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I had the feeling he was pleasantly surprised, and the spontaneity of his welcome delighted me.

We breakfasted, and drank of this excellent chalybeate water. I felt wonderfully stronger, and quite decided upon pushing on.

Category theory was introduced by Eilenberg and Mac Lane in the 1940s. {-}.In this book, I will be sure to use examples that do not do that, including examples from daily experience such as family relationships, train journeys, freezing and thawing food, and more hard-hitting subjects such as racism and privilege...{-}...More than technical prowess or a huge litany of theorems, I want to share the joy of abstraction.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

Let's recapitulate: I have written a study of Carpaccio, which is bad, a play entitled 'Marriage', which tries to demonstrate something that is false using techniques that are equivocal, and poetry. But oh, poetry achieves so little when it's written early. One should hold off and collect meaning and sweetness for the whole length of a life, a long one if possible, and then, right at the end, one might perhaps be {-}

Childhood! Winged likenesses half-guessed at, wheeling,
oh, where, oh, where?

“‘The statistical likelihood,’ continued the autopilot primly, ‘is that other civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins. Till then there will be a short delay. Please return to your seat.’”

——————

“‘Simple,’ said Zarniwoop. His self-assurance and smugness made Zaphod seethe….. He smiled a tight little smile which Zaphod wanted to hit with a brick.”

Christoph Detlev's death had been living at Ulsgaard now for many, many days, and spoke with everyone, and demanded. It demanded to be carried, demanded the blue room, demanded the little salon, demanded the great hall. Demanded the dogs, demanded that we laugh, talk, play games and be still, and all at the same time.
Demanded to see friends, women, the departed, and demanded its own death: {}Demanded, and screamed.

Perhaps the current reading of the evidence is incorrect. Or perhaps the mitochondrial Eve hypothesis will turn out to be right, after all. This uncertainty is more likely to be resolved when the clamor of debate ebbs and new evidence is found in support of one or another of the competing hypotheses.

The Schottky dance

Homo was a runner; Australopithecus was not.

To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three parts dead.

Chapter XVIII on EUGENICS is such a rollercoaster ride with so many gems. Professor Russell stays so somewhat level headed and insightful....

It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and N.C.O.s, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no ranks, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.

"Give up?" Pooh asked hopefully.

"All right, I give up. What's black and white and red all over?"

"A sunburned penguin."

"Pooh, that's stupid."

"Better than yours," he said.

Like several of the millennium problems, the Birch—Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture is difficult even to state{}However, it rewards perseverance, because along the way we start to appreciate the depths, and long historical traditions of number theory. If you look carefully at the name of the conjecture, one hyphen is longer than the other.It is not something conjectured by mathematicians named Birch, Swinnerton,and Dyer,

But the disaster in which the space shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after takeoff caused this plan to be abandoned, because the Centaur-G was prohibited. So Galileo had to use a weaker solid fuel booster instead. The mission was a huge success, and the scientific payoff included observing the collision between comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 and Jupiter in 1994, while the probe was still en route to Jupiter.

അനന്തമായ പ്രാര്ഥനയാകുന്നു ജീവിതം.

“Yes, Eeyore. He’s clever, Rabbit is.”

For natural selection operates according to immediate circumstances and not toward a long-term goal. Homo sapiens did eventually evolve as a descendant of the first humans, but there was nothing inevitable about it.

മഹാ ഡിങ്കൂസ് ആയ ചോദ്യം.

ധ്യാനത്തിൽ മുഴുകി ഇരിക്കുന്നു. ചിന്ത അതിപുരാതീനമായ അണ്ഡകടാഹം.

Without understanding, I was at the mercy of blind habit; with understanding, I could develop my own rules for living and nd out which of the conicting exhortations of a changing civilization was appropriate to my needs.

My mind jumped to the thought that it stood for the panic dread of being overwhelmed by the boundless sea of what was not myself.

Given an algorithm, is there a proof that it either stops, or a proof that it must go on for ever? Turing’s surprising answer was `no’. For some algorithms no proof either way exists. The P/NP problem could, perhaps, be like that. It would explain why no one can either prove it or disprove it. But no one can prove or disprove that the P/NP problem is undecidable, either. Maybe its undecidability is undecidable...

....discontinuities along eight dimensional planes. I referred to these as D8-branes, and Witten asked, `How can these be D8-branes, they are supersymmetric?’ And I explained that D-branes are BPS states, carrying Ramond-Ramond (R-R) charges. Witten seemed astonished, and said that I should write this up ( I don’t think we met in person, and don’t recall whether his astonishment was conveyed by phone or email).

During the time I was there, I had the excitement of seeing the discovery of the 40 GeV top quark, supersymmetry, and the ζ_8.3. The less credulous readers will point out that the top was discovered more than 10 years later at 170 GeV, supersymmetry has not been found, and what is ζ_8.3 anyway? Such was life in the Wild West (or should I say Alternate Truth?) of particle physics.

Oh, you bright and risen angels, you are all in your graves!