rhasspy/piper-checkpoints huggingface dataset:
For now, he can not rule out other causes for the bluntness, such as early stage dementia.
As water falls on the jacket you get a pattern of lights that looks like water falling.
A coat that glows when it rains has been created by a US-based designer.
The material is usually purchased pre-manufactured as plastic sheets that are cut up and wired together.
Caffeine is more likely to disrupt a daytime snooze than a normal night sleep.
To investigate, they asked thirty-four people to drink caffeine or take a placebo before going to sleep at their normal bedtime.
A month later, the same people were deprived of sleep for an entire night.
Caffeine didn't affect night time sleep duration or R E M.
Beetles with the biggest horns have the smallest testes, say scientists who show that in evolutionary terms you can't have it all.
The team then observed the element decay to element one hundred sixteen, then to one hundred fourteen.
So it looks like high school and university science labs may still have to replace their periodic table posters yet again.
Butane is made from a raw product that is then broken down to starch or sugars, fermented and purified.
The moths are active at dusk and survive for a brief breeding period of four to six weeks between October and November.
Fish developed features characteristic of land animals much earlier than once thought, say researchers.
At the time, scientists saw this as evidence of ice in areas that were permanently shaded from the Sun.
The latest study on the best time of year to shear sheep overturns twenty years of thinking.
Each year for five years, they sheared one thousand ewes and lambs in three different seasons and measured the quality of the wool.
In a way, the results are good news for farmers, he says.
Campbell's research will form part of his Phd, which is to be submitted later this year.
It's how you see things.
Scientists may say they are dispassionate defenders of the unfettered pursuit of truth.
But history suggests they are often guilty of being irrational and narrow-minded, says an Australian philosopher.
Tasmanian Minister for Infrastructure Jim Cox hopes industry will also support a better rail service.
The cloak also only works with microwaves of a specific wavelength.
The research, he says, shows that people believe they can overcome stereotyping and continue to try.
But if they blame their genetic makeup and believe they have an innate lack of ability, they give up, he says.
The x-rays are produced by particles that are accelerated around a large ring at close to the speed of light.
Forget where you left your glasses?
Why should a fellow throw up the sponge after the first round?
Two days ago, Jeanne learned where her father's men were hiding.
He told himself that, as he washed himself and groomed his disheveled clothes.
They include the virus that causes polio, as well as colds and diarrhea.
I can not follow you, she said.
All operations have been carried out from Montreal and Toronto.
Some were barely affected, while others were completely unable to manage.
Ow, a wild dog, he growled.
There are four, all low, Mccoy answered.
Other viruses kill brain cells, including the herpes virus and HIV.
The log on which Lop-ear was lying got adrift.
Poor little Crooked-leg was terribly scared.
Why the average review is more nauseating than cod liver oil.
The foxes also feast on migratory mutton birds that visit the island, says Kirkwood.
Azizah is the only magazine of its kind in North America, owned and produced by Muslim women.
Kirkwood says although foxes only live about five years the population is resilient and recovers quickly.
The federal government last week introduced its proposed changes to copyright law into parliament.
And Kinzer is an awesome writer.
Um, Donna, divas sing.
This trend of people confusing divas with anyone arrogant and annoying is itself seriously annoying.
Wow, am I ever cranky this morning!
The utilitarian male is a producer, the ornamental male is a consumer.
But she is too good an interviewer to be trapped in that cliche.
The very openness and depth of her interviewing poses the first question I have about Stiffed.
But that longing for a lost home, a secure sense of self, appears equally in Britain, or in Germany.
Dear Ted,
Look at Chechnya.
I did a profile of him for Esquire last year and interviewed Karl Rove, his chief strategist.
He talked about Irishmen, the difference between the dark, tormented Irish and the sunny Irish.
It also includes profiles of successful Muslim women.
But the difference is that the Mousers are not from New York.
Why are we suddenly counting our pennies like never before, and what technology is helping us do it?
A number of Japanese students and part-time workers living in America buy up brand name products for Japanese retailers.
Many web sites offer licensed therapists who counsel via e-mail.
All they need to do is sit at a computer anywhere in the world, at any hour, and write down their thoughts.
Some people have dozens of e-sessions, while others simply log on once or twice during a time of need, said Grohol.
In such a situation, therapists generally refer patients to a hot line or a local practitioner they can see in person.
The aroma of samosas, fried, spicy, Indian dumplings, competes with the buttery smell of popcorn.
Cell phones beep, babies wail, South Asian girls and boys dressed in their Sunday best eye each other.
The cinema that seats five hundred people is in some ways a core of the social scene for South Asians in diaspora.
It ran in seventy theaters over North America and grossed three million dollars in its month-long run.
Indians, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Tibetan, and Nepali immigrants all speak some variation of Hindi or Urdu.
The standard formula is a love story intertwined with family feuds, melodrama and slapstick comedy.
As with any band that hangs together for a quarter of a century, the Dirty Dozen has weathered some changes.
Most bands just play what the band leader says.
But this time his reaction was very different.
Neither are beds, thanks to air mattresses and sleeping bags.
Sunny watched over him and tried not to upset him with any arguments or disagreements.
To further his prestige, he occasionally reads the Wall Street Journal.
My sincere wish is that he continues to add to this record he sets here today.
Instead of that he was engulfed by bedlam.
Steph could barely handle the psychological trauma.
It is well liked by the children and faculty.
Let's be fine superior people of great dignity, he said as if he were joking.
Not immediately, as the deputy demanded.
Let's hope we come to a safer place.
The simplest kind of separate system uses a single, self-contained unit.
The stepmother, almost without exception, has been presented as a cruel ogress.
Let's take them home.
Set aside to dry thoroughly.
Set aside to dry with lid on sugar bowl.
Wet also were the marine's fatigues, and the face had an oily film.
Now whenever Sunny goes anywhere, Everett insists that she tell him how he can reach her, just in case.
It gave the rubberized fabric a dull gleam, like metal.
Before going to sleep at night, he makes certain she remembers exactly where his emergency medication is, just in case.
And he has repeatedly reviewed with her all their important documents, again just in case.
His anxiety has become so contagious that their children have even broached the possibility of their parents moving closer, just in case.
At the same time they warn Sunny not to hover over Everett so much, saying that it's not good for either of them.
Lina and Jess recently celebrated their fiftieth anniversary.
It was a quiet event because they have no children or nearby family, and also for health reasons.
A few years ago, Jess began to complain about fatigue, shortness of breath, and unusual swellings in his legs that affected his walking.
Doctors visits and tests concluded with a diagnosis of beginning congestive heart failure.
Jess was treated with diuretic medication, a fluid-restricted diet, and limited physical activity.
The doctors made it clear that this was a condition that would continue and possibly worsen over time.
Over the past two years, Jess has had to be briefly hospitalized twice for what the couple calls drying out times, because his body was accumulating fluids.
When he came home after each of these episodes, he seemed a little more tired than before, as if moving on a gradual downward spiral.
They have no way of knowing when the next drying out time will occur, because there are no special advance warnings.
They don't even talk about it much, though they certainly think about it and know it will happen.
Indeed, many of these couples have now been married forty, fifty, sixty, or even more years, which is longer than people used to live only a few generations ago!
These long-term marriages are unique to today's older generation because of the special confluence of longevity and monogamy.
Longevity has made them possible, but monogamy has made them desirable.
Such long-term marriages did not occur in the last generation and may not in the next one for vastly different reasons.
In the previous generation, most men and women stayed married to each other as long as they lived, but they did not live long enough to celebrate such advanced anniversaries.
For them, the so-called silver anniversary, twenty-five years, was long-term; more was not expected and was not usual.
The shorter span of these marriages produced a kind of stability during whatever time they lasted.
Husbands and wives usually lived only into their fifties or occasionally sixties.
They worked at their jobs, raised their children, and died not long afterward.
That means they will probably not be able to celebrate wedding anniversaries of forty, fifty, or more years unless they add together the different years of their separate marriages!
And, on the radio, jazz is the least played.
Even though the baby boomers will be younger, stronger, healthier, active longer than any previous generation, they too will ultimately grow older and change with age, even if later in their lives.
And when that happens, it means that many will find themselves not in long-lasting marriages as their parents did, but merely in their last marriages.
It is only the current older generation that uniquely has both monogamy and longevity.
The previous generation experienced monogamy without longevity, and it appears that the next generation will have the reverse.
It is obvious that longevity has altered the number of years possible in people's lives and marriages, but what is less obvious is that longevity also has altered the very nature of those years.
The new years added to old marriages do not bring merely more of the same.
They bring time for changes, opportunities, and problems that would not have occurred or even been possible before.
They bring new and different circumstances and they change old and expected ones.
For example, there are certain important normal developmental changes that, in the past, occurred during the final years of marriage.
These changes are the end of full-time parenting, when children grow up and go off into separate adult lives, and the end of full-time working, when men and women retire from their out-of-home jobs and careers.
In the previous generation, there were few years left in people's lifetimes after these normal developmental changes occurred.
These are years in which husbands and wives have more time in their days and their lives to be with each other without those previous familiar occupying roles.
However, it turns out that this additional time does not bring just more years to be together, but mostly more years to be old together which is both a bonus and a burden in their lives.
For today's long-lived and long-married couples, these aging-related health changes occur precisely during those years that have now been added to their marriages: the fourth, fifth, and later decades.
Indeed, the golden anniversary, fifty years, seems to form an almost irreversible threshold for age-related health problems.
As a result, many of these supposedly celebrating couples find themselves complaining that the so-called golden years are really rather tarnished!
In other words, the longevity that has made long-lasting marriages possible has also made the aging-related health problems inevitable.
Certainly, all husbands and wives do not experience health and aging changes in the same way or at the same time or at the same rate.
Some of these changes may be slow and minor, especially at first, and only require care that is slight and minor, also at first.
But over time, as long as life continues to be prolonged, these changes and needs will also continue and, in fact, escalate.
Inevitably even if later rather than sooner, even if gradually rather than drastically, even if only one spouse more than the other, aging-related health problems will create special needs and require special care.
In addition to the personal aging changes that come with a long life, long-married couples also experience and share each other's aging changes.
So it is not only an individual's health problems that affect married life in the later years, but also the spouse's and the effect each one has on the other.
The result is that health and aging become overriding presences in a long-term marriage.
We stood stock-still, the way an animal does when it catches the scent of danger.
They become constant sources of concern and attention, even a controlling influence affecting in some way what these couples can do, what they can have, what they can expect, and how they can feel.
Health and aging seem to take over the last years of lasting marriages, virtually redefining what husbands and wives will now need from each other and what they will need to do for each other.
This is neither a happy nor a sad ending for these marriages, but the price paid by these husbands and wives for the gift of time they have received.
Therefore, the only way not to eventually need any special care for oneself, or not to need to give any special care to a spouse, is not to live so long or to be married so long!
The words in sickness and in health, which are such an important part of traditional marriage vows, take on new meaning and reality for long-married couples.
Concern about sickness becomes everpresent, and being well comes to mean only being well enough.
At that time, the five leading recorded causes of death were pneumonia, tuberculosis, diarrhea, heart disease, and stroke.
Also, by this time, the five leading causes of death had changed to heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disease, and accidents.
During the twentieth century, especially the latter half, major and far-reaching changes occurred in health care.
Certain illnesses, such as infections and intestinal diseases, were able to be prevented or almost eliminated through improved sanitation, diet, or inoculation.
The cat's meow always hurts my ears.
Differences were related to social, economic, and educational backgrounds.
A flash illuminated the trees as a crooked bolt twigged in several directions.
Steve wore a bright red cashmere sweater.
The courtyard is magnificently decorated.
The Boston Ballet overcame their funding shortage.
It was named after the ballet.
Angora cats are furrier than Siamese.
He may toss coins; he may take slips of paper from a grab bag.
The Dirty Dozen Brass Band has been proving that theory for twenty five years.
Anything to do with an ace of spades, bad luck.
Soon, said the half-man.
She always could sense the shag end of a woolly day.
Shall we teach him some?
Some illnesses, such as diabetes, were able to be mitigated through early diagnosis and treatment.
Share bath, maybe, but share refrigerator?
Others, such as heart damage and joint atrophy, were able to be corrected through surgery, implants, or replacements.
Yes, because you didn't run off to use that new toothbrush.
No return address whatsoever.
Sulphur, oil, and copra make the kind of tinder any firebug dreams of.
As such, it was beyond politics and had no need of justification by a message.
The data are presented in lists, and tables.
Cottage cheese with chives is delicious.
To protect ourselves from the damaging intensity of our own response, we become depressed.
The parents stress activates the child's nervous system to forewarn the child of a danger he has never encountered before.
A child can learn to fear a hot stove without having to be injured by it first.
Many adult children whose parents lived through the Depression feel alienated from them.
At age twenty, with a one-year-old son at home, Lena was brutally raped at gunpoint.
Both of Lena's children attribute their fearfulness to their mother's rape.
Looking at her child with both love and sorrow, she either expresses her tears or holds them in.
The effects may be invisible.
We would like to wave a magic wand so the young, grieving widow would accept her loss, grieve, get over it, and go on.
He must accept that he may suffer in comparison.
An aging, heavy Marlon Brando can never romantically compete with a young, shining James Dean.
An only child, his feelings of emptiness extended to his earliest memories.
He only felt alive when drunk or playing music.
Richard knew little about his parents lives before he was born.
A child's first step in learning to walk is a triumph.
The process also works in reverse: achieving mastery can undo the neurochemistry of depression.
Our belief in what we are able to do determines what we are willing to try.
Looking for an emotional point of contact, I asked when he had come to this country.
Everyone else in the family was killed.
If learning is the work of childhood and youth, mastery and growth are at their most intense and deliberate in adolescence.
By acting out and provoking a response, teens get their parents to express one side of their inner conflict.
Teenagers can preserve courage despite their mix of emotions by getting their parents to express their fears for them.
Parents naturally want to keep their teenage children safe from the dangers of the world.
Occasionally, family necessity may require some curtailment of a teenager's freedom.
But confining an adolescent too severely can leave a lasting wound.
After the birth of her first child, Janice became depressed and had violent suicidal fantasies.
Unfairly confining an adolescent is a prescription for enduring hostility.
Janice longed for the freedom she had never had and therefore never learned to use.
Their injuries consciously or unconsciously determine how we act, love, and raise our children.
Each reenactment offers a triumph that encourages us to repeat it again in various aspects of our lives.
Helpless and ill as a child, doctor Schweitzer dedicated his adult life to triumphing over pain and anguish.
He seemed to reenact his helpless despair with one patient after another.
For example, Maggie, a very genteel Scotswoman, had adored and been hurt by her alcoholic father.
But it was the hardest thing she had ever done, and she learned how difficult and costly it was for her to achieve.
In finally understanding what her father endured, Maggie could grieve for him as she had not been able to do as a child.
The unconscious reenactment of old feelings in new situations can choreograph a person's future.
We also reenact childhood hurts in our relationships, hoping to do better, hoping to heal.
In the world of violence, pain is reenacted, externalized, and inflicted onto others.
Eddy's father had been a loved and respected man who did highly skilled, well-paid work.
Eddy's task was to master the trauma of two generations: his own and his father's.
Reenactments of our traumatic childhood situations are compelling.
Neurobiological reactions associated with the helplessness of early, traumatic experiences are especially keen.
Although we may feel that a parent's behavior provokes our reaction, we are still responsible for our own response.
Childhood feelings flooding rationality can overwhelm a mature response.
Parents often find themselves acting as their own parents once did, hurting their children the way their parents once hurt them.
Sharon, for instance, became more tolerant and understanding of her father after she herself had children.
Once, when I was eleven, we were at Coney Island.
My father was furious.
Last year, I was in the kitchen.
I started running out the back door when my neighbor came over with my daughter and said, Are you looking for this?
William loved his son but had loathed timidity ever since his father had condemned him for it years earlier.
Then she said: I'm sorry I was so late, Dad, but my friend was all alone and had been smoking marijuana all day.
Those who achieve it feel a spiritual triumph.
Otherwise we are helplessly driven by forces we neither understand nor challenge.
Many years ago, while staying with friends, I overheard their end of an intense and lengthy telephone conversation with their son.
His parents did not minimize the import of their son's experience.
The parents expected their son to be honest with himself, and the son could trust that he could be honest with them.
Or, why do I argue with my children so much?
Honestly answering Where are you?
We see our partner's shortcomings more easily than our own.
Resignation that arises from one's own disappointed needs pushes away rather than invites love later: Oh well, what can you do?
My wife's just rigid.
Or, this is just a minor annoyance.
Good relationships break or get stale from the accumulation of dishonest and hidden feelings over time.
She was frenetic in her attempts to have fun, and was always on the go, rarely stopping for breath.
The great majority of serious alcoholics and addicts were repetitively traumatized as children.
For a time, the addictions do seem to help people control their lives until the addictions themselves get out of control.
In the conflicts inherent in intimacy, addicts make no presumption of a partner's or a child's good faith.
A child who gets into trouble with the law, or who attempts suicide, forces the parent to deal with him.
Bulimics hide the honest emblem of obesity.
They may appear normal, but bulimic parents try to fill emptiness with food and control their weight with purging.
He found that virtually any altered state was better than the way he felt naturally.
My mother was bulimic.
At an early age, Frank may have been emotionally older than his mother.
A majority of bulimics were sexually abused as children, and nearly thirty percent were physically abused.
Active bulimics tend to feel sick, desperate, and out of control, often appearing nauseated before and after purging.
Gordon was sincerely asking, Where am I?
His marriage and his future depended on the quality of his answers, and Gordon needed help.
Should they rebel, their unguided, defiant teenage children may fall prey to the mistakes of their grandparents.
He never drank, however.
After moving to the West Coast, Samuel instinctively knew he needed someone to fill in for the father who had abandoned him.
Instead, he endured, he persevered, and he survived.
He transformed his wounds into the sensitivities that allowed him to become a good husband and a father.
Adults who grow up in troubled families often spend their lives posing and answering questions of Where are you?
But more than most, they need some guidance to help them make the good lives they long for.
If we were in Cain's shoes, we would also feel hurt and jealous.
Picture the scene: Cain toiling, tilling the earth; Abel in the quiet pastures tending his sheep.
Cain works hard, proudly bringing the fruits of his labors to God: fruit, bread, vegetables.
With Cain, God seems critical, demanding, cold, and intolerant of imperfection.
God holds to the standards necessary for Cain to overcome flaws in his character that would grow if left unchecked.
But Cain avoids looking at himself, refusing to see the self-centeredness that shuts out love, hurts him, and fuels his hatred.
Instead, he directs his hurt and fury toward a victim.
Like most hurt children, even adult children, Cain does not fight his feelings in order to see the adult's point of view.
Objectively, however, God spends far more time with Cain than with his brother.
When we keep secrets, the richness of life is lost to loneliness, and intimacy is lost to fear.
Alienated from ourselves, we preserve our pain throughout the time we hide.
I understood Aaron's father's impulse.
My children had already spent the morning at the museum, but because I felt overwhelmed, I wanted to protect them.
In the end, however, I took them into the room, they asked questions, and accepted the explanations we offered.
She must have lived with endless guilt.
As Ben told this story, the bewildered look of a little boy crossed his face, and his forehead furrowed with perplexity.
When we keep secrets, we bury a part of ourselves in a desolate place where no comfort can reach.
Adam, secretly mistrusting her, did not openly challenge Eve with his doubts.
The paradox is that what is truly strong and weak is the reverse of what feels strong and weak.
Seven months after I started using, I was arrested for robbing a convenience store.
When I was arrested, I was more afraid of Helen's reaction than prison.
No anger, guilt trips, demands, accusations.
In close relationships, Terry anticipated being hurt and rejected for his failures.
Terry lived in reply to his fear and not to Where are you?
Four years later, while Terry was still in prison, Helen died of cancer.
Jean, who had been in an abusive relationship for fifteen years, despaired even after her life got better.
Two years after Jean divorced her first husband, she married a kind, gentle man.
But later she became depressed after she realized that she still loved her first husband.
In telling her husband, Jean gained a sympathetic witness for the grief of her prior relationship.
Children learn whether or not it is safe to be emotionally honest by watching their parents relate to one another.
For a time, the adult child may become too distrustful of his feelings to answer Where are you?
This was the case for Charles.
Charles's world of the past thirteen years collapsed after his wife left him.
Growing up with secrets, Charles accepted Marilyn's silence and did not think to challenge it.
His mother had attempted to protect Charles from the hurt she felt from her sense of his father's betrayal.
When his mother told him of his father's infidelity, Charles finally understood his life and he understood his mother.
The partnership is over, even if it persists superficially.
The child is left to hide the shame, weakness, and vulnerability that he feels in comparing himself to his father.
A married couple is like two rough stones that take years to grind each other smooth.
Arguments between partners, although uncomfortable, can be rich opportunities for healing deep childhood wounds.
Pain triggered from the past seems abusive to the partner who stands wrongly accused of having evoked it.
In the romance of new love, we experience a fleeting reminder of those early glorious times.
In ever further excursions, we explore the world.
When we leave home, the arms that clung to our parents in childhood become empty, and we seek love again.
As we make our first discoveries about a new potential mate, a special glow seems to encompass the world.
Two years after Sandra and John had married, for example, Sandra described an incident that led to their worst blowup:
John accidentally broke my favorite chair when he stood on it to change a lightbulb, and then he didn't tell me.
He's so careless with my things.
Moore internalizes the emotion a shade too much, and her lack of urgency amid the rubble borders on camp.
The rhythms are leisurely but fraught, even the most casual exchanges carry an awareness of the electric chair nearby.
Other writers have influences; King has nothing but influences.
The stricken executioner gets blessed by his beatific sacrifice, Billy Budd.
All three states now forbid traditional affirmative action in admissions to state universities.
When do traditional job qualifications, such as a test or membership in a guild, amount to racial discrimination?
Along came high-school quotas and minority admissions returned to pre one thousand nine hundred ninety six levels.
Naturally enough, conservatives dare not make this dangerous idea too explicit.
Croatian President Franjo Tudjman.
Tudjman is a true believer, but he has not always believed the same thing.
Though he had fought the Ustasha, he began to excuse their behavior, arguing that they had killed fewer people than Serbs claimed.
Before Milosevic invaded, Tudjman had schemed with him to divide Bosnia between them and throw out the Muslims.
Then in nineteen ninety three, when he thought he could build a Croat state in Bosnia, Tudjman turned on his allies.
Tudjman silenced most outside criticism by pushing Bosnian Croats into a federation with Muslims.
That summer, he invaded the Krajina, the Serb area captured by Milosevic in nineteen ninety one.
The two hundred thousand Serb residents fled to Serbia rather than fight.
Tudjman punctuated the arguably justified invasion with a vicious exclamation point.
Croatia analysts surmise that H D Z is keeping Tudjman alive as a campaign strategy.
Those polled, however, appear less enthusiastic about forging an interactive relationship with campaigns or candidates.
Whenever I read that a wine is lush and creamy, elegant, lovely, graceful, generous, luscious, or smooth, I gag.
These days, I gag a lot.
My wife is elegant, lovely, graceful, and even luscious.
Most wine critics similarly enjoy gyring and gimbling in the wabe.
Is this what happens when your job requires you to drink before noon?
Having researched how people assess wine, Noble now teaches scientific techniques to describe it precisely.
To this end, she has developed a lovely, impressive, and wonderfully balanced tool, which she calls the wine aroma wheel.
Noble divides her wheel into three rings.
Rather, she strives for a standard terminology that cuts through the babble of winespeak.
Had I lost my wine aptitude or was my nose just fatigued?
An hour later, I retook the test and scored one hundred.
Candidates benefit from the perception that online donations are purer than checks written in response to personal appeals.
Online cash intake is already being used as a barometer of grass-roots support.
Others say the antitrust siege, the attendant P R damage, and constant media scrutiny have worn him out.
Sure, say the critics, Ballmer is tactile and outgoing like a pit bull.
On this, Microsoft haters and worshippers agree: The only thing of which Bill Gates is incapable is coincidence.
Most were defense contractors, quiet, bureaucratic firms that churned punch cards for the Pentagon and had no social cachet.
We had guys putting up chandeliers in their offices or lifting weights or watching General Hospital.
Most of the hot new companies are outside the Beltway, twenty miles or more from the White House.
The techies labor like dogs on their suburban campuses, live near work, and spend what social time they have with each other.
They buy boats, play the stock market, fiddle with software and gadgets.
Case hired George Vradenburg, a high-powered lobbyist, to represent A O L on the Hill.
An ambitious young lawyer hungry for power used to join a big firm, make partner, schmooze senators, and die happy.
Or the information embedded on plastic films that allowed eight track tapes to alter the way one experienced a day on the beach.
Examples include Michael Dukakis after nineteen eighty eight and, yes, George H W Bush after nineteen ninety two.
Recent articles in the New Republic, the Washington Post, and the New York Times milk the Alexander death-watch for pathos.
I myself had some harsh words about Lamar during the nineteen ninety six campaign.
But since Newt Gingrich went the way of all political flesh, Lamar has returned to his sounder instincts.
As a member of the urban media elite, I live in a kind of protected bubble.
The Pentagon announced earlier this month that it will revise its guidelines for carrying out the policy.
I was very cognizant of this when I was writing my book on A O L.
The situation with A T and T is a case in point, with its current leader, Michael Armstrong.
Oops, it did fire in incendiary devices, despite its denials.
Does that make me hopelessly naive?
The great bitches of entertainment history understood this.
Trash-mouthed Roseanne made everyone else look middlebrow by comparison.
After all, Barbara Hershey and Lauren Holly, hired more or less to replace her, are powerful actresses.
Let her loose and she could have been, to say the least, memorable.
Brilliant, Tony, brilliant!
Drinking bouts were long, taciturn, and ended in somnolence.
But I think your other scenario, a foreign teacher joins Hogwarts, is much more likely.
At some point, usually the climax, we visit the Forbidden Forest, a spot of hazard and wonder, right on school grounds.
During the antitrust trial, though, you could see the problem with that lack of independent thinking.
Speaking of abominations, the Waco disclosure certainly ranks as one, on so many levels.
Not long after the event, an old Texas friend of mine, Dick J Reavis, went to work on a book about it.
Wiranto, expressed willingness to accept an accelerated deployment of peacekeeping troops.
Wiranto made his comments in informal talks with a U N delegation he was escorting around East Timor.
In the East Timorese U N compound, civilians cowered in fear of the next paramilitary onslaught.
Negotiations soured last April when Clinton rejected a promising deal.
And, wonders the L A T, what will happen to the militias?
Clinton.
These baroque newspaper corrections are to a mistake what a comb-over is to baldness.
The pundits, like the GOP, concede that tax cuts are a no-win issue this year.
Renounce?
Dear Witold,
Also, Emmys-wise: I adore Jenna Elfman.
Good morning, Seth.
Other than that, the differences are all aesthetic.
But these new flavors, especially the Powerade flavors, are, I think, too intense.
And I felt a lot better than I did with the bars.
All Sport came close, the barely there carbonation was nice, but in the end it was just too sweet.
Do Cellular Phones Cause Brain Cancer?
Recent news reports out of Britain are giving credence to the theory that cellular phone use increases the risk of brain cancer.
They either fail to find effects, or have produced statistically insignificant findings.
I felt distinct relief whenever somebody in The New New Thing expressed a measure of skepticism.
The Spread of Goo.
Dear Eliza,
Last night I reprised our run over the bridge, trying several new bars, a different brand of goo, and a couple of drinks.
Leave it to the frogs to produce a tasty sports snack, Grabber had the taste and consistency of a thicker Fruit Roll-up.
I also tried the Clif Bar in Apricot flavor, which basically tasted like dried apricots, but mushier.
HANOVER, New Hampshire, Al Gore performed this evening on a stage at Dartmouth College.
Upon release, he began to scamper furiously in every direction at once.
He oozed empathy from every pore, getting all over every questioner like a cheap suit.
First he would ask the person about his circumstances, his family, or his job, in a desperate effort to bond.
Not content with the six debates Bradley has already agreed to, Gore challenged his opponent to debate every week.
Gore joked, smarmily.
This makes him seem insincere, inauthentic, and just generally fake, in a way Clinton seldom does.
Dowdily dressed and gravel-voiced, he is as close to affectlessness as anyone who I can remember running for high office.
In suburban Virginia, for instance, the advice tends towards abstinence.
The L A T, N Y T and Washington Post also give prominent front-page space to these developments.
The L A T, while keeping up on the Diana front, manages to find more front-page room than most for other hard-news stories.
Gore: Here and Everywhere.
The group issued a deadline for freeing all Arab prisoners held by Israel, September fourteenth.
The Diana media oil slick continues to spread.
Do you believe the public lost confidence in you?
Ken Starr, favorable, thirty; unfavorable, sixty one.
The exact opposite of President Clinton.
Was it the Constitution the president was trying to save?
Dear Merrill,
The Man Who Loved Genetic Anomalies.
Dear Todd,
Maybe you can help me with a new one.
And as in the Gore-Wolf case, the benefits of the Bradley-West relationship are clearly reciprocal.
I would describe him as a blunt-spoken moderate with a radical self-image slightly at odds with the substance of his views.
In the house!
More later, Todd.
I want to move away from all this witty banter about politics and media ethics and move on to something more serious: T V.
Except for The Simpsons and The Practice, there are no T V shows worth watching regularly anymore.
This is probably the reason for the rise of the magazine shows on V H one, E!, and the like.
The minute I saw Leif Garrett in his bandanna hopefully talking about a comeback in two thousand, I was hooked.
Lately, though, our favorite, hers and mine, is the animated series based on the George and Martha books.
Nathan Lane does the voice of George with such flamboyance and relish that it puts the actors on Will and Grace to shame.
No Relation number six: Moore Than Meets the Eye.
And now, Michael Moore is heading the W T O as it meets in Seattle.
He took the helm of the W T O in September.
But has anyone really thought through the full implications of this convenient fix?
Has the divisive, decades-long debate over affirmative action really been defused by a clever policy gimmick?
The X Percent Solution seems to subvert the basic mechanism that is supposed to make school choice work.
They broke through checkpoints one hundred seventeen times in one hundred seventy three attempts.
There is, I concede, a somewhat confusing interlude where George takes up modern dance.
And as I recall, he wears a sombrero with his leotard.
The two live together in a suspiciously well-decorated castle on a lake outside Celesteville.
They wear turtlenecks.
I saw it and thought, Hmmm.
Why Global Warming Is Good for Gore.
On the other hand, if the temperature stayed warm, there would be no oil price spike, hence probably no recession.
I was told, however, that there was laughter and derision at a New York Magnolia screening.
The plaintiff in school desegregation cases.
My own feeling is that the film deserves its chance to develop in the minds of its viewers before being defined in a tidal wave of buzz.
Boys on Film
Dear all,
But I bet that too few of them demonstrate the consideration for their readers that you do, or your habitual fairness.
Elvis, you raised two really important points yesterday.
The dearth of relationship films this year may just be a cyclical thing, I suspect.
The dearth of decent roles for black actors goes deeper, and is much more frustrating.
Hanks clearly identifies with the kid, and the weirdly anti-dramatic thing is this: Nothing bad happens to him in the film.
Hanks is a bugaboo for me, sorry if I got off track.
In this regard, I appreciate your praise of Three Kings, Elvis.
Toy Story two: Woody.
There is often that globule of anti-semitic spit that he drops into his column.
Les mots justes.
Life, at its core, depends upon autocatalysis, that is, reproduction.
Most catalysis in cells is carried out by protein enzymes.
Might there be general laws supporting the possibility that systems of catalytic polymers such as proteins might be self-reproducing?
Mutations are the feedstock of heritable variation in a population.
Populations evolve by mutation, mating, recombination, and selection to give the well-marked varieties that are, for Darwin, new species.
First, Darwin's theory of evolution is a theory of descent with modification.
It does not yet explain the genesis of forms, but the trimmings of the forms, once they are generated.
In Drosophila, many mutants make small modifications in bristle number, color, shape.
A few change wings to legs, eyes to antennae, heads to genitalia.
But it is not so obvious that recombination is a good idea after all.
At the molecular level, the recombination procedure is rather like taking an airplane and a motorcycle, breaking both in half, and using spare bolts to attach the back half of the airplane to the front half of the motorcycle.
The resulting contraption seems useless for any purpose.
In later chapters I will discuss the concept of a fitness landscape.
The basic idea is simple.
Consider a set of all possible frogs, each with a different genotype.
Locate each frog in a high-dimensional genotype space, each next to all genotypes that differ from it by a single mutation.
Imagine that you can measure the fitness of each frog.
Graph the fitness of each frog as a height above that position in genotype space.
The resulting heights form a fitness landscape over the genotype space, much as the Alps form a mountainous landscape over part of Europe.
In the absence of any knowledge or constraint on the fitness landscape, on average, any search procedure is as good as any other.
But life uses mutation, recombination, and selection.
These search procedures seem to be working quite well.
Think of an organism's niche as a way of making a living.
Call a way of making a living a natural game.
Then of course, natural games evolve with the organisms making those livings during the past four billion years.
What, then, are the winning games?
Naturally, the winning games are the games the winning organisms play.
So organisms, niches, and search procedures jointly and self-consistently coconstruct one another.
We make the world in which we make a living such that we can, and have, more or less mastered that evolving world as we make it.
The same is true, I will argue, for an econosphere.
A web of economic activities, firms, tasks, jobs, workers, skills, and learning, self-consistently came into existence in the last forty thousand years of human evolution.
Think of the Magna Carta, that cultural enterprise founded on a green meadow in England when John the First was confronted by his nobles.
British common law has evolved by precedent and determinations to a tangled web of more-or-less wisdom.
When a judge makes a new determination, sets a new precedent, ripples of new interpretation pass to near and occasionally far reaches of the law.
Were it the case that every new precedent altered the interpretation of all old judgments, the common law could not have coevolved into its rich tapestry.
Conversely, if new precedents never sent out ripples, the common law could hardly evolve at all.
The experiment requires a table and some sand.
Drop the sand slowly on the table.
The sand gradually piles up, fills the tabletop, piles to the rest angle of sand, then sand avalanches begin to fall to the floor.
Keep adding sand slowly to the sand pile, and plot the size distribution of sand avalanches.
You will obtain many small avalanches and progressively fewer large avalanches.
In the sand pile case, a straight line sloping downward to the right is obtained.
The slope is the power law relation between the size and number of avalanches.
In addition, the same body of theory predicts that most species go extinct soon after their formation, while some live a long time.
The predicted species lifetime distribution is a power law.
Similar phenomena may occur in an econosphere.
Small and large avalanches of extinction and speciation events occur in our technologies.
As autonomous agents coconstruct a biosphere, each must manage to categorize and act upon its world in its own behalf.
What principles might govern that categorization and action, one might begin to wonder.
I suspect that autonomous agents coevolve such that each makes the maximum diversity of reliable discriminations upon which it can act reliably as it swims, scrambles, pokes, twists, and pounces.
Our universe is vastly nonrepeating; or, as the physicists say, the universe is vastly nonergodic.
Perhaps there are laws that govern this nonergodic flow.
Biospheres demand their Shakespeares as well as their Newtons.
We will have to rethink what science is itself.
And the humanities and science may find an unexpected, inevitable union.
A simple example of a device that detects displacements from equilibrium and extracts work is a windmill.
The vane on the windmill measures the direction of the wind, and pivots the windmill such that its fan blades are perpendicular to the wind.
In turn, the wind does work on the blades, causing the windmill to rotate.
The system as a whole measures a deviation from equilibrium, orients the entire system such that extraction of work by the wind is possible for the device, and it actually extracts work.
The windmill turns.
The stark fact that a biosphere builds up this astounding complexity and diversity suggests that our current physics is missing something fundamental.
A biosphere becomes complex, the universe becomes complex.
I will argue that the very diversity and complexity of a biosphere begets its further diversification and complexification.
But it will turn out that in any specific case of work, the specific process is organized in some specific way.
A conceptual cluster lies at the heart of the mystery.
The cluster concerns the progressive emergence of organization in the evolution of the physical universe and of a biosphere.
Part of the answer lies in the concept of broken symmetries.
Consider a pole standing vertically on a horizontal plane.
In due course, it will fall over under the influence of gravity.
Prior to falling, its range of possible directions to fall is the full circle.
After it falls, it points in some specific direction.
By falling, the pole has broken the circular symmetry of the system and come to a specific orientation.
Maxwell's demon is almost an autonomous agent.
While the demon is not defined as I have done, you will soon see that he seems to be able to make decisions, and to act on the physical world.
I suspect it is more than a mere coincidence that Maxwell and we seem forced to use this kind of intentional language.
Multiply the logarithm of the number of microstates per macrostate by the probability that the system is in that macrostate.
Now add up all these quantities for all the macrostates.
The total is the entropy of the system.
One modern sense of a compact description of something is a computer program.
We are to think of the computer program as a calculating engine.
We give it initial input data.
It has some program, typically written as a sequence of binary numbers, and the program operates on the input data, also a string of binary symbols, and churns out an answer.
Then the concept of a compact description becomes the concept of the shortness of the symbol string giving the input data, and the shortness of the program.
Terrorists usually try to attack strong targets at their weakest point, security experts contend.
But if the shooting Thursday at Los Angeles International Airport was terrorism, then it was an attack on perhaps the airport's strongest point.
Israeli officials have been ratcheting up security on El Al since the nineteen sixties, when it became a target of attacks and hijackings.
The only successful hijacking of an El Al jet was in nineteen sixty eight, when a flight from Rome was diverted to Algiers by Palestinian nationalists.
Its passengers are unapologetically profiled.
While most Israeli Jews quickly pass through security inspection, Arabs and certain other foreigners are singled out for intense questioning.
I think we need to take a long look at all of our security procedures, he said.
We need to see what further steps should be taken to protect the entire terminal area.
No one answered the phone at the Aerial Sign Corporation Thursday night.
One of the company's planes was involved in a fatal accident at the airport on Monday, when it turned right shortly after takeoff, cartwheeled and exploded.
You shouldn't have jumped that subway turnstile, but it is too late for regrets.
You were caught and sentenced to community service.
Do you resign yourself to spending the weekend picking up trash along the highway, and hoping none of your friends cruise past while you are wearing that orange traffic vest?
Or do you try for a more genteel punishment, say, planting bulbs in Central Park?
But not all community service sentences are the same.
Choose the short stick, and you could do your time scraping human feces off the concrete beneath the Harlem River Drive overpasses.
If you are lucky, you could end up stuffing envelopes and sipping tea at the charity of your choice.
Whatever you do, avoid something called homeless removal.