January 2012
December 2011
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"Burning the Old Year" - Naomi Shihab Nye
girlwithlandscape:
Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I...
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“Other people teach us who we are. Their attitudes toward us are the mirror in...”
– Alan Watts (via salubriousextrications)
WikipediAdventures!
Hyperbolic Growth
If the output of a function is inversely proportional to its input, or inversely proportional to the difference from a given value x0, the function will exhibit hyperbolic growth, with a singularity at x0.
In the real world hyperbolic growth is created by certain non-linear positive feedback mechanisms.[2]
Comparisons with other growth:
Like exponential growth and logistic...
“Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done...”
– Miles Davis to Nancy Reagan at a White House dinner in 1987 after she’d inquired as to what he’d done with his life to merit an invitation. source (via marxisforbros)
Eh this is completely wrong. He was actually quite fond of the Reagans. It was at a White House dinner however. Here is what...
“Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.”
– Oscar Wilde (via b0nermeurs)
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Marge Piercy, "Always Unsuitable"
airwalker:
She wore little teeth of pearls around her neck. They were grinning politely and evenly at me. Unsuitable they smirked. It is true I look a stuffed turkey in a suit. Breasts too big for the silhouette. She knew at once that we had sex, lots of it as if I had strolled into her diningroom in a dirty negligee smelling gamy smelling fishy and sporting a strawberry on my neck. I could...
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“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of...”
– Sylvia Plath (via hellisblue)
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“The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the...”
– Elizabeth Bishop “One Art” (via bitchhunter)
Historical Nonfiction: Linguistic Acrobatics →
historical-nonfiction:
Charles Ollier observed that GHOTI can be pronounced “fish”:
GH as in laugh
O as in women
TI as in nation
Melville Dewey, who devised the Dewey Decimal System, suggested that GHEAUGHTEIGHPTOUGH spells “potato”:
GH as in hiccough
EAU as in beau
GHT as in naught
EIGH as in neigh
PT…
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wwnorton:
But Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, writing for five justices in the 6-to-3 Lawrence decision, said, “The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives.”
“The state,” he wrote, “cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”
-from the obituary of John Lawrence, plaintiff in the groundbreaking case Lawrence v. Texas
The Roof Nail
wwnorton:
A hundred boats are still looking for shore. There is more in my hopes than I imagined. The tiny roof nail lies on the ground, aching for the roof. Some little bone in our foot is aching for heaven.
Robert Bly, from Talking into the Ear of a Donkey
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