Mike Duffy

“For most of the time, Musashi wasn’t really conscious of what he was doing. He was in a sort of trance, a murderous dream in which body and soul were concentrated in his three-foot sword. Unconsciously, his whole life experience—the knowledge his father had beaten into him, what he had learned at Sekigahara, the theories he had heard at the various schools of swordsmanship, the lessons taught him by the mountains and the trees—everything came into play in the rapid movements of his body. He became a disembodied whirlwind mowing down the herd of rōnin, who by their stunned bewilderment left themselves wide open to his sword. For the short duration of the battle, one of the priests counted the number of times he inhaled and exhaled. It was all over before he had taken his twentieth breath. Musashi was drenched with the blood of his victims. The few remaining rōnin were also covered with gore. The earth, the grass, even the air was bloody. One of their number let out a scream, and the surviving rōnin scattered in all directions.”
― Eiji Yoshikawa, Musashi: An Epic Novel of the Samurai Era

“Even sitting well can put up to 40 percent more pressure on your spine than standing.3”
― Kelly Starrett, Deskbound: Standing Up to a Sitting World

“It is amusing to speculate that the reason why music has the ability to move us so deeply is that it is an auditory allusion to our basic connection to the universe. If our cosmic origins are seated in sound patterns, is it too far-fetched to think that music viscerally enables us to tap into those origins?”
― Stephon Alexander, The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe

“Scrum embraces the fact that in product development, some level of variability is required in order to build something new.”
― Kenneth S. Rubin, Essential Scrum: A Practical Guide to the Most Popular Agile Process