It amazes me that we are all on Twitter and Facebook. By "we" I mean adults. We're adults, right? But emotionally we're a culture of seven-year-olds. Have you ever had that moment when are you updating your status and you realize that every status up...
Natural selection is a blind and undirected consequence of the interaction between variation and the environment. Natural selection exists only in the continuous present of the natural world: it has no memory of its previous actions, no plans for the...
I once ran across a list of nearly 400 winds from around the world and wondered why Wyoming, so dominated by wind, has so few names for its variations. . . . There's the wind, the damned wind, and the goddamned wind.
It was certainly not this mummified and outrageously painted old woman he was seeing before him, but the entire "female species," as it was his custom to call women. The individual disappeared, the features were obliterated, whether young or senile, ...
Specific reifications are variations on this general theme. Marriage, for instance, may be reified as an imitation of divine acts of creativity, as a universal mandate of natural laws, as the necessary consequences of biological or psychological forc...
t is generally recognized that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multitasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics a...
It is generally recognized that women are better than men at languages, personal relations and multitasking, but less good at map-reading and spatial awareness. It is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that women might be less good at mathematics ...
Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find more than one instructive p...
As immigrants fly across oceans they shed their old clothing because clothes maketh the man and new ones help ease the transition. Men's clothing has less international variations; the change is not so drastic. But those women who are not used to wea...
But you know that any showing of such an innovation is apt to start gossip. Just why, I don’t know. It, though, is a trait of Mankind only. Animals don’t ‘bloom’ out so abruptly. You can hunt through Biology, Zoology or any similar study, and...
The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, o...
VIEW FROM A HILL I am not yet quite over it. I am lying down on top of it. Surveying behind me a wasteland Of dried-up promise. While the lights below twinkle With dull mocking uncertainty. There isn't much left to look forward to, And the looking fo...
RIVETING TORPOR It is remarkable how far I am prepared to go In order to avoid doing the one thing that might Provide satisfaction, and it is remarkable to consider What I will do instead of it, purely for the pleasure Of being dissatisfied. When it ...
Patronage of Negation I am constantly confronted by other people’s works That I could have created myself. And I am constantly disappointed by them. Sadly, I have to recognize them For what they are: inferior versions Of what I could have done If I...
Only art can make the future love you, and that is what art is about: attraction at a distance, seduction from the past, inveiglement from beyond the grave. Art is a plea to love me when I’m gone. And yet, I thought to myself, who could love what I...
It’s the wide variation of women in our little shared petri dish that makes our lives never boring. Really all that we have in common is we each fell in love with a dude in uniform. The rest of it is a wild card. . . . Each of us trying to get thro...
If you are to believe that there are an infinite amount of universes with an infinite amount of possible variations on the laws of nature, then you are forced to admit that it is quite certain that in one of these parallel worlds dragons exist.
We know God by cultivating a relationship, not by understanding a concept. The relation constitutes the very subjectivity of of our existence. We participate in existence consciously and rationally, with subjective self-knowledge and identity, becaus...
Baba: There is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft... When you kill a man, you steal a life. You steal his wife's right to a husband, rob his children of a father. When you tell a lie, you steal someone'...
And so, as I sleep, some dream beguiles me, and suddenly I know I dream. Then I think: this is a dream, a pure diversion of my will; now that I have unlimited power, I am going to create a tiger. Oh incompetence! Never do my dreams engender the wild ...
One of the truly bizarre things about our current cultural situation is that the leading figures of the scientific establishment seem genuinely amazed that the citizens do not accept finch-beak variation as proof of the claim that humans, like all an...
