#t

I used to give X-ray vision a lot of thought because I couldn’t see how it could work. I mean, if you could see through people’s clothing, then surely you would also see through their skin and right into their bodies. You would see blood vessels, pulsing organs, food being digested and pushed through coils of bowel, and much else of a gross and undesirable nature. Even if you could somehow confine your X-rays to rosy epidermis, any body you gazed at wouldn’t be in an appealing natural state, but would be compressed and distorted by unseen foundation garments. The breasts, for one thing, would be oddly constrained and hefted, basketed within an unseen bra, rather than relaxed and nicely jiggly. It wouldn’t be satisfactory at all—or at least not nearly satisfactory enough. Which is why it was necessary to perfect ThunderVision™, a laserlike gaze that allowed me to strip away undergarments without damaging skin or outer clothing. That ThunderVision, stepped up a grade and focused more intensely, could also be used as a powerful weapon to vaporize irritating people was a pleasing but entirely incidental benefit. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#imagination #kids #food

The mind is reluctant to embrace deep change, and will play devious games to maintain the status quo. ↗

— Kristin Linklater

#nature

A sincere apology is analogous to authentic repentance". ~R. Alan Woods [2013] ↗

— R. Alan Woods

#r-alan-woods #repentance #r-alan-woods

To hear them talk one would have thought they had no legs, natural functions or knowledge of the wicked world. ↗

— Margaret Mitchell

#talk #wicked #world #nature

ভীতি কখনোই প্রীতির মতো স্থায়ী ফলদায়ক ঔষধ নয়, তবে তাতে সাময়িক উপশম অবশ্যই হয়। ↗

— Abu Taher Misbah

#human-nature #nature

I griped about it at lunch one day to Bill Weist and Dr. Leslie Squier, our visiting psychologists from Reed College. I'd been trying to train one otter to stand on a box, I told them. No problem getting the behavior; as soon as I put the box in the enclosure, the otter rushed over and climbed on top of it. She quickly understood that getting on the box earned her a bite of fish, But. As soon as she got the picture, she began testing the parameters. 'Would you like me lying down on the box? What if I just put three feet on the box? Suppose I hang upside down from the edge of the box? Suppose I stand on it and look under it at the same time? How about if I put my front paws on it and bark?' For twenty minutes she offered me everything imaginable except just getting on the box and standing there. It was infuriating, and strangely exhausting. The otter would eat her fish and then run back to the box and present some new, fantastic variation and look at me expectantly (spitefully, even, I thought) while I struggled once more to decide if what she was doing fit my criteria or not. My psychologist friends flatly refused to believe me; no animal acts like that. If you reinforce a response, you strengthen the chance that the animal will repeat what it was doing when it was reinforced; you don't precipitate some kind of guessing game. So I showed them. We all went down to the otter tank, and I took the other otter and attempted to get it to swim through a small hoop. I put the hoop in the water. The otter swam through it, twice. I reinforced it. Fine. The psychologists nodded. Then the otter did the following, looking up for a reward each time: swam through the hoop and stopped, leaving its tail on the other side. Swam through and caught the hoop with a back foot in passing, and carried it away. Lay in the hoop. Bit the hoop Backed through the hoop. 'See?' I said. 'Otters are natural experimenters. ↗

— Karen Pryor

#otter #training #imagination

September has come, it is hers Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, Whose nature prefers Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace. So I give her this month and the next Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already So many of its days intolerable or perplexed But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls Dancing over and over with her shadow Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls And all of London littered with remembered kisses. ↗

— Louis MacNeice

#poetry #life

The will of God or the lunacy of man - it seemed to him that you could take your choice, if you wanted a good enough reason for most things. Or, alternatively (and he thought of it as he contemplated the small orderliness of the cabin against the window background of such frantic natural scenery), the will of man and the lunacy of God. ↗

— James Hilton

#religion #science-fiction #nature

But Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#nature

I had learned that a dexterous, opposable thumb stood among the hallmarks of human success. We had maintained, even exaggerated, this important flexibility of our primate forebears, while most mammals had sacrificed it in specializing their digits. Carnivores run, stab, and scratch. My cat may manipulate me psychologically, but he'll never type or play the piano. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#cat #evolution #panda #science #thumb