Megalithic Structures Quotes

The sheer size of some of the limestome foundation blocks [at Baalbek] are the largest ever quarried on the planet, conservatively estimated at 800 to 1200 tons, and the common belief that the Romans chose to do this work on such a massive scale to 'impress the locals' is absolutely ludicrous. Nowhere else in the Roman world is there any evidence of the quarrying of blocks of this size, so we can clearly presume that they were there when the Romans first appeared, and were used as foundational material. A group of three horizontally lying giant stones which form part of the podium of the Roman Jupiter Temple of Baalbek, Lebanon, go by the name 'trilithon.' Each one of these stones is 70 feet long, 14 feet high, 10 feet thick, and weighs around 800 tons. These three stone blocks are the largest building blocks ever used by any human beings anywhere in the world. The supporting stone layer beneath features a number of stones that are still in the order of 350 tons and 35 feet wide. No one knows how these blocks were moved, cut, placed, and fit perfectly together. ~ Brien Foerster

The issue of power is not bound to power per se, but often depends on the people themselves, to what extent they unconsciously encourage this power and its structures. ~ Mitra Farahani

Immigrants can spread diseases for which we may have no immunity. There is also the question of crime and culture. Many immigrants come from countries with different legal structures and are not willing to behave in the way we expect American citizens to behave. ~ Ron Paul

One reason I find anthropic reasoning troublesome is that no one yet knows what might be essential to any possible form of life or even to structures such as galaxies that might support it. I am not as confident as others seem to be that any form of life would be similar to ours. ~ Lisa Randall

Fractal Beats The body structures of all of nature's animals are fractal, and so too is their behaviour (see Orchid Fractals) and even their timing. Our heart beats seem regular and rhythmic, but when the structure of the timing is examined in fine detail, it is revealed to be very slightly fractal. And this is very important. ~ Nigel Lesmoir-Gordon

Leaves are also teaching scientists about more effective capture of wind energy. Wind energy offers great promise, but current turbines are most effective when they have very long blades (even a football field long). These massive structures are expensive, hard to build, and too often difficult to position near cities. Those same blades sweep past a turbine tower with a distinctive thwacking sound, so bothersome that it discourages people from having wind turbines in their neighborhoods. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service also estimates that hundreds of thousands of birds and bats are killed each year by the rotating blades of conventional wind turbines. Instead, inspired by the way leaves on trees and bushes shake when wind passes through them, engineers at Cornell University have created vibro-wind. Their device harnesses wind energy through the motion of a panel of twenty-five foam blocks that vibrate in even a gentle breeze. Although real leaves don't generate electrical energy, they capture kinetic energy. Similarly, the motion of vibro-wind's "leaves" captures kinetic energy, which is used to excite piezoelectric cells that then emit electricity. A panel of vibro-wind leaves offers great potential for broadly distributed, low noise, low-cost energy generation. ~ Jay Harman

What is then the central idea of transcendental philosophy? It is to construe each object of science as the focus of a synthesis of phenomena rather than as a thing in itself. And it is to accept accordingly that the very possibility of such objects depends on the connecting structures provided in advance by the procedures used in our research activities. Thus something is objective if it results from a universal and necessary mode of connection of phenomena. In other words, something is objective if it holds true for any (human) active subject, not if it concerns intrinsic properties of autonomous entities. (...)

From a transcendental standpoint, the structure of a scientific theory is nothing less than the frame of procedural rationalities that underpin a certain research practice (and that, conversely, were constrained by the resistances arising from the enaction of this practice). ~ Michel Bitbol

Philosophy does provide me a structure and a way of thinking. Religion - like the religion I grew up with, Mormonism - also provides a way of thinking. And I think those two structures - one highly logical, the other anything but - are always part of my thought process as I'm putting together a story. ~ Brian Evenson

I was asking questions which nobody else had asked before, because nobody else had actually looked at certain structures. Therefore, as I will tell, the advent of the computer, not as a computer but as a drawing machine, was for me a major event in my life. That's why I was motivated to participate in the birth of computer graphics, because for me computer graphics was a way of extending my hand, extending it and being able to draw things which my hand by itself, and the hands of nobody else before, would not have been able to represent. ~ Benoit Mandelbrot

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie. ~ Hokusai Katsushika

I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, literature is unread, music is unheard, and prayers are no more answered. Go ahead, destroy Armenia . See if you can do it. Send them into the desert without bread or water. Burn their homes and churches. Then see if they will not laugh, sing and pray again. For when two of them meet anywhere in the world, see if they will not create a New Armenia. ~ William, Saroyan

Computing should be taught as a rigorous - but fun - discipline covering topics like programming, database structures, and algorithms. That doesn't have to be boring. ~ Geoff Mulgan

The key to a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms is not an exhaustive survey of every conceivable data structure and its subforms, with memorization of each's Big-O value and amortized cost. ~ Robert Love

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. ~ Eric S. Raymond

If you are born in 1564, your dislocation from your parents' experience is very profound. You are the first generation who will have had all your religious experience in English, the first to have a countryman circumnavigate the globe. All the power and economic structures of the world are changing around you. ~ Neil MacGregor

The gender of God, God's presumed masculinity, has functioned as the ultimate religious legitimization of the unjust social structures which victimize women. ~ Sandra Marie Schneiders

Perry was in charge of music; Asher, lighting, seating, and structures; and presiding the service was Elaine, who was, not suprisingly, a certified minister and wedding planner. ~ Wendy Wunder

As a melody instrument player, it's all about getting from one note to the next, and those intervals and how you navigate your way through these vertical structures of chords. You realize that everything's moving forward, and it's all linear. ~ David Sanborn

Normative statements about "women's roles" and girls' and women's behaviour being "appropriately feminine" were replaced with more neutral statements about what women and girl versus boys and men do and think and say they want. In this way, conventionally gendered behaviour was taken out of the context of prescription and presented as simple description. This had the possibly unanticipated consequence, though, of taking these behaviours out of the context of the social world. The descriptive approach significantly deemphasised the role of norms, social structures, and modelling in developing gendered traits. Instead, disembodied as "naked facts" of sex differences, they began to look more and more like simple reflections of male and female behaviour. ~ Rebecca M. Jordan-Young

In many tribal cultures, it was said that if the boys were not initiated into manhood, if they were not shaped by the skills and love of elders, then they would destroy the culture. If the fires that innately burn inside youths are not intentionally and lovingly added to the hearth of community, they will burn down the structures of culture, just to feel the warmth. ~ Michael Meade

Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat. ~ Carol P. Christ

It seems likely that the Internet will do for the corporation what the Guttenberg press did for the church. That is, it will break up structures we had always assumed were permanent: it will render temporal what we assumed was timeless. ~ Ron Davison

Our utilitarian structures will mature into architecture only when, through their fulfillment of function, they become carriers of the will of the age. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

I see together with Lovecraft the potting around of enormous foul masses, moving in endless waves, stepping over the last remaining crystal structures of resistance of spiritual elites; I am gazing, in ecstatic powerlessness of my hallucinatory awakening, at the shimmering black foam, the foam of black disintegration, terror of democratic stench and frightening organs of these convulsing corpses, which – in the makeup of dirty whores with a deceitful smile, with the California beach smile of European anti-fascists, with the smile of mannequin whores in flickering windows(so I would define it) - are preparing our final defeat, leading us to a destination which they themselves do not know, or, more precisely, know it too well, on the way there with relish sucking out our bone marrow; this is the hallucinatory leaden mantle of Human Rights, this faecal-vomitory discharge of Hell, although by saying so, I am insulting Hell. ~ Parvulesco

Essentially, the mercenary sets morality aside, or at best reorders the customary structures to fit the needs of his way of life. The ~ Glen Cook

our daily associations cannot be trusted to make clear to the young the part played in our activities by remote physical energies, and by invisible structures. Hence a special mode of social intercourse is instituted, the school, to care for such matters. ~ John Dewey

The difference between supermind and Big Mind (if we take Big Mind to mean the state experience of nondual Suchness, or turiyatita) is that Big Mind can be experienced or recognized at virtually any lower level or rung. Magic to Integral. In fact, one can be at, say, the Pluralistic stage, and experience several core characteristics of the entire sequence of state-stages (gross to subtle to causal to Witnessing to Nondual), although, of course, the entire sequence, including nondual Suchness, will be interpreted in Pluralistic terms. This is unfortunate in many ways - interpreting Dharma in merely Pluralistic terms (or Mythic terms, or Rational, and so on) - because it is so ultimately reductionistic; but it happens all the time, given the relative independence of states and structures at 1st and 2nd tier.

Supermind, on the other hand, as a basic structure-rung (conjoined with nondual Suchness) can only be experienced once all the previous junior levels have emerged and developed, and as in all structure development, stages cannot be skipped. Therefore, unlike Big Mind, supermind can only be experienced after all 1st-, 2nd-, and 3rd-tier junior stages have been passed through. While, as Genpo Roshi has abundantly demonstrated, Big Mind state experience is available to virtually anybody at almost any age (and will be interpreted according to the View of their current stage), supermind is an extremely rare recognition. Supermind, as the highest structure-rung to date ~ Ken Wilber

There seemed to be nothing that contributed more to squalor than a bunch of basalt-block structures designed to lift people out of squalor. ~ Philip K. Dick

The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures. ~ Frederick P. Brooks Jr.

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any. ~ Merton Miller

Certain American uses of deconstruction, Derrida has observed, work to ensure 'an institutional closure' which serves the dominant political and economic interests of American society. Derrida is clearly out to do more than develop new techniques of reading: deconstruction is for him an ultimately political practice, an attempt to dismantle the logic by which a particular system of thought, and behind that a whole system of political structures and social institutions, maintains its force. He is not seeking, absurdly, to deny the existence of relatively determinate truths, meanings, identities, intentions, historical continuities; he is seeking rather to see such things as the effects of a wider and deeper history of language, of the unconscious, of social institutions and practices. ~ Terry Eagleton

A perfect society needs no rulers," they said. "Knowledge and authority ought to be held in common. In order to imagine a new existence, we must free ourselves from the structures of both our failed government and the unjustifiable hegemony of the wasp nests. Hear what you can hear and learn what you can learn while we remain among them. But be ready. ~ E. Lily Yu

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. ~ Bob Dylan

Collapse begins at this paradoxical point: the reiteration of a metanarrative of heroism and innocence ceases to be essential to sustain global normative structures at the moment its use becomes ubiquitous. ~ Stephen Hopgood

The human drama is reaching its denouement. The great unveiling is approaching, a time when the power structures of the world begin to crumble and people of the heart sing out a new truth. Many voices are joining the chorus, many feet are walking the path, many minds are dreaming possibilities for a magnificent future. For beneath the crises that are looming at every level of civilization, the global heart is awakening, beating out the rhythm of a new and glorious dance, calling us to a better way of living. ~ Anodea Judith

Just like the movements in a symphony, the rain sent vibrations through his body, painting the world in a physical map of mountains, valleys and high peaks dropping into deep ravines. The physical structures were all created by sound itself, and the colors were intense and vivid - substance created by sound, by feeling. ~ Christine Feehan

Honest, wholesome structures do not stare at travellers so slyly and hauntingly, ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The corporatization of U.S. agriculture and the growth of international free markets squeeze growers such that they cannot easily imagine increasing the pay of the pickers or improving the labor camps without bankrupting the farm. In other words, many of the most powerful inputs into the suffering of farmworkers are structural, not willed by individual agents. In this case, structural violence is enacted by market rule and later channeled by international and domestic racism, classism, sexism, and anti-immigrant prejudice. However, structural violence is not just a simple, unidirectional phenomenon; rather, macro social and economic structures produce vulnerability at every level of the farm hierarchy. ~ Seth Holmes

Live long enough and nothing is news. 'The News' is
'the new things.' That's fine, until a hundred years go by and you realise there are no new things, only deep structures and cycles that repeat themselves through different period details. ~ Glen Duncan

Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end. ~ David Whyte

Your music, your lyrics, the leaden prose of your life that proves that everything you are and are not, the structures you build to make futility seem like meaning, the dead and living – who will soon be dead, who will soon be gone, who will soon be smoke – rising in columns and forming clouds in the night sky. For now and ever, by the will of dead and dying gods. ~ Joseph Fink

Love covers a myriad of plausibility structures. ~ Carol Plum-Ucci

A great tide of civilization governs how humans do things. When that tide goes out, we centralize, establish command and control structures, and attempt to find efficiencies in large batches and long queues. When the water starts to come back in, we break down those structures, start to drive control down into the hands of 'common' folk, and attempt to find efficiencies in the quick decisions that get made by people closest to the problem. The tide is coming back in and will probably continue to ebb that direction for the lifespan of anyone alive at the time of this writing. ~ Max Guernsey III

There is a system and a flow and an organization to the structure of the universe. Just like there's a system and a flow and an organization to the human body, to atomic structures, to the elements. ~ Frederick Lenz