We've been metric since the 70s, but we'll travel miles in 90 degree heat to avoid using it. Although as the temp drops, we do switch to celcius :-)
- Le Slip Anglais
from Android
"Ruskin wrote that Turner’s underlying theme was Death. I believe rather that it was solitude and violence and the impossibility of redemption. Most of his paintings are as if about the aftermath of a crime. And what is so disturbing about them — what actually allows them to be seen as beautiful — is not the guilt but the global indifference that they record."
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
"These incredible looking flowers are monkey orchids. There are two species shown here, Dracula simia (the ones that look like monkey faces) and Orchis simia (which resemble little dancing monkeys). Dracula simia are only found in the cloud forests of southeastern Ecuador at elevations of 1000 to 2000 meters and their flowers smell likes ripe oranges. Orchis simia are found in Europe, the Mediterranean, Russia, Asia Minor and Iran and the flowers smell strongly of feces! "
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
from Bookmarklet
"Just as capital is compelled continually to reproduce itself, so its culture is one of unending anticipation. What-is-to-come, what-is-to-be-gained empties what-is. The immigrant proletariat, unable to return home, suffering from being who they were, yearned to become, or for their children to become, American. They saw no hope but to exchange...
"...themselves for the future. And although the desperation of this wager was specifically immigrant, the mechanism has become more and more typical of developed capitalism."
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
"Time, they often say in New York, is money. This can also mean that money is what time is like. Money, being purely quantitative, has no content, but it can be exchanged for content: it purchases. The same has become true of time: it, too, is now being exchanged for the content that it lacks. Work-time for wages, wages for the unlived time 'encapsuled' in the purchase: the 'speed' of...
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"Had it not been for the trivial circumstance that British and American notebook paper are not the same size, flexagons might still be undiscovered, and a number of top-flight mathematicians would have been denied the pleasure of analyzing their curious structures."
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
from Bookmarklet
"This documentary is retracing the famous Steinbeck/Ricketts expedition of 1940, when they sailed down the coast of California and Mexico to the Sea of Cortez. “The abundance of life here gives one an exuberance,” they wrote, “a feeling of fullness and richness.” Their stated purpose was to document the creatures that inhabit shallow waters and tide pools on the margins of the Sea of Cortez. But it became much more. In these mysterious, phosphorescent waters they sought an understanding of mankind’s relationship to the natural world, and a wellspring of hope for a world headed toward war."
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
from Bookmarklet
You just know that SOMEbody was shaking a shiny object just off camera.
- Jkram|ɯɐɹʞſ
I watched this last night, and I liked the movie much more than the book. That doesn't happen very often.
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
"Oh, my smile meant something quite different. I'll tell you why I smiled. Not long ago I read the criticism made by a German who had lived in Russia, on our students and schoolboys of to-day. 'Show a Russian schoolboy,' he writes, 'a map of the stars, which he knows nothing about, and he will give you back the map next day with corrections on...
...it.' No knowledge and unbounded conceit- that's what the German meant to say about the Russian schoolboy."
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
"Yes, that's perfectly right," Kolya laughed suddenly, "exactly so! Bravo the German! But he did not see the good side, what do you think? Conceit may be, that comes from youth, that will be corrected if need be, but, on the other hand, there is an independent spirit almost from childhood, boldness of thought and conviction, and not the spirit of these sausage makers, grovelling before...
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- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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"During the second half of the 20th century the judgment of history has been abandoned by all except the under-privileged and dispossessed. The industrialised, 'developed" world, terrified of the past, blind to the future, lives within an opportunism which has emptied the principle of justice of all credibility. Such opportunism turns everything...
...-- nature, history, suffering, other people, catastrophes, sport, sex, politics -- into spectacle. And the implement used to do this -- until the act becomes so habitual that the conditioned imagination may do it alone -- is the camera."
- ʎəlɹoɯ uəʞ
"Corporations are in love with the idea of the strategic plan. They need to pay to figure out where they are going. Yet there is no evidence that strategic planning works—we even seem to have evidence against it. A management scholar, William Starbuck, has published a few papers debunking the effectiveness of planning—it makes the corporation...
"Almost everything theoretical in management, from Taylorism to all productivity stories, upon empirical testing, has been exposed as pseudoscience—and like most economic theories, lives in a world parallel to the evidence. Matthew Stewart, who, trained as a philosopher, found himself in a management consultant job, gives a pretty revolting, if funny, inside story in The Management...
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"For an illustration of business drift, rational and opportunistic business drift, take the following. Coca-Cola began as a pharmaceutical product. Tiffany & Co., the fancy jewelry store company, started life as a stationery store. The last two examples are close, perhaps, but consider next: Raytheon, which made the first missile guidance system, was a refrigerator maker (one of the...
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- from Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
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