Academics From The United States

"One of the reasons why the Catholic Church attains greater success than the Protestants in China is that its missionaries are men, its preachers are men, the dresses in Chinese garb, he lives among them and becomes one of them ; he is careful not to interfere with their superstitions only so far as these interfere with his own, and is especially careful not to inveigh against the . His , , and picturesque ritual does not widely differ from the Buddhist."

"Fifty years ago in , while walking along the road I passed an open field and noticed to my astonishment hundreds of flashing in perfect unison. I watched this curious sight for some time and the synchronism of the flashing was unbroken. Many times after I have watched these luminous insects, hoping to see a repetition of this phenomenon, but the flashes in every instance were intermittent. Since that time I have read about these insects in various books without meeting any allusion to this peculiar behavior. At last I have found a confirmation of my early observations. In of December 9, page 414, is the report of an interesting paper read before the by entitled “ Luminous Insects ” in which reference is made to the remarkable synchronism of the flashes in certain European species of fireflies. ..."

"On the approach of winter, s bury themselves in the ground, and those that have shells retire within the shell as far as possible, and close the aperture of the shell with a film of the mucus which the body secretes so abundantly. In this condition they remain dormant until revived by the warm weather of spring. If the pupil will collect a number of snails in the early spring, and keep them confined in a box, with earth, damp leaves, or bits of rotten wood or bark, the snails in the course of a few weeks will lay a number of little eggs. These eggs will be white and round, about the size of a pin’s-head. By careful tending, that is, by keeping the leaves slightly moist, the eggs will hatch out tiny snails, and these will attain half their mature size the first season."

"Whatever value these records may possess lies in the fact that when they were made, Japan had within a few years emerged from a peculiar state of civilization which had endured for centuries. Even at that time, however (1877), changes had taken place, such as the modern training of its armies; a widespread system of public schools; government departments of war, treasury, agriculture, telegraph, post, statistics, and other bureaus of modern administration, — all these instrumentalities making a slight impress on the larger cities such as Tokyo and , sufficiently marked, however, to cause one to envy those who only a few years before had seen the people when all the wore the two swords, when every man wore the and . The country towns and villages were little, if at all, affected by these foreign introductions, and the greater part of my memoranda and sketches were made in the country."

"In the gardens of the better classes summer-houses and shelters of rustic appearance and diminutive proportions are often seen. Rustic arbors are also to be seen in the larger gardens. . High fences, either of board or , or solid walls of mud or tile with stone foundations, surround the house or enclose it from the street. Low rustic fences border the gardens in the suburbs. Gateways of various styles, some of imposing design, form the entrances; as a general thing they are either rustic and light, or formal and massive."

"Soon after his first arrival in Japan, Morse became interested in everything bearing on the ancient culture of the people. This was shown in the epoch making discovery and excavation of the . Implements and pottery were found there. In 1878 he wrote that he was starting a collection of pottery. ... In 1890 this great collection was deposited with the Boston Art Museum and two years later the Museum bought it, Morse being made Keeper of Japanese Pottery and holding the office for the rest of his life."

"The appreciation which gladly recognized Chaucer as standing at the head of all living English poets never, to our knowledge, inspired a solitary disciple to place upon record the slightest particular in the story of his career. His superiority remained unchallenged during the century that followed his death. Yet no account of him on even the most insignificant scale was even attempted till after he had been in his grave almost a hundred and fifty years. Nothing could show more pointedly how alien was the spirit of the past to that of the present."

"It was the attacks connected with the controversy about the "Naval History" that more than anything else embittered ’s feelings. He had striven hard to write a full and trustworthy account of the achievements of his country upon the sea. Because he had refused to pervert what he deemed the truth to the gratification of private spite, he had been assailed with a malignity that had hardly stopped short of any species of misrepresentation. Rarely has devotion to the right met with a worse return. The reward of untiring industry, of patriotic zeal, and of conscientious examination of evidence, was little else than calumny and abuse. He felt so keenly the treatment he had received that he regretted having ever written the "Naval History" at all."

"}} in the course of time became the literary autocrat of his age. He was disliked by many; but there was no one to dispute his supremacy. As he was conspicuously identified with the of the , it was inevitable that his advocacy of it and his example should affect in some measure the belief and practice of his contemporaries."

"By Shakespeare Voltaire was both attracted and repelled. As a Frenchman, trained in the strictest rules of the s, and disposed to render those rules even more rigid, he was shocked beyond measure by the irregularities, the gross improprieties, or rather indecencies, as he looked upon them, in which the greatest English dramatist had indulged with no apparent consciousness that his course was anything but perfectly proper. A man who could in all sincerity assert, as did Voltaire, that in the , all other laws, that is to say, all other beauties of the drama, are comprised, was not likely to be impressed favorably by the persistent disregard of them which Shakespeare had manifested. He shuddered furthermore at the mixture of the comic and the tragic in the same production; at the low characters which were brought upon the stage, and the low language in which they indulged; at the scenes of violence, of horror, and of carnage which were enacted in full view of the audience. Such practices ran counter to all his personal tastes and prejudices, as well as to the traditions of which he believed, or tried to believe, surpassed not only that of all modern nations, but themselves."

"The , the s, the , the , and the have met or succeeded one another upon British soil; and the occupation of the country by each has left ineffaceable records of itself in the tongue we use to-day. But English was to the original speech of the island. In the modern form in which we know it, it can, indeed, hardly lay claim to a higher age than five hundred years."

"It was in the that the forces which give stability and credit to a language began first to operate powerfully upon the speech employed by the great body of the people. It was in the latter half of that century that , in the strict sense of the word literature, properly begins. Numerous works had, indeed, been written between the and this period; but, with the exception of some few specimens of lyric poetry, there had been nothing produces, which, looked at from a purely literary point of view, had any reason to show for its existence. If known to the cultivated classes at all, it was probably treated with contempt; for it was certainly contemptible in execution, whatever it may have been in design. The men who, during those centuries, wrote in English, seem to have done so in most cases because they had not the knowledge or the ability to write in Latin or in French. To a very large extent, their works were translations."

"The pronouncing dictionary has not only come, but is treated with a deference to which, at the outset, it was an utter stranger. It seems as if its production must have been due in the first instance to the desire for a work of such a nature manifested by the imperfectly educated middle class, rising more and more into social prominence. The members of this body wanted somebody to tell them precisely what to say and how to say it. They did not care to exercise the right of private judgment, or, rather, they did not have sufficient faith in their own cultivation to trust it. Authority was what they were after; and when men are longing for authority on any subject, some one will be considerate enough of their welfare, and confident enough in his own sufficiency, to come forward and furnish it."

"W is to be found the best text of ? Of the many s before the public, which one is the one to be preferred? These are questions which are pretty certain to be asked by him who is about to take up for the first time the study of that author's dramatic productions. It may and it sometimes does cause a feeling of disappointment when the answer is made—as no other answer can fairly be made—that not only is there no best edition of Shakespeare's works, but there never can be and never will be one."

"Professor Lounsbury's name, I suppose, is most closely associated by the public with his studies in Chaucer and Shakespeare. His literary taste, however, was singularly catholic. Pope and Dryden, for example, appealed to him strongly because of their pugnacity and the keenness of their satire. Their poems he knew intimately, and he often quoted passages from them in conversation, not always accurately but rather by way of a paraphrase which gave new edge to an epigram. Of later poets the ones he read most were Byron, Browning, and Tennyson. From any one of the three, he would repeat, when in the mood for it, long stretches running to hundreds of verses."

"... People tire of being taken advantage of. Some commit their lives to reforming city politics, and others work on technological solutions that benefit both humankind and . The latter efforts have led to (1) the development of efficient, affordable renewable-energy strategies; (2) carbon-capturing, recyclable construction materials with low s; (3) cost-effective atmospheric water-harvesting methods; and (4) productive vertical farms situated within the city. issues are now front and center on many city council agendas. I call these four applications of technology the four pillars of sustainability."

"... if you look at the way cities behave, they are parasitic on landscape. In every aspect of whatever they need, they get it from some other place ..."

"mainly differ amongst each other in terms of the technological methods used to grow edible plants indoors. 1. The first one, , consists of growing plants on a neutral and inert substrate (e.g. sand, clay, and rock material), which is regularly irrigated by a liquid fortified with minerals and nutrients that are necessary to sustain plant growth. Hydroponic systems use 60-70% less water than traditional outdoor agriculture. They are widely employed by hundreds of thousands of commercial greenhouses and vertical farms throughout the world. 2. The second process of vertical farming is , through which plants are grown without the use of any soil (or soil replacement): their roots, hanging down in the air inside a closed container, are exposed to a fine mist of nutrient-laden water, regularly sprayed through a nozzle. While this is a relatively new method for growing edible plants – it was first developed in 1983 – it is increasingly employed by commercial vertical farms such as and Tower Garden in the US. 3. Finally, a hybrid method, , integrates fish production into the hydroponic growing scheme. More precisely, it uses fish waste as a nutrient source for the plants after treatment, operating as a closed loop ecosystem for indoor farming. However, this system’s complexity and high cost hinder its widespread use. The former two methods are the most common forms of ."

"Despommier's writing is conversational and fun. He quotes Mark Twain and shares “inside” stories (did you know, for example, that once contracted at a restaurant in New York and later banked a hefty sum for his tsouris?). Despommier also pays homage to early giants of parasitology and the late , a superb spinner of parasite tales known to many members."

"Time Line for 1937 – Discovered in Uganda in the . Mistaken at first for 1951 – Israeli scientists determine the conditions for transmission from the perspective of mosquitoes. Temperature vrs. 1973 – Biggest outbreak in history in South Africa – 3,000 people sick. Hot and dry conditions followed by heavy rains 1999 – West Nile Virus first introduced in USA. Hottest, driest summer on record. 2010 – West Nile virus now an endemic infectious disease of and people. Yearly outbreaks common. All dependent on hot, dry weather, followed by a rain event"

"Trees sequester carbon, harvest water, produce food, and convert sunlight into energy. Those are the four characteristics I would love a city to have. The resiliency of forests is to be emulated. And that’s the reason why I picked forests as my biomimic. I want my city to be as resilient as Earth’s s. The main reason why is occurring is to make room for farms. Before there was farming, which was about ten to twelve thousand years ago, we had six trillion trees. We now have three trillion trees. We’ve cut down half of the Earth’s ability to capture carbon. We’re not going to replace all of that with new trees. But if we got back up to five trillion trees, let’s say, simply by leaving the remaining forests alone and letting them repopulate and selectively harvesting, the Earth’s temperature rise would begin to slow down. And, once you’ve slowed it down, that gives you time to reflect and to prepare for these changes that are not going to go away. Replacing three trillion trees by planting them—that’s not going to work. We’ll never be able to do that. So we have to let nature do that part. And, in order to do that, we have to return a lot of farmland back to what it used to be, which was forests."

"Ever since we became a species, some 200,000 years ago, s have been responsible for untold amounts of human suffering and countless deaths. For instance, some experts believe that Homo sapi­ens almost became extinct as the result of epidemics caused by malaria that coincided with a time when our numbers were perhaps as low as 400,000 individuals. The worst part is that this killer is still with us. In just over the past one hundred years, as many people have died from worldwide as now live in the United States. While the number of people dying from this one parasite is high, consider the fact that ma­laria in all its forms (there are four) infects some two billion individuals each year. This reduces the mortality rate to around 1 percent, making this group of infectious agents some of the most successful parasites on the planet."

"Words and sentences are subjects of revision; paragraphs and whole compositions are subjects of prevision."

"Wendell was a man of pronounced individuality, warm in his sympathies, singularly loyal in his attachments, and free from littleness. He never concealed his convictions, which were often critical of modern tendencies and points of view. If he seemed to champion the past at the expense of the present, it was because of his insistence on standards and his veneration for the summits not the table lands of tradition. His conversation had the charm of freedom from the commonplace."

"Sustainable urban life is technologically achievable, and most important, highly desirable. For example, food waste can easily be converted back into energy employing clean state-of-the-art incineration technologies, and wastewater can be converted back into drinking water. For the first time in history, an entire city can choose to become the functional urban equivalent of a natural ecosystem. We could even generate energy from incinerating human feces if we so desired. We have the ability to create a "cradle to cradle" waste-free economy. All that is needed is the political will to do so. Once we begin the process, cities will be able to live within their means without further damaging the environment."

"Weren't humans domesticated by the requirements of the plants and animals themselves?"

"As a university professor I sell what I know."

"Computers will not preserve cultures. But they can be used to foster cultural pluralism and to provide people everywhere with the power to make their own bilingual educational materials, or to print pamphlets on how to grow better rice, or to record for future generations the customs and lore of those now alive."

"The extinction of language is nothing new...What is new today is the rate and extent of extinction of languages."

"There are 63 officially recognized indigenous languages in Mexico, but there are at least 282 indigenous languages spoken in Mexico...We see the different languages in these families referred to as "varieties" or “dialects” in the literature. Nobody would think today of calling Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, French and Portuguese "varieties" of Latin."

"Languages have always come and gone. Neither the language of Jesus nor that of Caesar are spoken today. But languages seem to be disappearing faster than ever before."

".. most people think of science as technology and engineering—life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on... It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include polling, marketing, management, insurance, and public health programs."

"It is not necessary to argue that language diversity caused the evolutionary success of humans. We need only recognize that the knowledge generated by all those successfully adapting cultural groups over the millennia is stored in all those thousands of languages now spoken around the world."

"Teaching people to read primers and Bibles does not produce authors; it produces readers. Printing presses and publishing houses produce authors. This rule is no different today for nonliterate languages than it was in late medieval times in Europe."

"Research is a craft. I’m not talking analogy here. Research isn’t like a craft. It is a craft. If you know what people have to go through to become skilled carpenters or makers of clothes, you have some idea of what it takes to learn the skills for doing research. It takes practice, practice, and more practice."

"I see nothing useful or charming about remaining monolingual .. if that results in being shut out of the national economy."

"A couple key ingredients. One was studying fan cultures. Trying to figure out what builds strong followings for people. Why people feel more attached to one film versus another– or one property versus another. When you analyze that, one property usually has more depth. It usually has a more resonating meaning. A deep universe, well fleshed out feels like you know it better than your reading, or your viewer knows it. They feel like they’re uncovering something that a creative team is really ahead of them on in terms of the believability of the universe. There are so many factors. What makes people want tattoos of a motor cycle brand or a rock band? What brings people to feel so passionate about properties that they’re willing to make life long commitments to something that they didn’t even create? I was fascinated by that and came away with a lot of takeaways. The other factor was, I always had a different outlook on life. Maybe because my dad was in the nuclear submarines as I was growing up throughout the cold war. Or serious global issues. My favorite fishing places, in Vermont, had died as a result of acid rain. These were the most gorgeous lakes and there was no fishing in them anymore. They looked clear; they were absolutely beautiful, but all the fish were dead. I was realizing there were cold plants in the midwest; and they were also mentioning cold plants merging in China. This was in the 1980s. I was seeing this big impact on the environment. At the same time the media was basically silent and people were ignorant of what was going on in the world in an environmental level. In my own circles, people just weren’t aware of these things. If you talked about things like the meat raising practices of fast food companies burning the lungs of the planet in South America for cheaper grazing lands and cheaper meat, people thought you were a conspiracy theorist. They were really uneducated. Even educated people had no idea what was going on on the planet. That was very stressing for a kid spending a lot of time in the woods connecting with nature. I found that really disturbing. I wasn’t looking at it as a business venture. I was coming at it as, “what if stories are richer? What if we could get connected through characters that are more like we are?” I was feeling pretty helpless in a world that makes decisions and screws up our abilities independent of our control; independent of our vote. Since that time we’ve seen the rise of the 99 percent. At that time people were saying capitalism is great. That was disturbing. So as an artist, people reinterpret what they’re seeing in the world. What makes that message resonate is A. there’s substance to it. B. it’s told beautifully. C. it has respect for the audience. My point is, when you see these things in the world, I felt more and more people were feeling more isolated. And I felt more and more people were headed for the third world. If you look at the 2008 financial crisis in the United States; what happened to the middle class and how it’s now basically poverty class. It’s all around us, and it’s pervasive, and it’s got a lot of momentum. In the ’80s people were still riding high. Global Warming– Al Gore hadn’t made his film yet. It took something like that to get people to start paying attention. If I agree to what many other climate scientists are saying is a whole other issue. What I think we can agree on is that human impact on the Earth has been substantial. When I started making Oddworld, that’s what made my heart heavy when I went to sleep every night. When I’d travel the world and see different places that’s what would break my heart, the continued impact of the environment and what that probably meant for our future. But who wants to see a documentary game?"

"On a very practical level, we were striving for a deeper and more engaging sense of story and emotional character development for games. We brought character development, production design, animation, and effects from the film industry. We wanted to feel like you were playing not just a challenge, but someone’s fate – someone that you had to be responsible for. On a more philosophical level, I wanted to take the most pop of pop culture, and convert it into meaningful modern day myths that would have great appeal to a wider audience. We also believed that people could find more empowering messages through gaming. So we targeted the anti-hero as our main character. Abe wasn’t the muscle-bound superhero that you wanted to be – he was the rather pathetic chump that you actually are. It was about rendering the journey out of the more powerless beings that we see ourselves as and at the place we most typically are, which is at the bottom of the global corporate food chain."

"It was film that was the key inspiration, but from games the most fun I personally had, aside from pure racing and arcade-style games, was the great early side-scrollers like Prince of Persia, Out of This World and Flashback. I loved those games, but most importantly those games made me feel like I was controlling a lifeform more than a piece of art in some challenge contest."

"I think the game served a lot of people who wanted to see deeper and more developed characters in games that had more real world relevance to them. I believed, and still do, that the audience wants richer entertainment than they are currently getting. I also hear a lot of people in the business claim the game inspired them to want to start making games. But I have to say the most intangible rewards were the heart-breaking and inspiring fan mails from people whose lives the game so deeply affected. It’s uncanny the impact the game had on some people, but it was why I personally wanted to make the games."

"“The public mind is poisoned at its source when special interests take hold of educational institutions for their own propaganda.”"

"“If the Anti-Evolutionists in Tennessee were aware of the existence of any other religions than their own, they might realize that it is the very genius of religion itself to evolve from primary forms to higher forms.”"

"“We have to live in the universe science gives us. A theology that is contrary to reality must be abandoned or improved.”"

"“What is the purpose of this examination?” Darrow answered honestly. “We have the purpose of preventing bigots and ignoramuses from controlling the education of the United States,” he declared, “and that is all.”"

"Conservative Christians drew together across denominational lines to fight for the so-called fundamentals of their traditional faith against the perceived heresy of modernism, and in so doing gave birth to the fundamentalist movement and antievolution crusade."

"Darrow’s opening introduced his main point. The antievolution statute was illegal because it established a particular religious viewpoint in the public schools."

"Stanford university president David Starr Jordan, an eminent evolutionary biologist who later volunteered to aid in the legal defense of John Scopes, spoke for many academics when he dismissed traditional Protestant revivalism as “simply a form of drunkenness no more worthy of respect than the drunkenness that lies in the gutter!”"

"Already, the three main tactics for attacking the antievolution measure had emerged: the defense of individual freedom, an appeal to scientific authority, and a mocking ridicule of fundamentalists and biblical literalism; later, they became the three prongs of the Scopes defense."

"Growing evidence indicates that once diseases like cancer or cardiovascular disease are diagnosed, these same exposures may be associated with improved survival outcomes."

"The terrain in which cancer grows is shaped by everyday behavior."