Measurable Quotes - page 2
In the early 20th century, cosmological physics was returned to the edge of time, and the question: what ‘came before' the Big Bang? For cosmology no less than for transcendental philosophy - or even speculative theology - this ‘before' could not be precedence (in time), but only (non-spatial) outsideness, beyond singularity. It indicated a timeless non-place cryptically adjacent to time, and even inherent to it. The carefully demystified time of natural science, calculable, measurable, and continuous, now pointed beyond itself, re-activated at the edges.
Nick Land
The impending collision out there somewhere in the great dark between a gas giant and a world very much like our own has some parallels to the eternal collision between religion and common sense. One is bloated and full of gas, and the other is measurable and solid. One engulfs everything around it, and the other simply provides a place to stand. One is a rogue destroyer that has come in out of the night, and the other is a warm well-lighted place vulnerable to the sainted mobs.
Jack McDevitt
Women's greater social desirability and beauty power afford opportunities for creating both measurable and invisible income. While the opportunities are available to almost all women and some men, they are available in abundance to the genetic celebrity ... a woman so beautiful that men do more than look and talk--they follow her.
Warren Farrell
Excessively precise economic analysis can lead to assessing everything in terms of its easily measurable melt value - the value that thieves get from stealing copper wiring from isolated houses, that vandals got from tearing down Greek temples for the lead joints holding the marble blocks together, that shortsighted timber companies get from liquidating their forests. The standard to insist on is live value. What is something worth when it's working?
Stewart Brand
[P]robability as a measurable degree of certainty; necessity and chance; moral versus mathematical expectation; a priori an a posteriori probability; expectation of winning when players are divided according to dexterity; regard of all available arguments, their valuation, and their calculable evaluation; law of large numbers...
Jacob Bernoulli
The Feraliminal Lycanthropizer is a low frequency thanato-auric wave generator. Known for its use by the Nazis and for its animalizing effects on human subjects tested within measurable vibratory proximity, the machine electrically generates two subsonic sinewaves-one 3hz, the other 9hz. Together, these two frequencies (one acting as carrier, the other as program) generate a lower third,.56hz. In addition to these sinewave generators, the machine contains four tape loops of unduplicable lengths, each containing textual material. Two of these loops operate below the threshold of decipherability (one forward, the other backward), and two operate far beyond the opposite threshold (also one forward, the other backward). The effect of the subsonic sinewaves on the sound of these human voice recordings is one of organic ululation.
David Woodard
What I am after is 'bravura, an attempt to do something beyond the truth'... I do not seek truth before bravura, I seek it on the other side. Naturally it is a basic risk to run, the internal insecurity, where nothing is measurable, no solid standard exists any longer, and one can hardly discern the difference between commercial bravura and true trapdoor, but it is the only way of escaping good taste and narrow certification. The light of ambivalence is a heavenly one.
Per Kirkeby
But institutional economics is the field of the public interest in private ownership, which shows itself behavioristically in buying and selling, borrowing and lending, hiring and firing, leasing and renting. The private interests become the field of intangible yet quantitative and measurable rights, duties, liberties and exposures to the liberties of others. These are various aspects of rights of ownership. What we buy and sell is not material things and services but ownership of materials and services. The correlation of engineering economics, home economics, and institutional economics makes up the whole of the science of political economics.
John R. Commons
If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.
Italo Calvino