sky with authority. It is master of all it surveys. The eagle is an individualist and was selected from among the rest of the birds to be our symbol. But the buffalo was never alone. It always ran in a herd with other buffaloes. And, friends, I call your attention that the buffaloes are gone from the open range, but the eagles are still soaring. – Norman Vincent Peale • I speak as a private citizen and not as a representative of the Executive Branch of the United States government. The impression that people of faith are uniformly opposed to stem-cell research is not documented by surveys. In fact, many people of strong religious conviction think this can be a morally supportable approach. – Richard Dawkins • I think my great book is Born to Sing: An Interpretation and World Survey of Bird Song. – Charles Hartshorne • I think somebody ought to do a survey as to how many great, important men have quit to spend time with their families who spent any more time with their family. Probably less. – Walter Cronkite • I think that if anyone bothered to take a survey, they would find a sharp decline in atheism during the winters in Cleveland, Ohio. – Drew Carey • I was rather discouraged when I discovered that Paul and Hotch had no marketing survey, no business plan, no budget, no organized strategy for the introduction of the sauce. When asked about this lack of preparation, the haphazard nature of their business, Paul said, ‘Me in this business is just part of life’s great folly. Stay loose, men, keep ’em off balance.'” – Paul Newman • I’m always fascinated when people really fervently believe, because I have such a hard time believing anything. When people have real faith in something, it’s fascinating to me. And the fact that so many people, in surveys, so many people say they do. It kind of blows my mind. – Conor Oberst • If a man could mount to Heaven and survey the mighty universe, his admiration of its beauties would be much diminished unless he had someone to share in his pleasure. – Marcus Tullius Cicero • If I were to peruse a survey of label options, as they exist now, they either sound like a time bomb disorder or manic depression or Bipolar divide or mental illness. How can I find an identity in that? It certainly isn’t something I can bring up in conversation, without a reaction of judgement or even fear. – Paul Dalio • If we take a survey of the greatest actions…in the world…we shall find the authors of them all to have been persons whose Brains had been shaken out of their natural position. – John Adams • I’m required to do every job well enough that I’d use it as evidence in court – that doesn’t come cheaply! Property is a critical asset for individuals. Maintaining the cadastre (legal survey fabric) is an important job and a valuable service. – Mark Mason • I’m sure if you could survey the unborn they would prefer the chance for life over the options of solar power. – Greg Gutfeld • Immense deposits of kimmeridge clay, containing the oil-bearing bands or seams, stretch across England from Dorsetshire to Lincolnshire. [An early political recognition of the native resource. The Geological Survey had identified the inflammable oil shale in reports since at least 1888.] – Winston Churchill • In 1989, I started the National Association of Business Women. We incorporated microfinance and different job training for women. We did a survey, with USAID, that found women lacked training, credit and information. – Joyce Banda • In a bird’s eye view you tend to survey everything and decide on a particular point, then you swoop down and pick it up. In a worms eye view you don’t have that advantage of looking at everything. – Muhammad Yunus • In all our academies we attempt far too much. … In earlier times lectures were delivered upon chemistry and botany as branches of medicine, and the medical student learned enough of them. Now, however, chemistry and botany are become sciences of themselves, incapable of comprehension by a hasty survey, and each demanding the study of a whole life, yet we expect the medical student to understand them. He who is prudent, accordingly declines all distracting claims upon his time, and limits himself to a single branch and becomes expert in one thing. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • In my judgment, based on the work that has been done to this point of the Iraq Survey Group, and in fact, that I reported to you in October, Iraq was in clear violation of the terms of U.N.Resolution 1441. – David Kay • In my totally unscientific yet enthusiastic survey of Communal Experiments Throughout American History, I’ve discovered that the thing most likely to break up said experiments is: Sex, all that murky, dark, dirty gunk simmering beneath human relations. – Lauren Groff • In one survey, respondents listed Princeton as one of the country’s top ten law schools. The problem? Princeton doesn’t have a law school – Alexandra Robbins • In survey after survey, people report that the greatest dangers they face are, in this order: terrorist attack, plane crashes and nuclear accidents. This despite the fact that these three combined have killed fewer people in the past half-century than car accidents do in any given year. – Will Self • In survey after survey, the Iraqi people say, ‘We want to choose our leaders.’ – Scott McClellan • In this country, the health concerns and the environmental concerns are as deep as in Europe. All the surveys show that. But here, we didn’t have the cultural dimension. This is a fast-food culture. – Jeremy Rifkin • Interesting survey in the current Journal of Abnormal Psychology: New York City has a higher percentage of people you shouldn’t make any sudden moves around than any other city in the world. – David Letterman • Ironically, survey after survey shows that married men are happier and healthier than unmarried men. Oh, and they also have more sex. – Michael Kimmel • It is an inherent property of intelligence that it can jump out of a task which it is performing and survey what it has done. – Douglas Hofstadter • It is in the field of prayer that life’s critical battles are lost or won. We must conquer all our circumstances there. We must first of all bring them there. We must survey them there. We must master them there. In prayer we bring our spiritual enemies into the Presence of God and we fight them there. Have you tried that? Or have you been satisfied to meet and fight your foes in the open spaces of the world? – John Henry Jowett • It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world. – Bertrand Russell • It is proved by surveys that happiness does not come from love, wealth, or power but the pursuit of attainable goals. – Helen Fielding • It is true that the path of human destiny cannot but appal him who surveys a section of it. But he will do well to keep his small personal commentarie to himself, as one does at the sight of the sea or of majestic mountains, unless he knows himself to be called and gifted to give them expression in artistic or prophetic form. In most other cases, the voluminous talk about intuition does nothing but conceal a lack of perspective toward the object, which merits the same judgement as a similar lack of perspective toward men. – Max Weber • It is vain and useless to survey everything that goes on in the world if our study does not help us mend our ways. – Madeleine de Souvre, marquise de Sable • It takes no compromising to give people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no survey to remove repressions. – Harvey Milk • It would be very interesting to make a survey around the world, from wealthy countries to the most advanced countries to see what influence Americans have had. IEmilio Pucci • It’s about average for us. Behavior always draws more than survey. We’re the sexy ones,’ Nate said with a grin. Amy snorted. ‘Oh, yeah, you guys are the Mae Wests of the nerd world.’ We’re action nerds,’ Nate said. ‘Adventure nerds. Nerds of romance. – Christopher Moore • It’s not possible to present an accurate picture of our culture without all the voices of the people in the culture. So at the emerging level, you can’t have a good survey art show without women and artists of color. – Frida Kahlo • I’ve done an informal, anecdotal survey about marriage, and I’ve found no evidence that it brings happiness. – Mary McCormack • I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The U.S. Geological Survey has told me that the proven potential for oil in Alaska alone is greater than the proven reserves in Saudi Arabia. – Ronald Reagan • Jocelyn Bell joined the project as a graduate student in 1965, helping as a member of the construction team and then analysing the paper charts of the sky survey. – Antony Hewish • Latest survey shows that 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the world’s population. – Stephen Hawking • Laws, it is said, are for the protection of the people. It’s unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months. – Tom Robbins • Let observation with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru; Remark each anxious toil, each eager strife, And watch the busy scenes of crowded life. – Samuel Johnson • Look back to 1948 when the British Medical Association denounced Aneurin Bevan as ‘a would-be Führer’ for wanting them to join a National Health Service. And Bevan himself described the BMA as ‘politically poisoned people’. A survey at the time showed only 10 per cent of doctors backed the plans … But where would we be today if my predecessors had caved in? – Andrew Lansley • Look. Survey. Inspect. My hair is ruined! I look like a pan of bacon and eggs! – Diana Wynne Jones • Luckily, a recent survey published in the American Sociological Review revealed that atheists are the least trusted group in America—less trusted, even, than homosexuals. It makes sense at least we trust the homosexuals with our hair. – Stephen Colbert • My colleagues and I have done a survey of 13,000 students on more than 17 campuses, and we found that while sex in college has always been a bit more casual, “hooking up” has pretty much replaced other traditional forms of dating.- Michael Kimmel • My father was a soil scientist with the Geological Survey. – Jim Fowler • My mind was once the true survey Of all these meadows fresh and gay; And in the greenness of the grass Did see its hopes as in a glass. – Andrew Marvell • My zest for exhibition has over a long career become increasingly a mania. The ecstasy I feel as I survey work I have done I want to share with the world – not the whole world which couldn’t care less, but my private world, which is my country, Canada. – Joseph Plaskett • No man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. – John Calvin • No one likes doing chores. In happiness surveys, housework is ranked down there with commuting as activities that people enjoy the least. Maybe that’s why figuring out who does which chores usually prompts, at best, tense discussion in a household and, at worst, outright fighting. – Emily Oster • Oh! that you could turn your eyes towards the napes of your necks, and make but an interior survey of your good selves. – William Shakespeare • Oh, sons of earth! attempt ye still to rise. By mountains pil’d on mountains to the skies? Heav’n still with laughter the vain toil surveys, And buries madmen in the heaps they raise. – Alexander Pope • One survey found that ten percent of Americans thought Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. – Rita Mae Brown • One survey that I saw that was published I think in Variety or Electronic Media within the last three weeks says that now the average hour of radio in the United States has 18 minutes of commercials. – Robert Waterman McChesney • Only by being suspended aloft, by dangling my mind in the heavens and mingling my rare thought with the ethereal air, could I ever achieve strict scientific accuracy in my survey of the vast empyrean. Had I pursued my inquiries from down there on the ground, my data would be worthless. The earth, you see, pulls down the delicate essence of thought to its own gross level. – Aristophanes • Osama bin Laden’s organization has spun out from him and is now probably independent of him. There will be others who will appear and reappear. This is why we need a much more precise, a much more defined, a much more patiently constructed campaign, as well as one that surveys not just the terrorists’ presence but the root causes of terrorism, which are ascertainable. – Edward Said • Our objective is to begin a national conversation to better support individuals and families living with ASD in Canada. The Summit will review the recent National Needs Assessment Survey and provide leaders with a better understanding of ASD surveillance across the country. We are pleased that Minister Bergen will be part of this important discussion. – Cynthia Carroll • Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct. – Carl Sagan • Personal weapons are what raised mankind out of the mud, and the rifle is the queen of personal weapons. The possession of a good rifle, as well as the skill to use it well, truly makes a man the monarch of all he surveys. It realizes the ancient dream of the Jovian thunderbolt, and as such it is the embodiment of personal power. For this reason it exercises a curious influence over the minds of most men, and in its best examples it constitutes an object of affection unmatched by any other inanimate object. – Jeff Cooper • Philosophy, most broadly viewed, is the critical survey of existence from the standpoint of value. – Sidney Hook • Physiology is the basis of all medical improvement and in precise proportion as our survey of it becomes more accurate and extended, it is rendered more solid. – John Gorrie • Piety practiced in solitude, like the flower that blooms in the desert, may give its fragrance to the winds of heaven, and delight those unbodied spirits that survey the works of God and the actions of men; but it bestows no assistance upon earthly beings, and however free from taints of impurity, yet wants the sacred splendor of beneficence. – Samuel Johnson • Readers, on the other hand, have at least 7.5 books going all the time. Actually, the number of books a reader takes on is usually directly related to the number of bathrooms he has in his home and office. I am working on a survey that will show that, over a lifetime, readers are in bathrooms seven years and three months longer than nonreaders. – Calvin Miller • Recent surveys of Church members have shown a serious erosion in the number of families who have a year’s supply of life’s necessities. Most members plan to do it. Too few have begun… It is our sacred duty to care for our families, including our extended families. – Thomas S. Monson • Recent surveys show 3 out of 10 men have a problem with premature ejaculation. The rest just didn’t really think it was a problem! – Frankie Boyle • Roberto Calasso’s survey of the renewed interest in myth demonstrates how decisive the gods’ influence was on modern literature. Calasso is not only immensely learned; he is one of the most original thinkers and writers we have today. – Charles Simic • San Francisco can start right now to become number one. We can set examples so that others will follow. We can start overnight. We don’t have to wait for budgets to be passed, surveys to be made, political wheelings and dealings … for it takes no money … It takes no compromising to give the people their rights. It takes no money to respect the individual. It takes no political deal to give people freedom. It takes no survey to remove repression. – Harvey Milk • School choice opponents are also dishonest when they speak of saving public schools. A Heritage Foundation survey found that 47 percent of House members and 51 percent of senators with school-age children enrolled them in private schools in 2001. Public school teachers enroll their children in private schools to a much greater extent than the general public, in some cities close to 50 percent. – Walter E. Williams • She couldn’t survey the wreck of the world with an air of casual unconcern. – Margaret Mitchell • So their combinations with themselves and with each other give rise to endless complexities, which anyone who is to give a likely account of reality must survey. – Plato • Suddenly, in the space of a moment, I realized what it was that I loved about Britain – which is to say, all of it. Every last bit of it, good and bad – old churches, country lanes, people saying ‘Mustn’t grumble,’ and ‘I’m terribly sorry but,’ people apologizing to ME when I conk them with a careless elbow, milk in bottles, beans on toast, haymaking in June, seaside piers, Ordnance Survey maps, tea and crumpets, summer showers and foggy winter evenings – every bit of it. – Bill Bryson • Survey 2001: Men who never married, never had a child, worked full time and were college educated earn only 85% of what women with the same criteria earn. – Warren Farrell • Survey and test a prospective action before undertaking it. Before you proceed, step back and look at the big picture, lest you act rashly on raw impulse. – Epictetus • Survey data suggest that war has become more unpopular. The majority of the American people now think it was a mistake, in a shift away from the 51 percent that endorsed it on Election Day. Admittedly this is only a small change in the population, from a majority to a minority. Nor do the changers earn grace for their new opinions. They still endorsed the war on Election Day and are still responsible for it. – Andrew Greeley • Survey says: one more for the bad guys. – Scott Hall • Surveys have shown going back as far as you and I can remember that people have perceived a leftward tilt in the basic coverage that they get on TV news. – Brit Hume • Surveys show that many talented and committed young people are reluctant to enter teaching for the long haul because they think the profession is low-paying and not prestigious enough. – Arne Duncan • Surveys show that more than 50 percent of people in the U.S. have prayed the sinner’s prayer and think they’re going to heaven because of it even though there is no detectable difference in their lifestyles from those outside of the church. On this issue- the most important issue on earth- we have to be absolutely clear. We need to preach salvation by repentance before God and faith in the finished work of Christ. – J. D. Greear • Surveys show that surveys never lie. – Natalie Angier • Surveys show that the #1 fear of Americans is public speaking. #2 is death. That means that at a funeral, the average American would rather be in the casket than doing the eulogy. – Jerry Seinfeld • Take the back door,” she said. “Claire, you and your strang friend-” “Eve,” they both said simultaneously, and Eve held out her fst for a bump. “Or, you could call me Eve the Great, Mistress of All She Surveys. Eve for short. – Rachel Caine • That I had never heard of such a bird did not surprise me…. But others more experienced also did not know of the Carolina Parakeet. The more I spoke of the bird, the more it seemed that, somehow, its existence had been a chimera. Admittedly, my survey was small and unscientific, but intelligent people who could reel off the names of various dinosaurs and identify sparrows at epic distances could not name the forgotten parakeet. I realized, forcefully, what I suppose I knew abstractly: Histories, like species, can go extinct. – Christopher Cokinos • The American people want to make sure that the rules of the game are fair. And what that means is that if you look at surveys around Americans’ attitudes on trade, the majority of the American people still support trade. But they’re concerned about whether or not trade is fair, and whether we get the same access to other countries’ markets that they have with us. Is there just a race to the bottom when it comes to wages, and so forth. – Barack Obama • The BBC did a survey of the top 50 things to do before we die. Not while we’re still alive, before we die.- Bill Bailey • The camera relieves us of the burden of memory. It surveys us like God, and it surveys for us. Yet no other god has been so cynical, for the camera records in order to forget. – John Berger • The distribution of wealth is even more unequal than that of income. …The wealthiest 5% of American households held 54% of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61% in 2010 and reached 63% in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution —families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million —held 43% of wealth in 1989 and only 36% in 2013. – Janet Yellen • The drys seemingly are afraid of the truth. Why not take inventory and ascertain the true conditions. Let us not leave it to the charge of an antiprohibition organization, or to any other private association, let us have an official survey and let the American people know what is going on. A complete and honest and impartial survey would reveal incredible conditions. – Fiorello H. La Guardia • The earliest religious texts in the West ascribe to humankind both a prehistory and a destiny among the gods. M. David Litwa presents a striking survey of the varieties the latter of these beliefs has had, both within and outside the Christian tradition. Becoming Divine reconstructs an accessible and fascinating mosaic of this too-long neglected idea, utilizing figures as disparate as Orphic cultists, Augustine, and Nietzsche. – Terryl L. Givens • The fact disclosed by a survey of the past that majorities have been wrong must not blind us to the complementary fact that majorities have usually not been entirely wrong. – Herbert Spencer • The fact is that surveys which media people openly admit to show that fewer than twelve percent of their customers believe they’re doing a good job, while the average profit margin in television is in the neighborhood of eighty percent. – L. Neil Smith • The good news from the U.S. military survey of focus groups is that Iraqis do accept the Nuremberg principles. They understand that sectarian violence and the other postwar horrors are contained within the supreme international crime committed by the invaders. – Noam Chomsky • The hawk is aerial brother of the wave which he sails over and surveys, those his perfect air-inflated wings answering to the elemental unfledged pinions of the sea. – Henry David Thoreau • The Iraq Survey Group has already found massive evidence of a huge system of clandestine laboratories. – Tony Blair • The Italian historian Armando Petrucci has done more than anyone else to revive interest in public writing. His groundbreaking Public Lettering: Script, Power, and Culture surveys the forms and uses of epigraphic writing from classical antiquity to the twentieth century. – Geoffrey Nunberg • The leader is the one who climbs the tallest tree, surveys the entire situation, and yells, ‘Wrong jungle!’ … Busy, efficient producers and managers often respond … ‘Shut up! We’re making progress!’ – Stephen Covey • The main object of the work was to present such a survey of the advances already made in physical knowledge, and of the mode in which they have been made, as might serve as a real and firm basis for our speculations concerning the progress of human knowledge, and the processes by which sciences are formed. – William Whewell • The majority of surveys throughout this Nation show that the American people are advocating for a comprehensive and realistic approach to immigration reform. – Raul Grijalva • The media transforms the great silence of things into its opposite. Formerly constituting a secret, the real now talks constantly. News reports, information, statistics, and surveys are everywhere. – Michel de Certeau • The much-vaunted sex appeal of American women is drawn from films, reviews and pin-ups, and is in large print fictitious. A recent medical survey in the United States showed that 75% of young American women are without strong sexual feeling and instead of satisfying their libido they seek pleasure narcissistically in exhibitionism, vanity, and the cult of fitness and health in a sterile sense. – Julius Evola • The other three incoming calls were from his building superintendent, his pharmacy and a telephone survey company.” “Bastards. They always call during dinner.” Liv laughed as I slid the sliced steak onto a platter and topped it with sautéed vegetables. “Forget crime lords and corrupt politicians – telemarketers are the root of all evil.” “Now you’re getting it. – Rachel Vincent • The Place of Religion in Chicago is a clearly written account of a little-studied aspect of American landscape. Based on unique field surveys and supported by photographs, tables, and beautifully crafted maps, the book will form a lasting contribution to our understanding of an overlooked element of the American urban scene: the religious landscape of a major metropolis. – Peter Haggett • The Playtex Secrets survey truly uncovered some thought-provoking and provocative secrets of real American housewives. In fact, many of the findings would make great fodder for a storyline on the show! – Alfre Woodard • The pool of illegal immigrants is like a qualified bunch of people. You don’t have to do surveys. You don’t have to interview them. You know they are ready-made Democrat voters. Not only that, they are readymade Democrat constituents. – Rush Limbaugh • The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of ’49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific. – John Moody • The pursuit of science has often been compared to the scaling of mountains, high and not so high. But who amongst us can hope, even in imagination, to scale the Everest and reach its summit when the sky is blue and the air is still, and in the stillness of the air survey the entire Himalayan range in the dazzling white of the snow stretching to infinity? None of us can hope for a comparable vision of nature and of the universe around us. But there is nothing mean or lowly in standing in the valley below and awaiting the sun to rise over Kinchinjunga. – Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar • The repeat run of Fawlty Towers (BBC2) drew bigger audiences than ever and deservedly so. Statistical surveys reveal that only the television critic of the Spectator is incapable of seeing the joke, which is that Basil Fawlty has the wrong temperament to be a hotel proprietor, just as some other people have the wrong temperament to be television critics. – Clive James • The spirit’s there and that’s not just my imagination. I think if you look at surveys and attitudes among young people, you see it. – Barack Obama • The survey findings reflect the growing trend toward incentive compensation programs as a way for employers to share the wealth with workers, … Roughly 80 percent of those surveyed offer bonus programs and 401(k) or profit-sharing plans . . . as they compete for the best and brightest workforce. – Jerry Jasinowski • The survey of more than 100 waterways downstream from treatment plants and animal feedlots in 30 states found minute amounts of dozens of antibiotics, hormones, pain relievers, cough suppressants, disinfectants and other products. It is not known whether they are harmful to plants, animals or people. The findings were released yesterday on the Web site of the United States Geological Survey, which conducted the research, and in an online journal, Environmental Science and Technology. – Andrew Revkin • The task of getting the Gospel in an adequate way to every ethnic person is tremedous. There is but one solution. I’m sure that it isn’t man, money, surveys, not talk. They all have their place, but if the basis of all of it isn’t fervent, believing prayer, they are in vain. And prayer should not only be the basis but it should permeate and vitalize the whole work. – William Cameron Townsend • The teachings or the information in the Venus project is not what Jacque Fresco dictates. It’s first doing a survey of the carrying capacity of a given environment and maintaining a population in accordance of the Earth’s resources, not Fresco’s opinion. – Jacque Fresco • The truth is that relative income is not directly related to happiness. Nonpartisan social-survey data clearly show that the big driver of happiness is earned success: a person’s belief that he has created value in his life or the life of others. – Arthur C. Brooks • The whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind so that I can survey it at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What delight this is I cannot tell! – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart • There are ancient and modern poems which breathe, in their entirety and in every detail, the divine breath of irony. In such poemsthere lives a real transcendental buffoonery. Their interior is permeated by the mood which surveys everything and rises infinitely above everything limited, even above the poet’s own art, virtue, and genius; and their exterior form by the histrionic style of an ordinary good Italian buffo. – Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel • There are arguments for atheism, and they do not depend, and never did depend, upon science. They are arguable enough, as far as they go, upon a general survey of life; only it happens to be a superficial survey of life. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • There are literally thousands of sites. As I was told in Iraq, information is coming in the entire time, but it is only now that the Iraq survey group has been put together that a dedicated team of people, which includes former UN inspectors, scientists and experts, will be able to go in and do the job properly. – Tony Blair • There is a kind, I might almost say, of artistic satisfaction, when we are able to survey the enormous wealth of Nature as a regularly ordered whole a kosmos, an image of the logical thought of our own mind. – Hermann von Helmholtz • There is a new survey out about the happiest professions. I think the whole premise is flawed. You’re supposed to find true happiness outside of work. From friends, family, and YouTube videos of old people falling down. – Craig Ferguson • There isn’t a clear goal in sight. Osama bin Laden’s organization has spun out from him and is now probably independent of him. There will be others who will appear and reappear. This is why we need a much more precise, a much more defined, a much more patiently constructed campaign, as well as one that surveys not just the terrorists’ presence but the root causes of terrorism, which are ascertainable. – Edward Said • There once was a demographic survey done to determine if money was connected to happiness and Ireland was the only place where this did not turn out to be true. – Fiona Shaw • There was a research I think team, which conducted a survey about what Indians think of Americans, and 71 percent I believe said, well, I think all the nice things about our working together with the United States. But there are people I think that are old mind-sets, who still I think remain mired in the Cold War ideology. – Manmohan Singh • There was a survey done a few years ago that affected me greatly. it was discovered that intelligent people either estimate their intelligence accurately or slightly underestimate themselves, but stupid people overestimate their intelligence and by huge margins. (And these were things like straight up math tests, not controversial IQ tests.) – Harvey Pekar • There`s plenty of other evidence Trump is in sync with the base, including a major survey released that found that 76 percent of Republicans think Islam is incompatible with the American way of life. – Donald Trump • They say the full potential of the human being is called enlightenment, which is infinite consciousness, infinite happiness, zero negativity, zero dying, complete freedom, total fulfillment, and being at one with everything. You can say it’s God realization, or you can say you sit at the feet of the Lord as master of all you survey. You could say it’s totality, total knowledge, and that you are that totality. This is every human being’s birthright: to one day enjoy supreme enlightenment, unity. It’s like the big graduation. – David Lynch • They took a survey: Why do men get up in the middle of the night? Ten percent get up to go to the bathroom and 90 percent get up to go home. – Rodney Dangerfield • This party will not take its position based on public opinion polls. We will not take a stand based on focus groups. We will not take a stand based on phone-in shows or householder surveys or any other vagaries of pubic opinion. – Stephen Harper • Though it is very easy to do valuations, eyeballs and brand prominence surveys, you should never allow any of them to influence the balance sheet. – Ashwin Sanghi • Though with those streams he no resemblance hold, Whose foam is amber and their gravel gold; His genuine and less guilty wealth t’ explore, Search not his bottom, but survey his shore. – John Denham • Time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop. – William Shakespeare • To glorify the past and paint the future is easy, to survey the present and emerge with some light and understanding is difficult. – Lin Yutang • To strive with difficulties, and to conquer them, is the highest human felicity; the next is, to strive, and deserve to conquer: but he whose life has passed without a contest, and who can boast neither success nor merit, can survey himself only as a useless filler of existence; ad if he is content with his own character, must owe his satisfaction to insensibility. – Samuel Johnson • USA Today has come out with a new survey – apparently, three out of every four people make up 75% of the population. – David Letterman • Verse is the natural speech of men, as singing is of birds’The Week’s Survey, 18 June 1904 – Edward Thomas • Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present. – Herbert Butterfield • We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by human kind. – William J. Clinton • We constantly see surveys that reveal this ignorance, especially among our high school students,78 percent of whom, in a recent nationwide multiple-choice test, identified Abraham Lincoln as ‘a kind of lobster.’ That’s right: more than three quarters of our nation’s youth could not correctly identify the man who invented the telephone. – Dave Barry • We must, like a painter, take time to stand back from our work, to be still, and thus see what’s what. . . True repose is standing back to survey the activities that fill our days. – William McNamara • We of the third sphere are unable to look at Europe or at Asia as they may survey each other. Wherever we go, across Pacific or Atlantic, we meet, not similarity so much as ‘the bizarre.’ Things astonish us, when we travel, that surprise nobody else. – Mary Ritter Beard • Well for everyone to make a study of astrology for, as indicated, while many individuals have set about to prove the astrological aspects and astrological survey enable one to determine future as well as the past conditions, these are well to the point where the individual understands that these act upon individuals because of their sojourn or correlation of their associations with the environs through which these are shown – see? Rather than the star directing the life, the life of the individual directs the courses of the stars, see? – Edgar Cayce • Well, first of all the Dominion Bureau of Statistics made a survey in the spring of 1970, which showed that on balance the difference in the cost of living between Canadian cities and American cities was 5 % to the advantage, of course, to the Canadian cities. – Leonard Woodcock • What is true about (ex-Iraq Survey Group head) David Kay’s evidence, and this is something I have to accept, and is one of the reasons why I think we now need a new inquiry – it is true David Kay is saying we have not found large stockpiles of actual weapons. – Tony Blair • What we also know is we haven’t found them [weapons of mass destruction] in Iraq – now let the survey group complete its work and give us the report… They will not report that there was no threat from Saddam, I don’t believe. – Tony Blair • When a lion stalks a herd, he sneaks in close, lies down, and surveys them to choose his victim. He takes his time. The deer or buffalo have no idea he’s near. He finds his prey and then he explodes from his hiding place and grabs it. Even if another, perfectly serviceable animal ends up within his reach, he isn’t going to alter his course. He has chosen, and he would rather go hungry than change his mind.- Ilona Andrews • When all thy mercies, O my God, My rising soul surveys, Transported with the view I’m lost, in wonder, love and praise. – Joseph Addison • When Gordon the Brown, in London in 1997, commissioned a great inquisition or survey of his new realm, the result was the so-called national asset register (NAR), which was immediately dubbed by the boomers of the UK Treasury “the modern Domesday Book”. – James Buchan • When I see the blind and wretched state of men, when I survey the whole universe in its deadness, and man left to himself with no light, as though lost in this corner of the universe without knowing who put him there, what he has to do, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost, with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. – Blaise Pascal • When the United States invaded Iraq, a New York Times/CBS News survey estimated that 42 percent of the American public believed that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And an ABC news poll said that 55 percent of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein directly supported al-Qaeda. None of this opinion is based on evidence (because there isn’t any). – Arundhati Roy • When they take surveys of women in business, of the Fortune 500, the successful women, 80% of them, say they were in sports as a young woman. – Billie Jean King • When we mean to build, We first survey the plot, then draw the model; And when we see the figure of the house, Then must we rate the cost of the erection. – William Shakespeare • When we started NFL Films, there were no focus groups, there were no demographic studies, there were no surveys. Every decision that we made, we made with our hearts, not with our heads. And, in the very beginning, we really didn’t even have a business plan. – Steve Sabol • When we survey our lives, seeking to fulfil our creativity, we often see we had a dream that went glimmering because we believed, and those around us believed, that the dream was beyond our reach. – Julia Cameron • When we take a slight survey of the surface of our globe a thousand objects offer themselves which, though long known, yet still demand our curiosity. – Oliver Goldsmith • When William the Conqueror commissioned a great survey of his English realm at Gloucester in 1085, the result was a work so thorough, fair, dispassionate, and wide-ranging that it seemed to the succeeding generations to have come from another world. – James Buchan • With respect to trust, people tell me that it is essential for organizational functioning. Maybe, but most surveys of trust find that trust in leaders is low and nonetheless, organizations role along quite nicely.- Jeffrey Pfeffer • With Twitter and other social networking tools, you can get a lot of advice from great people. I learn more from Twitter than any survey or discussion with a big company.- Daniel Ek • Write, if you must; not otherwise. Do not write, if you can earn a fair living at teaching or dressmaking, at electricity or hod-carrying. Make shoes, weed cabbages, survey land, keep house, make ice-cream, sell cake, climb a telephone pole. Nay, be a lightning-rod peddler or a book agent, before you set your heart upon it that you shall write for a living…. Living? It is more likely to be dying by your pen; despairing by your pen; burying hope and heart and youth and courage in your ink-stand. – Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward • You know all the surveys say that evangelicals have the best sex life of any other group. – Ted Haggard • You may have read that I went to M.I.T. In 1982 I filled out a Who’s Who survey with joking responses, and they never bothered to check the facts. – Chevy Chase • You’d think experienced political professionals would know better than to place their trust in exit polls, notoriously inaccurate surveys that had John Kerry winning the 2004 election by five points when he actually lost by three. – John Podhoretz

[batterymonster2021]

The Zipf Mystery

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/the-zipf-mystery-4/

The Zipf Mystery

Hi there, Vsauce. Michael right here. About 6 percentage of the whole thing you say and read and write is the "the" – is probably the most used word in the English language. About one out of each 16 phrases we encounter on a day-to-day basis is "the." the top 20 most original English words in order are "the," "of," "and," "to," "a," "in," "is," "I," "that," "it," "for," "you," "used to be," "with," "on," "as," "have," "however," "be," "they." that’s a fun fact. A section of trivialities however additionally it is extra. You see, whether or not essentially the most often used phrases are ranked throughout an whole language, or in only one booklet or article, just about at any time when a weird pattern emerges. The 2d most used phrase will show up about half of as probably as the most used. The third one 1/3 as mostly. The fourth one fourth as traditionally. The fifth one fifth as traditionally. The sixth one sixth as in general, and many others the entire means down. Severely. For some rationale, the quantity of occasions a word is used is just proportional to 1 over its rank.Word frequency and ranking on a log log graph comply with a satisfactory straight line. A energy-law. This phenomenon is known as Zipf’s legislation and it would not most effective follow to English. It additionally applies to different languages, like, good, all of them. Even historical languages we’ve not been competent to translate but. And here’s the thing. We don’t have any idea why. It is stunning that some thing as problematic as reality should be conveyed by way of anything as inventive as language in such a predictable method. How predictable? Good, watch this. Consistent with WordCount.Org, which ranks words as determined in the British countrywide Corpus, "sauce" is the 5,555th most normal English word. Now, here is a list of how regularly each phrase on Wikipedia and within the entire Gutenberg Corpus of tens of hundreds and hundreds of public domain books shows up.Essentially the most used word, ‘the,’ suggests up about 181 million instances. Realizing these two matters, we can estimate that the word "sauce" must appear about thirty thousand occasions on Wikipedia and Gutenberg combined. And it pretty much does. What gives? The sector is chaotic. Things are dispensed in myriad of methods, not simply vigour legal guidelines. And language is private, intentional, idiosyncratic. What about the world and ourselves might rationale such complicated routine and behaviors to follow this type of general rule? We literally do not know. Greater than a century of research has yet to close the case. Moreover, Zipf’s regulation doesn’t simply mysteriously describe phrase use. It is usually located in metropolis populations, sunlight flare intensities, protein sequences and immune receptors, the quantity of site visitors web sites get, earthquake magnitudes, the number of occasions academic papers are noted, last names, the firing patterns of neural networks, parts used in cookbooks, the number of cellphone calls persons obtained, the diameter of Moon craters, the quantity of persons that die in wars, the repute of opening chess strikes, even the price at which we put out of your mind.There are a lot of theories about why language is ‘zipf-y,’ however no firm conclusions and this video doesn’t incorporate a specific clarification both. Sorry, i do know that is a bummer, due to the fact that we show up to like figuring out greater than thriller. However that stated, we also ask greater than we reply. So let’s dive into Zipf’s ramifications, some associated patterns, some feasible explanations and the depth of the mystery itself. Zipf’s law was once popularized with the aid of George Zipf, a linguist at Harvard school. It is a discrete form of the continuous Pareto distribution from which we get the Pareto principle. Considering the fact that so many actual-world methods behave this manner, the Pareto precept tells us that, commonly of thumb, it is valued at assuming that 20% of the factors are dependable for 80% of the end result, like in language, where the most normally used 18 percentage of phrases account for over eighty% of phrase occurrences. In 1896, Vilfredo Pareto showed that approximately 80% of the land in Italy was owned by way of simply twenty percent of the population. It is said that he later observed in his backyard 20 percentage of his pea pods contained eighty percent of the peas. He and different researchers looked at other datasets and found that this eighty-20 imbalance comes up rather a lot on this planet.The richest 20% of humans have 82.7% of the sector’s income. In the U.S., 20% of patients use eighty percent of wellbeing care assets. In 2002, Microsoft said that 80% of the blunders and crashes in windows and workplace are caused by using 20% of the bugs detected. A long-established rule of thumb in the industry world states that 20% of your consumers are responsible for eighty% of your profits and eighty percent of the complaints you obtain will come from 20% of your buyers. A guide titled "The eighty/20 precept" even says that in a home or workplace, 20% of the carpet receives 80 percent of the wear and tear.Oh, and as Woody Allen famously mentioned, "eighty percent of success is just showing up." The Pareto principle is everywhere, which is just right. Via focusing on just 20 percentage of what’s incorrect, which you can mainly anticipate to resolve eighty percentage of the problems. A type of special unrelated factors purpose this to be true from case to case, but if we will get to the backside of what reasons a few of them, maybe we’ll find that one or more of those mechanisms is liable for Zipf’s regulation in language. George Zipf himself notion languages’ intriguing rank frequency distribution was a consequence of the precept of Least Effort. The tendency for life and matters to follow the path of least resistance. Zipf believed it drove so much of human conduct and hypothesized that as language developed in our species, speakers naturally preferred drawing from as few phrases as possible to get their thoughts out there. It was once less difficult.However to be able to fully grasp what was once being mentioned, listeners desired larger vocabularies that gave more specificity, in order that they needed to do much less work. The compromise between listening and speaking, Zipf felt, led to the present state of language. Just a few phrases are used almost always and many many many phrases are used hardly ever. Latest papers have urged that having a few short, probably used, predictable phrases helps dissipate expertise load density on listeners, spacing out main vocab so that the know-how rate is more regular.This makes sense and much has been realized by using making use of the least effort principle to different behaviors, but later researchers argued that for language, the explanation used to be much more easy. Only a few years after Zipf’s seminal paper, Benoit Mandelbrot confirmed that there could also be nothing mysterious about Zipf’s regulation at all, when you consider that although you just randomly type on a keyboard you’re going to produce words disbursed consistent with Zipf’s law. It is a sexy cool point and that is why it occurs. There are exponentially more different lengthy words than quick phrases. For example, the English alphabet can be used to make 26 one letter phrases, but 26 squared 2 letter phrases. Additionally, in random typing, whenever the space bar is pressed a phrase terminates. In view that there may be continuously a unique risk that the gap bar shall be pressed, longer stretches of time before it occurs are exponentially much less probably than shorter ones.The combo of those exponentials is pretty ‘Zipf-y.’ For example, if all 26 letters and the spacebar are equally more likely to be typed, after a letter is typed and a phrase has begun, the probability that the subsequent input will be an area, as a result creating a one letter phrase, is just one in 27. And sure sufficient, in the event you randomly generate characters or rent a proverbial typing monkey, about one out of each 27 or 3.7 percent of the stuff between areas, can be single letters. Two letter words appear when after opening a phrase any personality however the space bar is hit – a 26 in 27 hazard and then the gap bar. A three-letter phrase is the chance of a letter, yet another letter after which an area. If we divide by means of the quantity of particular phrases of each and every length there will also be, we get the frequency of prevalence anticipated for any unique word given its length. For illustration, the letter V will make up about 0.142 percent of random typing. The word "Vsauce" zero.0000000993 percentage. Longer phrases are much less probably, but watch this. Let’s unfold these frequencies out in step with the ranks they’d soak up on a most on the whole used record.There are 26 possible one letter words, so each and every of the top 26 ranked phrases are anticipated to occur about this often. The subsequent 676 ranks can be taken up through two letter phrases that exhibit up about this in general. If we extend each and every frequency according to how many participants it has, we get Zipf. Subsequent researchers have distinct how altering up the initial conditions can smooth the steps out.Our mysterious distribution has been created out of nothing however the inevitabilities of math. So perhaps there is not any thriller. Maybe phrases are just the influence of people randomly segmenting the observable world and the mental world into labels and Zipf’s legislation describes what naturally occurs when you do this. Case closed. And as consistently And as at all times, thanks for… Wait a minute! Actual language may be very different from random typing. Conversation is deterministic to a unique extent. Utterances and topics arrive headquartered on what was mentioned before.And the vocabulary we have got to work with absolutely isn’t the result of in basic terms random naming. For example, the monkey typing mannequin cannot provide an explanation for why even the names of the factors, the planets and the times of the week are utilized in language according to Zipf’s legislation. Sets like these are limited by means of the natural world and they’re now not the effect of us randomly segmenting the arena into labels. Furthermore, when given a list of novel words, phrases they’ve on no account heard or used before, like when caused to write down a story about alien creatures with unusual names, humans will naturally tend to use the title of 1 alien twice as on the whole as one other, three times as regularly as one other… Zipf’s law seems to be developed into our brains. Perhaps there’s something about the way in which ideas and themes of discussion ebb and drift that contributes to Zipf’s legislation.One more means ‘Zipf-ian’ distributions occur is via approaches that change in keeping with how they’ve earlier operated. These are referred to as preferential attachment procedures. They occur when something – money, views, awareness, version, buddies, jobs, anything fairly is given out according to how so much is already possessed. To go back to the carpet example, if most folks stroll from the residing room to the kitchen across a targeted direction, furniture will be placed in other places, making that course even more wellknown. The extra views a video or photograph or put up has, the extra likely it is to get advocated routinely or make the information for having so many views, both of which offer it more views.It’s like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill. The more snow it accumulates, the bigger its floor subject turns into for gathering more and the faster it grows. There doesn’t must be a deliberate option using a preferential attachment procedure. It will probably occur naturally. Do this. Take a bunch of paper clips and take hold of any two at random. Hyperlink them together after which throw them again in the pile. Now, repeat over and over again. If you seize paper clips which can be already a part of a chain, hyperlink ’em anyway. More customarily than no longer after a even as you are going to have a distribution that appears ‘Zipf-ian.’ A small quantity of chains include a disproportionate quantity of the total paperclip rely. That is without problems due to the fact the longer a chain gets, the better proportion of the entire it involves, which gives it a greater risk of being picked up one day and accordingly made even longer.The rich get richer, the tremendous get larger, the popular get popular-er. It is just math. Might be languages’ Zipf mystery is, if now not induced by it, at the least bolstered by means of preferential attachment. Once a word is used, it’s extra probably for use again soon. Critical facets could play a role as well. Writing and conversation in general stick to a subject matter unless a imperative point is reached and the area is changed and the vocabulary shifts. Approaches like these are identified to influence in vigor legal guidelines. So, ultimately, it appears tenable that all these mechanisms could collude to make Zipf’s regulation essentially the most normal means for language to be. Possibly a few of our vocabulary and grammar was once developed randomly, in step with Mandelbrot’s thought. And the natural approach conversation and dialogue comply with preferential attachment and criticality, coupled with the precept of least effort when speakme and listening are all responsible for the connection between phrase rank and frequency.It’s a shame that the answer is not less complicated, nevertheless it’s intriguing on account that of the penalties it has on what communication is made from. Roughly talking, and that is mind blowing, just about half of any publication, conversation or article will be nothing however the same 50 to one hundred words. And nearly the opposite half can be phrases that appear in that selection most effective as soon as. That is now not so stunning when you do not forget the fact that one word accounts for six percentage of what we say.The top 25 most used phrases make up a few 1/3 of everything we are saying and the highest 100 about half of. Significantly. I imply, whether or not it is all of the phrases in "moist scorching American summer," or all the words in Plato’s "whole Works" or within the whole works of Edgar Allan Poe or the Bible itself, best about one hundred words are used for practically 1/2 of the whole lot written or mentioned. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 44% and in Tom Sawyer 49.Eight% of the designated words used appear only once within the e-book. A phrase that’s used handiest as soon as in a given determination of words is referred to as a ‘hapax legomenon.’ Hapax legomena are vitally primary to understanding languages.If a phrase has handiest been found as soon as in the entire known assortment of an historical language, it can be very intricate to determine what it approach. Now, there’s no corpus of everything ever stated or written in English, however there are very very tremendous collections and it is fun to seek out hapax legomena in them. For illustration, and this frequently will not be the case after I mention it, but the phrase "quizzaciously" is within the Oxford English Dictionary, however seems nowhere on Wikipedia or in the Gutenberg corpus or within the British countrywide Corpus or the American national Corpus, however it does show up when searched in only one outcome on Google. Fittingly, in a guide titled "ElderSpeak" that lists it as a ‘rare word.’ Quizzaciously, by the way, manner "in a mocking method," as in "The paradist rattled off quizzaciously, ‘good day, Vsauce.Michael here. But who’s Michael and how much does right here weigh?’" it can be a bit unhappy that quizzaciously has been used so infrequently. It can be a enjoyable phrase, however that is the way in which matters go in a ‘Zipf-ian’ procedure. Some things get all of the love, some get little. Most of what you expertise on a every day foundation is forgotten, forgettable. The Dictionary of vague Sorrows, as it most commonly does, has a word for this – alright – the realization of how few days are memorable. I have been alive for almost 11,000 days but i couldn’t inform you some thing about every one among them. I mean, not even shut. Most of what we do and see and feel and say and listen to and believe is forgotten at a cost really much like Zipf’s law, which is sensible. If a quantity of factors naturally selected for considering and speakme concerning the world with tools in a ‘Zipf-ian’ way, it is smart we’d remember it that way too. Some things rather well, most things hardly ever at all. Nevertheless it bums me out many times given that it signifies that a lot is forgotten, even things that on the time you idea you might by no means omit.My locker number – senior yr – its combo, the jokes I liked after I saw a comedian on stage, the names of folks I noticed everyday 10 years ago. So many memories are gone. Once I look at the entire books I’ve learn and have an understanding of that I are not able to keep in mind every detail from them, it can be just a little disappointing. I mean, why even bother if the Pareto precept dictates that my ‘Zipf-ian’ mind will consciously don’t forget generally best the titles and some basic reactions years later Ralph Waldo Emerson makes me think better. He as soon as stated, "I can’t don’t forget the books I’ve read any more than the meals i’ve eaten. Then again, they’ve made me." And as always, thanks for gazing. .

[airoasis]

The Zipf Mystery

New Post has been published on https://hititem.kr/the-zipf-mystery/

The Zipf Mystery

Hey, Vsauce. Michael right here. About 6 percent of the whole lot you say and skim and write is the "the" – is essentially the most used word within the English language. About one out of each sixteen words we encounter on a daily basis is "the." the top 20 most common English words so as are "the," "of," "and," "to," "a," "in," "is," "I," "that," "it," "for," "you," "used to be," "with," "on," "as," "have," "but," "be," "they." that is a enjoyable reality. A piece of minutiae but additionally it is more. You see, whether or not the most mostly used words are ranked across an complete language, or in only one e-book or article, almost every time a bizarre sample emerges. The 2d most used phrase will appear about half as most commonly as probably the most used. The 1/3 one 1/3 as mostly. The fourth one fourth as most commonly.The fifth one fifth as commonly. The sixth one sixth as most often, and so forth the entire method down. Critically. For some intent, the quantity of occasions a phrase is used is simply proportional to 1 over its rank. Word frequency and ranking on a log log graph follow a fine straight line. A vigour-regulation. This phenomenon is called Zipf’s law and it doesn’t handiest observe to English. It additionally applies to different languages, like, good, all of them. Even ancient languages we’ve not been ready to translate yet. And this is the article. We don’t have any idea why. It’s shocking that something as intricate as reality must be conveyed via something as ingenious as language in this kind of predictable approach. How predictable? Well, watch this. According to WordCount.Org, which ranks phrases as located within the British country wide Corpus, "sauce" is the 5,555th most fashioned English word. Now, here’s a record of how generally each phrase on Wikipedia and within the complete Gutenberg Corpus of tens of countless numbers of public domain books indicates up.The most used word, ‘the,’ suggests up about 181 million occasions. Figuring out these two things, we are able to estimate that the phrase "sauce" should appear about thirty thousand occasions on Wikipedia and Gutenberg mixed. And it normally does. What offers? The sector is chaotic. Matters are distributed in myriad of approaches, no longer just vigour legal guidelines. And language is personal, intentional, idiosyncratic. What about the world and ourselves could motive such complicated pursuits and behaviors to comply with this sort of normal rule? We actually have no idea. Greater than a century of research has yet to shut the case. Furthermore, Zipf’s law does not simply mysteriously describe phrase use. It is also located in city populations, sunlight flare intensities, protein sequences and immune receptors, the quantity of site visitors web pages get, earthquake magnitudes, the number of times educational papers are mentioned, last names, the firing patterns of neural networks, ingredients utilized in cookbooks, the number of cell calls individuals obtained, the diameter of Moon craters, the number of individuals that die in wars, the reputation of opening chess strikes, even the fee at which we fail to remember.There are plenty of theories about why language is ‘zipf-y,’ however no organization conclusions and this video doesn’t include a particular clarification either. Sorry, i do know that’s a bummer, for the reason that we appear to like realizing greater than mystery. However that mentioned, we additionally ask more than we answer. So let’s dive into Zipf’s ramifications, some associated patterns, some feasible explanations and the depth of the thriller itself. Zipf’s law used to be popularized with the aid of George Zipf, a linguist at Harvard institution. It’s a discrete type of the steady Pareto distribution from which we get the Pareto principle. Seeing that so many real-world methods behave this fashion, the Pareto principle tells us that, as a rule of thumb, it can be worth assuming that 20% of the motives are responsible for 80% of the final result, like in language, where the most most of the time used 18 percentage of words account for over eighty% of phrase occurrences. In 1896, Vilfredo Pareto showed that approximately eighty% of the land in Italy was once owned with the aid of simply twenty percentage of the population.It’s stated that he later noticed in his garden 20 percentage of his pea pods contained eighty percent of the peas. He and different researchers checked out different datasets and determined that this eighty-20 imbalance comes up loads on the earth. The richest 20% of people have 82.7% of the sector’s sales. In the us, 20% of sufferers use eighty percent of wellness care assets. In 2002, Microsoft suggested that 80% of the mistakes and crashes in home windows and place of job are induced with the aid of 20% of the bugs detected. A normal rule of thumb in the trade world states that 20% of your shoppers are responsible for eighty% of your gains and eighty percent of the complaints you obtain will come from 20% of your customers.A ebook titled "The 80/20 principle" even says that in a home or workplace, 20% of the carpet receives eighty percentage of the wear and tear. Oh, and as Woody Allen famously stated, "eighty percent of success is just displaying up." The Pareto principle is everywhere, which is good. Through focusing on just 20 percentage of what’s wrong, that you would be able to normally assume to remedy eighty percent of the issues. A variety of specific unrelated explanations reason this to be proper from case to case, but if we can get to the bottom of what factors a few of them, probably we will in finding that one or more of these mechanisms is dependable for Zipf’s law in language.George Zipf himself idea languages’ fascinating rank frequency distribution used to be a end result of the precept of Least Effort. The tendency for lifestyles and things to comply with the trail of least resistance. Zipf believed it drove much of human behavior and hypothesized that as language developed in our species, audio system naturally favored drawing from as few phrases as feasible to get their ideas available in the market. It used to be less difficult. However with a view to have an understanding of what was being stated, listeners desired better vocabularies that gave extra specificity, in order that they needed to do less work. The compromise between listening and speaking, Zipf felt, resulted in the present state of language. A couple of words are used commonly and lots of many many phrases are used hardly ever. Contemporary papers have advised that having a few short, typically used, predictable phrases helps dissipate information load density on listeners, spacing out fundamental vocab in order that the expertise cost is extra consistent. This is smart and much has been discovered by means of applying the least effort principle to other behaviors, however later researchers argued that for language, the explanation was much more simple.Only some years after Zipf’s seminal paper, Benoit Mandelbrot confirmed that there could also be nothing mysterious about Zipf’s legislation in any respect, considering that even though you simply randomly form on a keyboard you’ll produce phrases disbursed in step with Zipf’s regulation. It’s a lovely cool factor and this is why it occurs. There are exponentially extra exclusive long phrases than brief words. For example, the English alphabet can be used to make 26 one letter phrases, however 26 squared 2 letter words. Additionally, in random typing, at any time when the gap bar is pressed a word terminates. Seeing that there’s perpetually a distinctive chance that the gap bar will probably be pressed, longer stretches of time before it occurs are exponentially less seemingly than shorter ones. The mixture of those exponentials is beautiful ‘Zipf-y.’ For instance, if all 26 letters and the spacebar are equally more likely to be typed, after a letter is typed and a word has begun, the likelihood that the following input shall be an area, for that reason making a one letter phrase, is just one in 27. And certain enough, if you randomly generate characters or rent a proverbial typing monkey, about one out of every 27 or three.7 percent of the stuff between spaces, will probably be single letters.Two letter phrases appear when after starting a word any personality however the space bar is hit – a 26 in 27 threat and then the gap bar. A three-letter word is the likelihood of a letter, another letter after which a space. If we divide by way of the quantity of exact words of each and every size there can be, we get the frequency of prevalence anticipated for any precise word given its length.For instance, the letter V will make up about 0.142 percent of random typing. The word "Vsauce" zero.0000000993 percent. Longer words are less possible, but watch this. Let’s unfold these frequencies out in line with the ranks they’d soak up on a most most often used list. There are 26 viable one letter words, so every of the highest 26 ranked words are anticipated to occur about this more often than not. The following 676 ranks will be taken up through two letter phrases that show up about this regularly. If we lengthen each frequency in step with how many members it has, we get Zipf. Subsequent researchers have distinctive how altering up the preliminary conditions can gentle the steps out. Our mysterious distribution has been created out of nothing but the inevitabilities of math. So perhaps there is no mystery. Perhaps words are simply the outcomes of humans randomly segmenting the observable world and the intellectual world into labels and Zipf’s legislation describes what naturally occurs while you do this. Case closed. And as normally And as constantly, thanks for…Wait a minute! Precise language could be very distinct from random typing. Communication is deterministic to a detailed extent. Utterances and topics arrive headquartered on what was stated before. And the vocabulary we need to work with absolutely isn’t the outcome of merely random naming. For instance, the monkey typing model are not able to provide an explanation for why even the names of the elements, the planets and the days of the week are utilized in language according to Zipf’s regulation.Sets like these are limited by means of the usual world and they’re no longer the influence of us randomly segmenting the world into labels. Moreover, when given a list of novel phrases, words they’ve under no circumstances heard or used earlier than, like when induced to write a story about alien creatures with strange names, persons will naturally tend to use the title of 1 alien twice as ordinarily as a different, thrice as almost always as an extra… Zipf’s regulation seems to be constructed into our brains.Possibly there may be some thing about the way in which thoughts and issues of discussion ebb and glide that contributes to Zipf’s law. Yet another approach ‘Zipf-ian’ distributions occur is through approaches that vary in line with how they’ve beforehand operated. These are called preferential attachment processes. They occur when whatever – cash, views, concentration, variant, friends, jobs, anything really is given out in step with how much is already possessed. To go back to the carpet example, if most people walk from the living room to the kitchen throughout a certain direction, furnishings will likely be placed in different places, making that path much more wellknown. The more views a video or snapshot or submit has, the extra seemingly it is to get recommended mechanically or make the information for having so many views, both of which provide it extra views. It’s like a snowball rolling down a snowy hill. The extra snow it accumulates, the larger its surface subject turns into for collecting extra and the turbo it grows.There would not need to be a deliberate choice using a preferential attachment method. It may possibly occur naturally. Try this. Take a bunch of paper clips and snatch any two at random. Link them together after which throw them again in the pile. Now, repeat again and again. In case you grab paper clips which can be already part of a sequence, link ’em anyway. More typically than no longer after a at the same time you are going to have a distribution that looks ‘Zipf-ian.’ A small number of chains include a disproportionate quantity of the complete paperclip count. That is quite simply considering that the longer a sequence gets, the better proportion of the whole it includes, which offers it a greater threat of being picked up one day and consequently made even longer.The rich get richer, the massive get greater, the standard get general-er. It’s simply math. Probably languages’ Zipf mystery is, if now not triggered by means of it, at the least strengthened by way of preferential attachment. Once a phrase is used, it is more possible to be used again quickly. Important elements could play a function as good. Writing and dialog generally stick to a subject until a critical factor is reached and the field is changed and the vocabulary shifts. Techniques like these are known to outcome in vigor laws. So, eventually, it seems tenable that each one these mechanisms could collude to make Zipf’s regulation probably the most natural means for language to be.Perhaps a few of our vocabulary and grammar was once developed randomly, in step with Mandelbrot’s concept. And the normal approach dialog and dialogue follow preferential attachment and criticality, coupled with the principle of least effort when speaking and listening are all accountable for the relationship between word rank and frequency. It can be a disgrace that the reply isn’t less complicated, nevertheless it’s intriguing for the reason that of the penalties it has on what conversation is made of. Roughly speaking, and this is intellect blowing, close to 1/2 of any book, dialog or article can be nothing however the equal 50 to a hundred phrases. And virtually the opposite 1/2 will likely be phrases that appear in that choice most effective once. That is now not so surprising whilst you take into account the truth that one phrase bills for six percent of what we are saying.The top 25 most used phrases make up a few 0.33 of the whole lot we say and the highest a hundred about 1/2. Severely. I imply, whether or not it’s the entire phrases in "wet sizzling American summer," or all the words in Plato’s "entire Works" or within the entire works of Edgar Allan Poe or the Bible itself, only about 100 words are used for close to half of the whole lot written or mentioned. In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 44% and in Tom Sawyer forty nine.Eight% of the targeted words used show up most effective once in the ebook. A phrase that is used most effective once in a given determination of words is known as a ‘hapax legomenon.’ Hapax legomena are vitally essential to working out languages. If a word has simplest been found as soon as in the whole known collection of an historical language, it may be very tricky to figure out what it manner.Now, there is no corpus of the whole thing ever mentioned or written in English, however there are very very enormous collections and it can be enjoyable to find hapax legomena in them. For illustration, and this traditionally will not be the case after I mention it, but the phrase "quizzaciously" is in the Oxford English Dictionary, but seems nowhere on Wikipedia or in the Gutenberg corpus or in the British countrywide Corpus or the American countrywide Corpus, however it does show up when searched in just one influence on Google. Fittingly, in a e-book titled "ElderSpeak" that lists it as a ‘rare word.’ Quizzaciously, by the way, means "in a mocking manner," as in "The paradist rattled off quizzaciously, ‘hello, Vsauce. Michael right here. However who’s Michael and how much does here weigh?’" it is a bit of sad that quizzaciously has been used so occasionally. It’s a fun word, however that’s the way in which things go in a ‘Zipf-ian’ method.Some things get all the love, some get little. Most of what you experience on a every day basis is forgotten, forgettable. The Dictionary of imprecise Sorrows, as it typically does, has a word for this – okay – the consciousness of how few days are memorable. I’ve been alive for close to 11,000 days but i could not inform you some thing about each and every one among them. I mean, now not even shut. Most of what we do and notice and feel and say and hear and consider is forgotten at a rate relatively similar to Zipf’s regulation, which makes sense. If a quantity of factors naturally selected for considering and talking concerning the world with instruments in a ‘Zipf-ian’ means, it is sensible we’d do not forget it that method too. Some matters relatively good, most matters infrequently in any respect. However it bums me out typically considering that it signifies that so much is forgotten, even things that on the time you thought you might certainly not fail to remember.My locker quantity – senior 12 months – its combination, the jokes I appreciated after I noticed a comic on stage, the names of persons I saw everyday 10 years ago. So many recollections are long past. When I seem at all of the books I’ve read and understand that I cannot recollect each detail from them, it can be a little bit disappointing. I imply, why even bother if the Pareto principle dictates that my ‘Zipf-ian’ mind will consciously consider usually only the titles and a few normal reactions years later Ralph Waldo Emerson makes me suppose higher. He as soon as stated, "I are not able to recall the books I’ve learn to any extent further than the meals i have eaten.Nonetheless, they’ve made me." And as invariably, thanks for watching. .

[scifigeneration]

Aliens, very strange universes and Brexit – Martin Rees Q&A

by Martin Rees

Martin Rees is Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics, at the University of Cambridge, the Astronomer Royal, a member of Britain’s House of Lords, and a former President of the Royal Society. The following interview was conducted at Trinity College, Cambridge, by The Conversation’s Matt Warren.

Into space

Q: How big is the universe … and is it the only one?

Our cosmic horizons have grown enormously over the last century, but there is a definite limit to the size of the observable universe. It contains all the things from which light has been able to reach us since the Big Bang, about 14 billion years ago. But the new realisation is that the observable universe may not be all of reality. There may be more beyond the horizon, just as there’s more beyond the horizon when you’re observing the ocean from a boat.

What’s more, the galaxies are likely to go on and on beyond this horizon, but more interestingly, there is a possibility that our Big Bang was not the only one. There may have been others, spawning other universes, disconnected from ours and therefore not observable, and possibly even governed by different physical laws. Physical reality on this vast scale could therefore be much more varied and interesting than what we can observe.

Plenty more over the horizon. Shutterstock

The universe we can observe is governed by the same laws everywhere. We can observe a distant galaxy and see that the atoms emitting the light are just the same as the ones in the lab. But there may be physical domains that are governed by completely different laws. Some may have no gravity, or not allow for nuclear physics. Ours may not even be a typical domain.

Even in our own universe, there are only so many ways you can assemble the same atoms, so if it is large enough it is possible that there is another Earth, even another avatar you. If this were the case, however, the universe would have to be bigger than the observable one by a number which to write down would require all the atoms in the universe. Rest assured, if there’s another you, they are a very, very long way away. They might even be making the same mistakes.

Q: So how likely is alien life in this vast expanse?

We know now that planets exist around many, even most, stars. We know that in our Milky Way galaxy there are likely millions of planets that are in many ways like the Earth, with liquid water. The question then is whether life has developed on them – and we can’t yet answer that.

Although we know how via Darwinian selection a complex biosphere evolved on Earth around 4 billion years ago, we don’t yet understand the actual origin of life – the transition from complex chemistry to the first metabolising, replicating structures. The good news is that we will have a better idea of how that happened within the next ten or 20 years and crucially, how likely it was to happen. This will give us a better understanding of how likely it is to happen elsewhere. In that time, we will also have technologies that will allow us to better search for alien life.

Intelligence has an uncertain future. Shutterstock

But just because there’s life elsewhere doesn’t mean that there is intelligent life. My guess is that if we do detect an alien intelligence, it will be nothing like us. It will be some sort of electronic entity.

If we look at our history on Earth, it has taken about 4 billion years to get from the first protozoa to our current, technological civilisation. But if we look into the future, then it’s quite likely that within a few centuries, machines will have taken over – and they will then have billions of years ahead of them.

In other words, the period of time occupied by organic intelligence is just a thin sliver between early life and the long era of the machines. Because such civilisations would develop at different rates, it’s extremely unlikely that we will find intelligent life at the same stage of development as us. More likely, that life will still be either far simpler, or an already fully electronic intelligence.

On intelligence

Q: Do you believe that machines will develop intelligence?

There are many people who would bet on it. The second question, however, is whether that necessarily implies consciousness – or whether that is limited to the wet intelligence we have within our skulls. Most people, however, would argue that it is an emergent property and could develop in a machine mind.

Q: So if the universe is populated by electronic super minds, what questions will they be pondering?

We can’t conceive that any more than a chimp can guess the things that we spend our time thinking about. I would guess, however, that these minds aren’t on planets. While we depend on a planet and an atmosphere, these entities would be happy in zero G, floating freely in space. This might make them even harder to detect.

Q: How would humanity respond to the discovery of alien life?

It would certainly make the universe more interesting, but it would also make us less unique. The question is whether it would provoke in us any sense of cosmic modesty. Conversely, if all our searches for life fail, we’d know more certainly that this small planet really is the one special place, the single pale, blue dot where life has emerged. That would make what happens to it not just of global significance, but an issue of galactic importance, too.

And we are likely to be fixed to this world. We will be able to look deeper and deeper into space, but travelling to worlds beyond our solar system will be a post-human enterprise. The journey times are just too great for mortal minds and bodies. If you’re immortal, however, these distances become far less daunting. That journey will be made by robots, not us.

Q: What scientific advances would you like to see over the coming century?

Cheap, clean energy, for one. Artificial meat is another. But the idea is often easier than the application. I like to tell my students the story of two beavers standing in front of a huge hydroelectric dam. “Did you build that?” asks one. “No,” says the other. “But it is based on my idea”. That’s the essential balance between scientific insight and engineering development.

On expertise

Q: Michael Gove [the British politician who was a leader of the campaign for the UK to leave the EU] said people have had enough of experts. Have they?

I wouldn’t expect anything more from Mr Gove, but there is clearly a role for experts. If we’re sick, we go to a doctor, we don’t look randomly on the internet. But we must also realise that most experts only have expertise within their own area, and if we are scientists we should accept that. When science impacts on public policy, there will be elements of economics, ethics and politics where we as scientists speak only as laymen. We need to know where the demarcation line is between where we are experts and where we are just citizens.

If you want to influence public policy as a scientist, there are two ways to do it. You can aspire to be an adviser within government, which can be very frustrating. Or you can try and influence policy indirectly. Politicians are very much driven by what’s in their inbox and what’s in the press, so the scientists with the greatest influence are those who go public, and speak to everyday people. If an idea is picked up by voters, the politicians won’t ignore it.

Q: Brexit – good or bad?

I am surprised to find myself agreeing with Lord Heseltine [former UK Conservative government minister] and Tony Blair [former Labour prime minister], but it is a real disaster, which we have stumbled into. There is a lot of blame to be shared around, by Boris Johnson et al, but also by Jeremy Corbyn [leader of the UK Labour party] for not fighting his corner properly. I have been a member of the Labour Party for a very long time, but I feel badly let down by Corbyn – especially as Labour voters supported Remain two to one. He has been an ineffective leader, and also ambivalent on this issue. A different leader, making a vocal case for Remain, could have tilted the vote.

On the other side, Boris Johnson [now UK foreign secretary – who campaigned for Britain to leave the EU] has been most reprehensible. At least Gove has opinions, which he has long expressed. Boris Johnson had no strong opinions, and the honourable thing to do if that is the case is to remain quiet. But he changed his stance opportunistically (as in the Eton debating society) and swung the vote.

Boris Johnson: ‘reprehensible’. Shutterstock

Q: But why is it such a disaster?

My concerns are broad geopolitical ones. In the world as it is now, with America becoming isolationist and an increasingly dominant Russia, for Europe to establish itself as a united and powerful counterweight is more important than ever. We are jeopardising something that has held Europe together, in peace, for 60 years, and could also break up the United Kingdom in the process. We will be remembered for that and it is something to deplore.

One thing astronomers bring to the table is an awareness that we have a long potential future, as well as the universe’s long past – and that this future could be jeopardised by what happens in the coming decades.

Q: More broadly, how much danger is the human race in?

I have spent a lot of time considering how we as a species can make it into the next century – and there are two main classes of problems. First, the collective impact of humanity as its footprint on the planet increases due to a growing population more demanding of resources. Second, the possible misuse by error or design of ever more powerful technology – and most worryingly, bio-tech.

There is certainly a high chance of a major global setback this century, most likely from the second threat, which increasingly allows individual groups to have a global impact. Added to this is the fact that the world is increasingly connected, so anything that happens has a global resonance. This is something new and actually makes us more vulnerable as a species than at any time in our past.

Q: So terrorism will pose an even greater threat in the coming century?

Yes, because of these technologies, terrorists or fanatics will be able to have a greater impact. But there’s also the simple danger of these technologies being misused. Engineering or changing viruses, for example, can be used in benign ways – to eradicate Zika, for example – but there’s obviously a risk that such things can get out of control.

Bio-tech: one of the great threats. Shutterstock

Nuclear requires large, conspicuous and heavily-protected facilities. But the facilities needed for bio-tech, for example, are small-scale, widely understood, widely available and dual use. It is going to be very hard indeed properly to regulate it.

In the short and intermediate term, this is even more worrying than the risks posed by climate change – although in the long term, that will be a very major problem, especially as both people and politicians find it very difficult to focus on things further down the line.

I have been very involved in campaigns to get all countries involved in research and development into alternative, clean energy sources. Making them available and cheap is the only way we are going to move towards a low carbon future. The level of money invested in this form of research should be equivalent to the amount spent on health or defence, and nuclear fusion and fourth generation nuclear fission should be part of that.

Q: In the medieval world, people would start building cathedrals that only later generations would finish. Have we lost that long-term perspective?

That’s right. In fact, one very important input behind the political discussion prior to the Paris climate agreement was the 2015 Papal Encyclical. I’m a council member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which helped to initiate the scientific meetings which were important in ensuring that the encyclical was a highly respected document. Whatever one thinks of the Catholic church, one cannot deny its long-term vision, its global range and its concern for the world’s poor. I believe that the encyclical, six months before the Paris conference, had a big impact on the leaders and people in South America, Africa and Asia. Religion clearly still has a very important role to play in the world.

Q: Have you ever encountered anything in the cosmos that has made you wonder whether a creator was behind it?

No. Personally, I don’t have any religious beliefs. But I describe myself as a cultural Christian, in that I was brought up in England and the English church was an important part of that. Then again, if I had been born in Iran, I’d probably go to the mosque.

Martin Rees is Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.