People From Minnesota

"Composing a score is like getting in one of those mini-submarines that take you to the bottom of the ocean. You crawl into this little bubble, seal yourself away from the outside world and dive deep into uncharted territory. Sometimes the places you explore are dark, sometimes they’re light. If you have the right tools and knowledge you can explore wherever you like and have a great experience. It’s a crude analogy to genre hopping, but it’s accurate. I was lucky as a kid to be exposed to so much different material. I watched cartoons and read all kinds of comics as much as I buried my head in scary stuff. It makes going from talking animals one day to shape-shifters the next pretty easy. Truth is, most composers are pinballs. They can bounce around from style to style and adapt really well."

"Games run primarily on music loops. Each piece is composed to cycle during gameplay so it’s important to create music that doesn’t get monotonous or annoying and has very exact pacing. The use of themes, signature motifs and rhythmic passages needs to be arranged so they remain effective when played over and over. In a film, it’s a one-time-through experience. Tracks are scored tightly to picture and each track is crafted to exactly match what’s going on on-screen. Scoring in such a precise manner wouldn’t be practical in games because of the dynamic environment of gameplay. It can be different each time you revisit a level or area of a game, whereas a film is intended to play one way every time."

"World War II"

"Henri Levaufre"

"A strange calm has come over my feelings and disposition last two days. Feel a strong will to achieve something forming and growing. ...Maybe I am squarely facing reality at last and am beginning to mature mentally."

"Try out for position in 90th Division Band. I’m afraid I did not do so well because my lips were chapped from the hot, desert wind and I was terribly thirsty."

"Life can be explained for the most part in terms of natural laws. The causes of suffering, pain then become plainer. Man should strive to enrich as much as possible life. To make himself an important tool in the general progress of mankind."

"One of those usual summer Sabbaths. Chores - breakfast - listen aimlessly to radio - swing music - symphony - round table discussion — and then rather aimless reading."

"I intensely dislike the job of butchering a farm animal. The pig we butchered today squealed unmercifully when it was shot. It thought we were going to feed it but instead it received a bullet to its brain. Eating animals is so uncivilized, I am beginning to understand why GB Shaw, Tolstoy and Albert Einstein are vegetarians..."

"He was just a young man who desperately wanted “a clearer philosophy of life.” He endured so much just to be able to read some important books and get the knowledge that would help him understand and live a full life... Like so many boys of his generation, he never had the chance. But I think to all those boys, and their devastated families, Virgil would say, “we must face whatever life offers us and try to enrich our lives as much as possible to become an important tool in the general progress of mankind.”"

"A heavy blanket of snow fell last night obscuring the ground and much of the trash that has collected during the winter. If only we could cover our past misdeeds in the same way."

"Sunday – a pack of dogs killed several of our sheep last night. ... I do not believe that Smokey participated in the killing but he was shot anyway. There was no indictment or trial – just an execution."

"John Dewey ...said “Education is a social process; education is growth; education is not preparation for life, but is life itself.” I understand and completely agree with this philosophy."

"Virgil was buried in the Normandy military cemetery near Omaha beach... One of the 9386 crosses in the cemetery marks the site of Virgil’s grave... In 2000 a memorial was dedicated in Periers, at the urging of Henri Levaufre, and the support of Periers citizens. A monument was erected with four life-sized statues of American soldiers who were killed in the invasion. One of the statues is Virgil as a medic assisting a wounded comrade. The cemetery is visited by nearly 2 million people each year, most of them Europeans, who look at these crosses and say, “they did this for us”. Thus, Virgil’s memory lives on in the hearts and minds of millions of grateful people in France and other European countries."

"...[T]he day that the Japanese captured Nanking. As many as 300,000 civilians were killed. I would like to understand how such things can happen in a civilized society. It is as though a mantle of evil is periodically draped over the world."

"One of our mules died today. ...[W]e rigged up a block and tackle with a sling around her middle and tried to hoist her up to a standing position but her legs were too weak to hold her up. Then Father said we may as well give up because he noticed that part of her insides was protruding from her rear end. He said that when this happens there is no hope... So we lowered her back to the ground and let her die in peace, which she did in a few hours."

"After such a close brush with mortality I feel that I have an obligation to destiny and want to do something with my life that will benefit mankind. I am not a writer but think the best thing I can do is try to report on and understand what is happening in the world."

"The book cannot be called, as some say, “a written evidence of the mind and character of Hitler and his henchmen,” for at the time of writing Hitler was seeking power, and once having gained this power it becomes the old story of the oppressed gaining power, becoming the oppressor, a fact that runs through history with a persistency of man’s claims to “natural rights.”"

"The Hitler... as dictator of the Reich... has a new personality. He seems to be a disciple of Nietzsche’s Metaphysical divinity – power and the masses of people are to be used as pawns in the chessboard Power Politics."

"Pfc Virgil J. Tangborn 37172938, Inf, United States Army. On June 14, 1944 the field in which an artillery ammunition dump was located was heavily shelled. The ammunition dump was set on fire and during the ensuing explosions, Pfc Tangborn, seeing a wounded soldier trapped in a burning truck which was filled with exploding ammunition, hurried to the truck accompanied by two other enlisted men to effect a rescue of the wounded man. At this point Pfc Tangborn was mortally wounded by enemy shellfire. Entered service from Minnesota."

"You have to fight that much harder, and not in a whiny or combatant way,” she said. “You just have to be that much smarter, that much more organized, on your toes, always, and you have to dress that much more professionally. A lot more thought has to go into everything you do."

"Phil and I were never political, ever, ever, ever, our parents just told us we were Democrats because everybody in South St. Paul are Democrats. So we went through life just thinking we were Democrats, and would vote that way until our late 30s, when I basically started to Google, ‘What are you?’ I was like, "Oh my gosh, Phil, we’re Republicans.""

"A group which has a simple structure may offer difficult questions when operating as a transformation group. For example, the ways in which a cyclic group of order 2 can operate on a manifold, even on E 3, are far from completely known."

"Others have spoken and written about his solution of Hilbert's fifth problem, but perhaps not enough is said about his later work, especially his joint work with C. T. Yang. In a long series of papers written in the late 1960s and early 1970s, they used the study of group actions on homotopy 7-spheres to showcase and test the growing new techniques of differential topology, especially index theory and surgery theory. At a time when much work in topology consisted in building these machines, their papers demonstrated the beauty of applying this theory to unfurl complexities of symmetry and structure."

"THEOREM: if G is a locally euclidean, connected, simply connected topological group of dimension n greater than one, then G contains a closed proper subgroup of positive dimension."

"He was sure there must be some catch. Every principle here had an opposite, and both were wrong."

"“You really are a pig,” she decided coldly. “You’ve got your snout in the trough here too,” he reminded her."

"He walked on in silence for a while, thinking of all that he had seen. And the sum of his thought was a sickness against the whole hypocritical system that was despoiling an incredibly rich planet."

"Evolution’s logical, unlike religion. Even the Church will agree with that. You have to take religion on faith and you can’t test it by common sense."

"The present molders of the code seemed to have a clear knowledge of just how difficult to make something, to add to its fascination, without making it impossible."

"An accident of careless handling at a dumping point had touched off a great atomic explosion, somewhere in central Europe. That country had thought itself attacked during the disarmament hiatus, and had struck at China, which had bombarded Russia, which thought it was being attacked by America. The confusion was straightened out in less than two hours, but by then two-thirds of the world had been killed."

"A single tiny cell had decided the fate of a population pressed so close to the ultimate limit of the planet’s resources that there was no margin for error. Facing such risks, how could any sane and responsible ruling group dare to demand still more mouths to cry for food? It was a shabby, horrible way to run a world."

"Stupidity, greed, misdirected aggression—or sum it up and call it man."

"“But it won’t stay at this level. Not with the Eleventh Commandment. They won’t stop, even when there are a hundred billion.” Epstein shook his head. “They won’t get there. At the present time, conditions make the death rate about equal to the birthrate. Sooner or later, everything reaches its own level. Oh, if the Australian scheme goes through, we may reach a twenty billion total. Beyond that, the more children get born, the worse conditions get—which brings up the death rate and cuts the figure back again.” “And leaves the misery rate at a maximum.”"

"“How can you prove God’s on your side?” Boyd asked."

"What's great is that he's written this, so there's never any confusion between what the writer wants and what the director wants. He always rewriting and tweaking and I like that. I like somebody who's passionate about their project and what they're doing. And he shows up and he knows exactly what he wants and he's incredibly clear. He mustn't be given caffeine. He's got more energy that anybody I've ever seen. It's extraordinary when you think how much of a weight this production must be for a director. I'd be terrified. He's endlessly brilliant and fun and comes up with really good notes. It's been really great."

"But what it really is about is storytelling. Character, story, character, story and that kind of got me through, and then I just wrote my ass off. Everything I've directed, I've written. So whenever anybody asks me how to become a director, I say "For me, you've got to write." Nobody ever offered me anything the first five years, so I just wrote my own."

"We define agency costs as the sum of:"

"Most organisations firms are simply legal fictions which serve as a nexus for a set of contracting relationships among individuals."

"We define an agency relationship as a contract under which one or more persons (the principal(s)) engage another person (the agent) to perform some service on their behalf which involves delegating some decision making authority to the agent. If both parties to the relationship are utility maximizers there is good reason to believe that the agent will not always act in the best interests of the principal."

"This paper integrates elements from the theory of agency, the theory of property rights and the theory of finance to develop a theory of the ownership structure of the firm. We define the concept of agency costs, show its relationship to the 'separation and control' issue, investigate the nature of the agency costs generated by the existence of debt and outside equity, demonstrate who bears the costs and why, and investigate the Pareto optimality of their existence. We also provide a new definition of the firm, and show how our analysis of the factors influencing the creation and issuance of debt and equity claims is a special case of the supply side of the completeness of markets problem."

"It is traditional in the theory of the firm to define the production opportunity set available to the firm in terms of its boundary -- the maximum attainable set of output quantities for various input quantities, given the state of technology and knowledge. This boundary is the production function of the firm. One of our purposes here is to point out the dependence of such production functions on the structure of property rights and contracting rights within which the firm exists. We redefine the production function in order to recognize the dependence of output on the structure of property and contracting rights. That expanded framework is then used to discuss a concrete set of problems surrounding the role of labor in the firm ranging from the 'labor-managed firm' system (in which tradable capital value residual claims [common stock] are legally prohibited), and the codetermination and industrial democracy movements (in which management participation by labor is required by law), to cooperatives and professional partnerships (i.e., quasi-labor-managed firms which arise out of the voluntary contracting process), and the capitalist corporation."

"A major social problem we face today is how to control the political process that is eroding the free enterprise market system. Although I am pessimistic that we will in fact ever resolve this problem completely, we will surely never solve it unless we develop a viable positive theory of the political process. Such a political theory will not be complete until we also have developed a theory that explains why we get the results we do out of the mass media."

"The corporation as an organizational form is an enormously productive social invention. Partly because of its success it is under increasing attack from various quarters, often under the guise of “protecting” investors from self-interested managers. Some of these attacks are successful simply because the corporation is a poorly understood entity. This paper discusses what the corporation is, what it is not, and how certain misconceptions about the corporate form are fostered by its critics as part of their attack."

"This paper analyzes the relations between knowledge, control and organizational structure both in the market system as a whole and in private organizations. Limitations on the mental capacity of the human mind and the costs of producing and transferring knowledge means that knowledge relevant to all decisions can never be collected in the mind of a single individual or a small body of experts. This means that if the knowledge valuable to a particular decision is to be used in making that decision, there must be a system for partitioning out decision rights to individuals who already have the relevant knowledge and abilities or who can acquire or produce them at the lowest cost. Self interest on the part of individual decision-makers means a control system is required to motivate individuals with the decision rights and the relevant knowledge to use those decision rights appropriately. This control problem is solved in a capitalist economy by a system of alienable property rights."

"Rational actors are significantly constrained by limitations of information and calculation."

"Relatively unsuccessful firms would be more likely to innovate than relatively successful firms."

"In general, success tends to breed slack. One of the main consequences of slack is a muting of problems of resource scarcity. Slack provides a source of funds for innovations that would not be approved in the case of scarcity but that have strong subgroup support."

"Effective retention is heavily dependent on recruiting students with the potential to graduate."

"After two years of study, I'm happy to tell you that dire projections about declines in the U.S. work force due to technological change are exaggerated at best."