Discrete Quotes

The minute you had kids you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls - even if you'd once been best friends - was now just that, outsiders. ~ Meg Wolitzer

The IMAX was dark when Shay awoke. She knew Ryan was beside her - even after only a day of being together, she could sense his body as a discrete element in the universe. ~ Dayna Lorentz

If you must be indiscrete, be discrete in your indiscretion. ~ Mark Twain

The myth of quantum consciousness sits well with many whose egos have made it impossible for them to accept the insignificant place science perceives for humanity, as modern instruments probe the farthest reaches of space and time. ... quantum consciousness has about as much substance as the aether from which it is composed. Early in this century, quantum mechanics and Einstein's relativity destroyed the notion of a holistic universe that had seemed within the realm of possibility in the century just past. First, Einstein did away with the aether, shattering the doctrine that we all move about inside a universal, cosmic fluid whose excitations connect us simultaneously to one another and to the rest of the universe. Second, Einstein and other physicists proved that matter and light were composed of particles, wiping away the notion of universal continuity. Atomic theory and quantum mechanics demonstrated that everything, even space and time, exists in discrete bits – quanta. To turn this around and say that twentieth century physics initiated some new holistic view of the universe is a complete misrepresentation of what actually took place. ... The myth of quantum consciousness should take its place along with gods, unicorns, and dragons as yet another product of the fantasies of people unwilling to accept what science, reason, and their own eyes tell them about the world. ~ Victor J. Stenger

Ananda, an attendant of the Buddha, passed by a well near a village. A young low-caste woman, Pakati, was fetching water. He asked her for a drink.
Pakati said: "I am low caste and therefore may not give you water. Please ask nothing from me in case I contaminate your holy state with my low-caste status."
Ananda said, "I am not interested in caste. It is water I am after."
Pakati's heart leaped joyfully. She gave him water to drink, and when he left she followed him at a discrete distance. Finding out that he was a disciple of the Buddha, she went to the Buddha and said, "Please accept me and let me live in this place where your disciple Ananda dwells, so that I may see him and supply him with what he needs. For I find that I love Ananda."
The Buddha understood what was going on in her feelings and he said gently, "Pakati, your heart if full of love but you don't understand your own emotions. It is not Ananda that you love, but his kindness. Accept the kindness that he has shown to you and in your turn practice it toward other. You have been born low caste, but in time you will outshine the glory of kings and queens. ~ Anne Bancroft

Even funnier, the guy at the front desk thinks I am either a hooker or having an affair with a married man. He was more than discrete."
"I would have guessed affair," I joked. ~ Andrea Heltsley

Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. ~ Tom Chatfield

Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheeps and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. ~ Alfred Kinsey

The function of treatment was to bridge the gulf, translate the sufferer from his own pernicious little private dungheap to the glorious world of discrete particles, where it would be his inestimable prerogative once again to wonder, love, hate, desire, rejoice and howl in a reasonable balanced manner, and comfort himself with the society of others in the same predicament. ~ Samuel Beckett

Souls aren't discrete units - or even units at all. They're more like reflections of consciousness in a fractured mirror. ~ Colleen Chen

At a certain point, you say to the woods, to the sea, to the mountains, the world, Now I am ready. Now I will stop and be wholly attentive. You empty yourself and wait, listening. After a time you hear it: there is nothing there. There is nothing but those things only, those created objects, discrete, growing or holding, or swaying, being rained on or raining, held, flooding or ebbing, standing, or spread. You feel the world's word as a tension, a hum, a single chorused note everywhere the same. This is it: this hum is the silence. Nature does utter a peep - just this one. The birds and insects, the meadows and swamps and rivers and stones and mountains and clouds: they all do it; they all don't do it. There is a vibrancy to the silence, a suppression, as if someone were gagging the world. But you wait, you give your life's length to listening, and nothing happens. The ice rolls up, the ice rolls back, and still that single note obtains. The tension, or lack of it, is intolerable. The silence is not actually suppression: instead, it is all there is. ~ Annie Dillard

Though who knows the architecture of the mind, and whether the arches that open upon discrete episodes are ordered in any way sequentialy? ~ Gregory Maguire

I am not interested in a hermeneutics, or an erotics, or a metaphorics, of my anus. I am interested in ass-fucking. I am interested in the fact that the clitoris, disguised as a discrete button, sweeps over the entire area like a manta ray, impossible to tell where its eight thousand nerves begin and end. I am interested in the fact that the human anus is one of the most innervated parts of the body, ~ Maggie Nelson

Conventional wisdom, fooled by our misleading "physical intuition", is that the real world is continuous, and that discrete models are necessary evils for approximating the "real" world, due to the innate discreteness of the digital computer. ~ Doron Zeilberger

What I have always found most comforting about these forms is the trace of hope I get as I'm filling them out. How they break your life down into such tidy realms, making each seem tractable, because discrete, in a way they never are beyond the white noise of the waiting room. You get that fleeting sense that you're on the verge of being understood, truly and fully, and for the first time, if you could just get it all down in black and white before the receptionist calls your name. ~ Adam Haslett

Learning to communicate in and with a culture of science is a much broader undertaking than mastering a body of discrete conceptual or procedural knowledge. One observer, for example, describes the process of science education as one in which learners must engage in "border crossings" from their own everyday world culture into the subculture of science.1 The subculture of science is in part distinct from other cultural activities and in part a reflection of the cultural backgrounds of scientists themselves. ~ Heidi A. Schweingruber

Radical expansions of power are often introduced in this way, by persuading people that they affect just a specific, discrete group. ~ Glenn Greenwald

Although we tend to think of the brain as a discrete organ - a lump of squidgy tissue - it is better to think of it as part of an elaborate network of nervous tissue that reaches out to every single part of the body. ~ Tim Birkhead

The bouillon cubes of discrete human-like intellects thus melt into an algorithmic soup. ~ Nick Bostrom

So we are nearing the end. The right-hand, still untasted part of the novel, which, during our delectable reading, we would lightly feel, mechanically testing whether there was still plenty left (and our fingers were always gladdened by the placid, faithful thickness) has suddenly, for no reason at all, become quite meager: a few minutes of quick reading, already downhill, and–O horrible! The heap of cherries, whose mass had seemed to us such a ruddy and glossy black, had suddenly become discrete drupes: the one over there with the scar is a little rotten, and this one has shriveled and dried up around its stone (and the very last one is inevitably hard and unripe) O horrible! ~ Vladimir Nabokov

This medical view of an ideal male who was insulated from pathogens was inextricably bound up with a parallel discourse about the maintenance of strong ego boundaries, a psychic investment in one's bodily peripheries that effected a gradual closing (and, one might say, a closing off) of the male body, at once from the outer world of dangerous stimuli and from the inner world of threatening passions. Without a doubt, as Norbert Elias has shown, in the western world both men and women experienced a shift in their sense of personal boundaries during the early modern era where, amid changing social circumstances, rising thresholds of repugnance and shame were manifested among the upper-classes as a growing aversion to their own bodily functions and to the bodies of others. The changes wrought by new developments in table manners and etiquette were extended by the introduction of hygienic practices in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that endeavored to maximise the order and cleanliness of the social body while futher compartmentalising the bourgeois self as a discrete bodily unit. ~ Christopher Forth

At the head of these new discoveries and insights comes the establishment of the facts that electricity is composed of discrete particles of equal size, or quanta, and that light is an electromagnetic wave motion. ~ Johannes Stark

Those smooth, spit-cleaned cheeks gave no indication of the dreams crowding her skull. Should she make it to adulthood, the girl would arrive with two hundred and six bones. Two and a half million sweat glands. Ninety-six thousand kilometers of blood vessels. Forty-six chromosomes. Seven meters of small intestines. Six hundred and six discrete muscles. One hundred billion cerebral neurons. Two kidneys. A liver. A heart. A hundred trillion cells that died and were replaced, again and again. But no matter how many ways she dismembered and quantified the body lying beside her, she couldn't say how many years the girl would wait before she married, if at all, or how many children she would have, if any; and between teh creation of this body and its end lay the mystery the girl would spend her life solving. ~ Anthony Marra

God so understood is not something posed over against the universe, in addition to it, nor is he the universe itself. He is not a "being," at least not in the way that a tree, a shoemaker, or a god is a being; he is not one more object in the inventory of things that are, or any sort of discrete object at all. Rather, all things that exist receive their being continuously from him, who is the infinite wellspring of all that is, in whom (to use the language of the Christian scriptures) all things live and move and have their being. ~ David Bentley Hart

Childhood obesity isn't some simple, discrete issue. There's no one cause we can pinpoint. There's no one program we can fund to make it go away. Rather, it's an issue that touches on every aspect of how we live and how we work. ~ Michelle Obama

Assurance, action, and evidence influence each other in an ongoing process. This helix is like a coil, and as it spirals upward it expands and widens. These three elements of faith - assurance, action, and evidence - are not separate and discrete; rather, they are interrelated and continuous and cycle upward. ~ David A. Bednar

Innocence could be considered a discrete state of mind. ~ John Shirley

Wish"

Just your hot heart,
nothing more.

My Paradise, a field,
no nightingales,
no strings,
a river, discrete,
and a little fountain.

Without the spurs,
of the wind, in the branches,
without the star,
that wants to be a leaf.

An enormous light
that will be
the flow
of the Other,
in a field of broken gazes.

A still calm
where our kisses,
sonorous circles
of echoes,
will open, far-off.

And your hot heart,
nothing more. ~ Federico Garcia Lorca

Quantum fields fill all all space, and the quantum electric and magnetic fields obey Maxwell's equations. Nevertheless, when you observe the quantum fields, you find their energy packaged in discrete units: photons. ~ Frank Wilczek

Electricity is not digital. It does not come in discrete packets, but floods the air and flows through conductors and shoots from the hands of mad scientists in silent movies. If it is futuristic at all, it is a past version of the future, temperamental, unstable, half-alive. ~ Hari Kunzru

The mass media stereotype of an MPD patient is a woman harboring an internal collection of delightfully different people ranging from wide-eyed little kids to kung fu masters and nuclear physicists. Skeptics tend to focus concretely on the impossibility of there being 10 or 20 or 100 separate people inside that woman's body (e.g., Sarbin, 1995). By and large, this stereotype will not go away.

Alter personalities are real. They do exist - not as separate, individuals, but as discrete dissociative states of consciousness. When considered from this perspective, they are not nearly so amazing to behold or so difficult to accept. A fair reading of the MPD literature shows that authorities have long subscribed to this thesis: "Only when taken together can all of the personality states be considered a whole personality" (Coons, 1984, p. 53). Paradoxically, it is the critics who implicitly accept the view that the alter personalities are separate people. ~ Frank W. Putnam

The evidence here, as elsewhere, suggests that education is certainly relevant, but more because better education is associated with general differences in patterns of life than because discrete parts of a lifestyle can be changed. Health-change policies which focus entirely on the individual may be ineffective not only because exposure to health risks is largely involuntary, but also, as this study has shown, because of unwarranted assumptions about the extent to which behaviour can, in these circumstances, be effective in improving health. ~ Mildred Blaxter

The full beauty of the subject of generating functions emerges only from tuning in on both channels: the discrete and the continuous. ~ Herbert Wilf

It's cheaper to put an entire microprocessor in your car key, microwave, or cell phone than it is to put in discrete chips and electronic components. Thus, a new technical economy drives the design of the product. ~ Alan Cooper

Their lives had been an interminable loop of repeated gestures; now their existences were winnowed to this discrete and eternal moment. ~ Colson Whitehead

Nothing like love to put blood
back in the language,
the difference between the beach and its
discrete rocks and shards, a hard
cuneiform, and the tender cursive
of waves; bone and liquid fishegg, desert
and saltmarsh, a green push
out of death. The vowels plump
again like lips or soaked fingers, and the fingers
themselves move around these
softening pebbles as around skin. The sky's
not vacant and over there but close
against your eyes, molten, so near
you can taste it. It tastes of
salt. What touches you is what you touch. ~ Margaret Atwood

Most clients expect experience design to be a discrete activity, solving all their problems with a single functional specification or a single research study. It must be an ongoing effort, a process of continually learning about users, responding to their behaviors, and evolving the product or service. ~ Dan Brown

I read once that it takes fourteen miles for an oil tanker to change course. The same change for mothers and daughters must take a nearly equal number of years. But in all those miles and years there does come one precise moment, one discrete point in an infinite vastness, when you start heading in an entirely new direction. I know that, for better or for worse, Aubrey and I have hit that moment when instead of arguing with me, fighting to convince me to accept what she wants, she states in a steady, even way that doesn't ask for my permission or seem ready to bristle when I don't offer it, Mom, I have to go. ~ Sarah Bird

I'd prefer to include sex scenes alongside the adventure scenes and everyday-life scenes, as if they were all part of the same thing. Which of course they are. Sex is not discrete from the rest of our existence. ~ Alan Moore

People have a basic desire to feel good about themselves, and we therefore have a tendency to be unconsciously biased in favor of traits similiar to our won, even such seemingly meaningless traits as our names. Scientists have even identified a discrete area of the brain, called the dorsal striatum, as the structure that mediates much of this bias. ~ Leonard Mlodinow

Out of her mouth came a stream of discrete, miraculous gadgets - tiny but mobile creatures so intricately small that generations marveled and would go on marveling at how the inventor ever got the motors into them. ~ Richard Powers

We needed to take a discrete population to give people the confidence that if we can end veterans' homelessness , we can attack chronic homelessness, families and other populations like foster youth, who each have distinct needs. ~ John Carlos Frey

Life in turn organises itself along deep, observable tendrils that do not speak of discrete, careful, artistic intervention, rather scream of haphazard chance and the emergency of survival. ~ John Zande

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you. ~ Deborah Eisenberg

Penises and ejaculate and prostate glands occur in nature, but the notion that these anatomical traits comprise a sex - a discrete class, separate and distinct, metaphysically divisible from some other sex, the "other sex" - is simply that: a notion, an idea. The penises exist; the male sex does not. The male sex is socially constructed. It is a political entity that flourishes only through acts of force and sexual terrorism. Apart from the global inferiorization and subordination of those who are defined as "nonmale," the idea of personal membership in the male sex class would have no recognizable meaning. It would make no sense. No one could be a member of it and no one would think they should be a member of it. There would be no male sex to belong to. That doesn't mean there wouldn't still be penises and ejaculate and prostate glands and such. It simply means that the center of our selfhood would not be required to reside inside an utterly fictitious category - a category that only seems real to the extent that those outside it are put down. ~ John Stoltenberg

Philotheo: All of this is true, and contradicts nothing we've said, rather to the contrary we've said that there are dissimilar finite parts in one infinity, and have offered considerations how this might be true. Perhaps it might be expressed proportionately, how one might have many continuous parts which form a unity, using the example and simile of liquid mud, which, though water is contiguous with water in every part, and earth with earth, smaller than we can apprehend sensibly, these are called neither discrete nor continuous, not water nor earth, but only a continuum of mud; another might like to say that since the atoms of water are not actually continuous with one another, nor earth with earth, but perhaps water with earth and earth with water; a third might disagree with both and say only mud is continuous with mud. Following these reasons it can be stated that the infinite universe is a continuum, in which discreteness is not created by the interposition of ether between the great celestial bodies, than it would be were air to be mixed and interposed among the dry and watery particles, the difference being only in the consistency of the smallest parts of the mud, beneath the level of our sensible apprehension, or in the size, greatness, and sensibility of the parts that make up our universe: and so, contrary and diverse moving parts cooperate and compose a single immobile continuum, where contraries converge to make up a single whole, achieve single order, and becom ~ Giordano Bruno

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it's a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We're chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent. ~ Alex Steffen

Generalized Social Anxiety

In contrast to people with specific social anxieties, you may be afraid in a wide variety of situations. You might feel that people are judging everything you do and you might set unreasonable standards of perfection for yourself. This condition is called generalized (or discrete) social anxiety. Generalized social anxiety accounts for 80 percent of all cases of social anxiety.
Often, people with generalized social anxiety get caught in a vicious cycle. Because they are overly anxious in many situations, they act in clumsy and awkward ways, which in turn makes them feel even more discouraged and anxious. This cycle often results in depression and chronic stress.
Generalized social anxiety can affect almost every aspect of your life. This has been the case for Toni, a college senior.

In high school, I hardly had any friends. I didn't participate in any extracurricular activities and managed to get by with average grades. Because I attend a large state university, I am even more invisible. So far, I have avoided any class that has any interaction with my peers, such as discussion groups or labs.
As graduation approaches, I need to decide what type of career I want. The thought of job interviews terrifies me. I am considering grad school but would need recommendations to apply. I haven't even spoken to most of my professors, and the ones who know me probably can't say anything good about me.
As a result, I'm r ~ Heather Moehn

Old money in Southeast Asia is much more discrete and low key. It's about not wearing brand names. It's about being invisible, almost. The billionaire can be taking the bus with you. ~ Kevin Kwan

Leyner's fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder's prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine as we fancy. Leyner's world is a Gilder-esque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters' reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as "liberating" as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of an assembly's quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience. ~ David Foster Wallace

Life is not a discrete phenomenon it is a part of an intelligent cosmic field. It is a cosmic dance. ~ Amit Ray

With ordinary men the moments which are united in a close continuity out of the original discrete multiplicity are very few, and the course of their lives resembles a little brook, whereas with the genius it is more like a mighty river into which all the little rivulets flow from afar; that is to say, the universal comprehension of genius vibrates to no experience in which all the individual moments have not been gathered up and stored. ~ Otto Weininger

I receive the reward for my willingness to participate in the object-subject reversal in the form of a private illumination - in the present case, as an aesthetic movedness. The torso, which has no place that does not see me, likewise does not impose itself - it exposes itself. It exposes itself by testing whether I will recognize it as a seer. Acknowledging it as a seer essentially means 'believing' in it, where believing, as noted above, refers to the inner operations that are necessary to conceive of the vital principle in the stone as a sender of discrete addressed energies. If I somehow succeed in this, I am also able to take the glow of subjectivity away from the stone. I tentatively accept the way it stands there in exemplary radiance, and receive the starlike eruption of its surplus of authority and soul. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

When you turn from one room to the next, when your animal senses no longer perceive the sounds of the dishwasher, the ticking clock, the smell of a chicken roasting - the kitchen and all its seemingly discrete bits dissolve into nothingness - or into waves of probability. ~ Robert Lanza

Yes, the burning of Moscow was especially Russian, my friend. Of that there can be no doubt. Because it was not a discrete event; it was the form of an event. One example plucked from a history of thousands. For as a people, we Russians have proven unusually adept at destroying that which we have created." Perhaps ~ Amor Towles

In my view, a political vision is not a grab-bag of discrete problems and solutions. It is the visionary anticipation of a direction. ~ Roberto Unger

Here in Turin you can write because past and future have greater prominence than the present, the force of past history and the anticipation of the future give a concreteness and sense to the discrete, ordered images of today. Turin is a city which entices the reader towards vigour, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way toward madness. ~ Italo Calvino

every day could bring the breaking of a new record, but the larger world would persist undisturbed. There was always news, even if little of it was newsworthy. Every pitch was different, every swing, and yet they all were variations on a familiar theme. The lines on the field, the fences around it, the neat geometry suggested that these, for a discrete but somehow infinite period, were the limits of the world. ~ Matthew Thomas

It's Omega?" Chakotay asked. Eden smiled bitterly. "The particle the Borg thought of as perfection and the Caeliar managed to domesticate as a power source is a pale reflection of true Omega. They were synthetic particles, corrupted by the boronite used to create them. The Omega Continuum is a discrete region underpinning the entire multiverse, composed entirely of pure Omega. It contains the destructive force required to end the multiverse, once it has run its course, and at the same time give rise to the next multiverse. It is an integral part of the eternal cycle of birth, life, and death. ~ Kirsten Beyer

The law of right-left symmetry was used in classical physics but was not of any great practical importance there. One reason for this derives from the fact that right-left symmetry is a discrete symmetry, unlike rotational symmetry, which is continuous. ~ Chen-Ning Yang

No trauma has discrete edges. Trauma bleeds. Out of wounds and across boundaries. ~ Leslie Jamison

I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on the frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words. When I was a boy, we were taught to be discrete and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise and impatient of restraint. ~ Hesiod

You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete. ~ Satya Nadella

But once you realize that we are not just thinking things but creatures of habit, you'll then realize that temptation isn't just about bad ideas or wrong decisions; it's often a factor of de-formation and wrongly ordered habits. In other words, our sins aren't just discrete, wrong actions and bad decisions; they reflect vices.25 And overcoming them requires more than just knowledge; it requires rehabituation, a re-formation of our loves. One ~ James K.A. Smith

Contrary to what your friends' hyper-consciously constructed Facebook updates would have you believe, life isn't a series of discrete, pivotal, deeply meaningful lily pads. Life is a smear. It's messy, indistinct and disorienting: pinball, not chess. ~ Lindy West

Much of life, fatherhood included, is the story of knowledge acquired too late: if only I'd known then what I know now, how much smarter, abler, stronger, I would have been. But nothing really prepares you for kids, for the swells of emotion that roll through your chest like the rumble of boulders tumbling downhill, nor for the all-enveloping labor of it, the sheer mulish endurance you need for the six or seven hundred discrete tasks that have to be done each and every day. Such a small person! Not much bigger than a loaf of bread at first, yet it takes so much to keep the whole enterprise going. Logistics, skills, materiel; the only way we really learn is by figuring it out as we go along, and even then it changes on us every day, so we're always improvising, which is a fancy way of saying that we're doing things we technically don't know how to do. ~ Ben Fountain

In large organizations there are discrete functions. I do this; you do that. I swim in my lane; you swim in your lane. That can be very effective for certain processes and in certain stable conditions. But it doesn't work in unstable conditions. ~ Daniel H. Pink

...this, he thinks, is the true curve of the world - now I glimpse it: all things are blended under the surface like the mass of us were blended in the water, it's the separateness of skin and rock and mind that is the great illusion. We are not discrete; we are not solid. People and things and even cities are meant to flow together, they are meant to connect, and this is why we're always full of longing, the way I long for the girl, and the girl longs for truth, and the truth longs for volume, and volume longs for people to hear it, and people long for - what? - for everything, air, home, violence, chaos, beauty, hope, flight, sight, each other. Always, whether to stroke or maim, each other, above all. ~ Carolina De Robertis

In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap - happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely. ~ Michael Arndt

Recall Part 3c's mention of how Cantor took what had been regarded as a paradoxical, totally unhandlable feature of (Infinity)-namely that an infinite set/class/aggregate can be put into a one-to-one correspondence with its own subset-and transformed it into the technical def. of infinite set. Watch how he does the same thing here, turning what appear to be devastating objections into rigorous criteria, by defining a set S as any aggregate of collection of discrete entities that satisfies two conditions: (1) S can be entertained by the mind as an aggregate, and (2) There is some stated rule or condition via which one can determine, for any entity x, whether or not x is a member of S. ~ David Foster Wallace

Humans are conversant in many media (music, dance, painting), but all of them are analog except for the written word, which is naturally expressed in digital form (i.e. it is a series of discrete symbols - every letter in every book is a member of a certain character set, every "a" is the same as every other "a," and so on). As any communications engineer can tell you, digital signals are much better to work with than analog ones because they are easily copied, transmitted, and error-checked. Unlike analog signals, they are not doomed to degradation over time and distance. That ~ Neal Stephenson

[D]ivision of labor, in my mind, is one of the dangers of work-based technology. Modern IT infrastructure allows us to break projects into very small, discrete parts and assign each person to do only one of the many parts. In so doing, companies run the risk of taking away employees' sense of the big picture, purpose, and sense of completion. ~ Dan Ariely

The body in Chinese medicine, then, is not an aggregate of discrete morphological substances linked to each other anatomically by means of mechanical structures and physiologically by way of interactive functional systems. Rather, it is a complex unit of functions and a site of regular transformations. While these transformations have discernible patterns, the body itself is always becoming. ~ Volker Scheid

The flakes stuck in my eyelashes. They fell on my sleeves. Huge. Flowers and stars. They fell onto each other, held their shapes, became small piles of perfect asterisks and blooms tumbled together in their discrete geometries like children's blocks. ~ Peter Heller

if physics is much simpler to describe under the assumption that space is discrete, rather than continuous, is not this fact itself a strong argument for space being discrete? If so, then might space look, on some very small scale, something like Wilson's lattice. ~ Lee Smolin

The same thing happens in the search for the laws of historical movement.
The movement of mankind, proceeding from a countless number of human wills, occurs continuously.
To comprehend the laws of this movement is the goal of history. But in order to comprehend the laws of the continuous movement of the sum of all individual wills, human reason allows for arbitrary, discrete units. The first method of history consists in taking an arbitrary series of continuous events and examining it separately from others, whereas there is not and cannot be a beginning to any event, but one event always continuously follows another. The second method consists in examining the actions of one person, a king, a commander, as the sum of individual wills, whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed in the activity of one historical person.
Historical science in its movement always takes ever smaller units for examination, and in this way strives to approach the truth. But however small the units that history takes, we feel that allowing for a unit that is separate from another, allowing for the beginning of some phenomenon, and allowing for the notion that all individual wills are expressed in the actions of one historical person, is false in itself.
Any conclusion of historical science, without the least effort on the part of criticism, falls apart like dust, leaving nothing behind, only as a result of the fact that criticism selects as an object for observation a ~ Leo Tolstoy

Those of us in medicine don't help, for we often regard the patient on the downhill as uninteresting unless he or she has a discrete problem we can fix. ~ Atul Gawande

We so often think of the past as a something like a nature reserve: a discrete, bounded place we can visit in our imaginations to make us feel better. I wonder how we could learn to recognise that the past is always working on us and through us, and that diversity in all its forms, human and natural, is strength. ~ Helen Macdonald

Study's good, because it microcosms everything - if you understand everything within the walls of what you study you can identify other walls too, other areas of study. Everything's separate and discrete and there is no macrocosm, really. When there are no walls there is no study, only chaos. And so you break it down. ~ Chris Kraus

How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of those shard human (and indeed also most divine) attributes that are supposed to distinguish us absolutely from animals but, more significant, the imbrications of our various pasts and presents, the ineluctable relationships of shred and contested meanings, values, and material resources? It is necessary to assert our dense particularities, our lived and imagined differences; but can we afford to leave untheorized the question of how our differences are intertwined and, indeed, hierarchically organized? Could we, in other words, afford to have entirely different histories, to see ourselves living - and having lived - in entirely heterogenous and discrete spaces? ~ Satya P. Mohanty

My love is building a building
around you,a frail slippery
house,a strong fragile house
(beginning at the singular beginning
of your smile)a skilful uncouth
prison, a precise clumsy
prison(building thatandthis into Thus,
Around the reckless magic of your mouth)
my love is building a magic, a discrete
tower of magic and(as i guess)
when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall
crumble the mouth-flower fleet
He'll not my tower,
laborious, casual
where the surrounded smile
hangs
breathless ~ E. E. Cummings

One of the central tenets of the Western worldview is that one should always be engaged in some kind of outward task. Thus, the Westerner structures his time - including, sometimes, even his leisure time - as a series of discrete programmed activities which he must submit to in order to tick off from an actual or virtual list. One need only observe the expression on his face as he ploughs through yet another family outing, cultural event, or gruelling exercise routine to realise that his aim in life is not so much to live in the present moment as it is to work down a never-ending list. If one asks him how he is doing, he is most likely to respond with an artificial smile, and something along the lines of, 'Fine, thank you – very busy of course!' In many cases, he is not fine at all, but confused, exhausted, and fundamentally unhappy. In contrast, most people living in a country such as Kenya in Africa do not share in the Western worldview that it is noble or worthwhile to spend all of one's time rushing around from one task to the next. When Westerners go to Kenya and do as they are wont to do, they are met with peels of laughter and cries of 'mzungu', which is Swahili for 'Westerner'. The literal translation of 'mzungu' is 'one who moves around', 'to go round and round', or 'to turn around in circles'. ~ Neel Burton

For while they'd stayed close during the absurd years of his sharp rise, having children had knocked it all into a different arrangement. The minute you had children you closed ranks. You didn't plan this in advance, but it happened. Families were like individual, discrete, moated island nations. The little group of citizens on the slab of rock gathered together instinctively, almost defensively, and everyone who was outside the walls
even if you'd once been best friends
was now just that, outsiders. Families had their ways. You took note of how other people raised their kids, even other people you loved, and it seemed all wrong. The culture and practices of one's own family were the only way, for better or worse. Who could say why a family decided to have a certain style, to tell the jokes it did, to put up its particular refrigerator magnets? ~ Meg Wolitzer

Chi-Os were ideal partners for all occasions. They were discrete, desirable, tactful, polite, and fun ... Every mom dreamed of her son coming home with a Chi Omega, a woman's woman. ~ David Letterman

Music is math, and one you understand that…How can anyone not be in awe? It's the audible expression behind the laws of the universe. It feels like the only thing, apart from God, that lives outside time. Once released, it lives on and it can make you laugh and cry, rip you apart and heal you, all withing a few discrete notes strung together. And while it follows rules, expression is limitless. ~ Katherine Reay

men tend to do the discrete tasks that are more easily crossed off lists, such as mowing lawns or fixing things round the house. ~ Anonymous

The key is to take a larger project or goal and break it down into smaller problems to be solved, constraining the scope of work to solving a key problem, and then another key problem.
This strategy, of breaking a project down into discrete, relatively small problems to be resolved, is what Bing Gordon, a cofounder and the former chief creative officer of the video game company Electronic Arts, calls smallifying. Now a partner at the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, Gordon has deep experience leading and working with software development teams. He's also currently on the board of directors of Amazon and Zynga. At Electronic Arts, Gordon found that when software teams worked on longer-term projects, they were inefficient and took unnecessary paths. However, when job tasks were broken down into particular problems to be solved, which were manageable and could be tackled within one or two weeks, developers were more creative and effective. ~ Peter Sims

I have no faith in our hypocritical, false, hysterical, uneducated and lazy intelligentsia when they suffer and complain: their oppression comes from within. I believe in individual people. I see salvation in discrete individuals, intellectuals and peasants, strewn hither and yon throughout Russia. They have the strength, although there are few of them. ~ Anton Chekhov

Winning has a joy and discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything; but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving is necessary to the healthy character. ~ A. Bartlett Giamatti

I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. I've never been an easy hugger. The social conventions that keep human beings separate and discrete - boundaries, etiquette, privacy, personal space - have always been a great well of safety to me. I am a rule follower. I like choosing whom I let in close. The emotional state of emergency following a death necessarily breaks those conventions down, and, unfortunately, I am bad at being human without them. I ~ Lindy West

Aristotle raped reason. He implanted in the dominant schools of philosophy the attractive belief that there can be discrete separation between mind and body. This led quite naturally to corollary delusions such as the one that power can be understood without applying it, or that joy is totally removable from unhappiness, that peace can exist in the total absence of war, or that life can be understood without death.
- ERASMUS, Corrin Notes ~ Brian Herbert

Whatever religious tradition you call your own, you will probably find religious diversity even within it. We can believe we mean the same things when we use highly charged theological terms like God, Christ, Bible, or church teachings. Yet these words convey layers of meaning, not discrete definitions. It is important to remember this and do our own mental translations as we communicate with each other. ~ George Tyger

The Nazi Party was, in the early 1920s, but one among many nationalist and volkisch radical political groups. It was catapulted to prominence with the onset of economic recession in the late 1920s ... The Nazis owed their spectacular to a combination of two discrete sets of factors: first, their distinctive organisation and strategy; and secondly, the wider socio-economic conditions which created climates of opinion and sets of grievances on which the Nazis could prey. ~ Mary Fulbrook

The history of the own that is grasped on too small a scale and the foreign that is treated too badly reaches an end at the moment when a global co-immunity structure is born, with a respectful inclusion of individual cultures, particular interests and local solidarities. This structure would take on planetary dimensions at the moment when the earth spanned by networks and built over by foams, was conceived as the own, and the previously dominant exploitative excess as the foreign. With this turn, the concretely universal would become operational. The helpless whole is transformed into a unity capable of being protected. A romanticism of brotherliness is replaced by a cooperative logic. Humanity becomes a political concept. Its members are no longer travellers on the ship of fools that is abstract universalism, but workers on the consistently concrete and discrete project of a global immune design. Although communism was a conglomeration of a few correct ideas and many wrong ones, its reasonable part - the understanding that shared life interests of the highest order can only be realized within a horizon of universal co-operative asceticisms - will have to assert itself anew sooner or later. It presses for a macrostructure of global immunizations : co-immunism. ~ Peter Sloterdijk

The basic structure of proteins is quite simple: they are formed by hooking together in a chain discrete subunits called amino acids. ~ Michael Behe

Maybe it's wrong when we remember breakthroughs to our own being as something that occurs in discrete, extraordinary moments. Maybe falling in love, the piercing knowledge that we ourselves will someday die, and the love of snow are in reality not some sudden events; maybe they were always present. Maybe they never completely vanish, either. ~ Peter Hoeg

This morning's pastry poses challenges. To assemble the tiny mosaic disks of chocolate flake and candied ginger, Avis must execute a number of discrete, ritualistic steps: scraping the chocolate with a fine grater, rolling the dough cylinder in large-grain sanding sugar, and assembling the ingredients atop each hand-cut disk of dough in a pointillist collage. Her husband wavers near the counter, watching. "They're like something Marie Antoinette would wear around her neck. When she still had one."
"I thought she was more interested in cake," Avis says, she tilts her narrow shoulders, veers around him to stack dishes in the sink. ~ Diana Abu-Jaber

Linguistic and musical sound systems illustrate a common theme in the study of music-language relations. On the surface, the two domains are dramatically different. Music uses pitch in ways that speech does not, and speech organizes timbre to a degree seldom seen in music. Yet beneath these differences lie deep connections in terms of cognitive and neural processing. Most notably, in both domains the mind interacts with one particular aspect of sound (pitch in music, and timbre in speech) to create a perceptually discretized system. Importantly, this perceptual discretization is not an automatic byproduct of human auditory perception. For example, linguistic and musical sequences present the ear with continuous variations in amplitude, yet loudness is not perceived in terms of discrete categories. Instead, the perceptual discretization of musical pitch and linguistic timbre reflects the activity of a powerful cognitive system, built to separate within-category sonic variation from differences that indicate a change in sound category. Although music and speech differ in the primary acoustic feature used for sound category formation, it appears that the mechanisms that create and maintain learned sound categories in the two domains may have a substantial degree of overlap. Such overlap has implications for both practical and theoretical issues surrounding human communicative development.

In the 20th century, relations between spoken and musical sound systems were la ~ Aniruddh D. Patel

The second [argument about motion] is the so-called Achilles, and it amounts to this, that in a race the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.
Statement of the Achilles and the Tortoise paradox in the relation of the discrete to the continuous.; perhaps the earliest example of the reductio ad absurdum method of proof. ~ Zeno Of Elea

If anything, the current state of the world is already a testament to our inability to either imagine a possible world different to ours or to abandon the raft of the medusa that is our present. The reality of this world seems to have bottomed out into a Hobbesian jungle in which we are stuck and which constantly grows and is cut back in vain. In the Hobbesian or game-theoretic jungle, no matter how drastically your social and political convictions differ from those of your supposed adversary, no matter how much your experience of the world seems truer or more authentic, auto-cannibalization is unavoidable. In the Hobbesian jungle, all groups not only gnaw at one another, but will also end up eating their own kin alive.

We as either Hobbesians or as Platonic Universalists ought to pay attention to the truth of particularity. Universalists think that the commensuration between human experiential or local particularities is an easy path. The true enemies of universalists - the neoreactionaries - think what is universalist is misguided but they nevertheless go on and build island-utopias. The problem of both factions is that the real issue is not the universal which both camps to different degrees endorse, but the specific and discrete particularities of the human experience. Not paying attention to the problems of the latter is a sure recipe for failure, not just for rationalist universalism but also for the neoreactionary craft of methodological individualism. Witho ~ Reza Negarestani