M⁴ ‘eye’ receptors are believed to be exclusive to the eye. Their activation causes constriction of the pupil and accommodation for near vision. Transduction is via G-proteins and a decrease in the second messenger cAMP through inhibition of adenylyl cyclase.

Elisabetta Battista et al., Crash Course Pharmacology (Fourth Edition)

The sages of the Victorian period believed in the consummation of human virtue. Progress became something that was measurable by statistics. Thus the twentieth century was the logical sequel to its predecessor; at the beginning, the conquest of natural forces, the increase of scientific inventions, the widespread co-operation in the betterment of human life, and the obviously improving amenities of European society all joined in giving the promise of a better day. Suddenly, in sheer mockery of all these high hopes, came the Great War, when the insanity of nationalism drove the so-called civilized peoples into the obscene savagery of wholesale murder, in which the very finest of our youth, the leaders of their generation, were sent to the shambles ruthlessly. All that was best in the modern world, its noblest manhood and its highest morality, was sacrificed in the hideous conflict; and civilized man, as he had proudly called himself, looked over the edge of an abyss that seemed ready to engulf him and all his works. After four agonizing years the carnage was stayed, and a disillusioned world picked up anew the threads of an orderly existence, but not without a doubt and a question: Is this civilization? Whither are we going?

Civilization obviously is menaced by the misuse of the very products that were essential to its advancement. By aid of metals man made the tools by which he emerged from savagery and with which he constructed the machines that have given a bigger scope and a wider meaning to human life. From the dawn the digging of ore has played a leading part in the drama of humanity and no one has more cause than the miner to deplore the misuse of the products of his skilful toil. The sword was made before the ploughshare, the spear was fashioned before the chisel. The maleficent use of metals has preceded the beneficent use of them. The perversity of mankind has turned a blessing into a curse. Shall we mend our ways or go with the Gadarene swine down the steep slope of perdition?

The history of mining, like all other history thunders a warning. Those that live by the sword shall die by the sword. The Assyrian trampled upon the Egyptian, the Persian on the Assyrian, the Greek on the Persian, the Roman on the Greek. As they did in ancient times, so we, more civilized, as we deem ourselves, have done in later times. History is a philosophy that teaches by example. We have more examples than our predecessors; shall we heed them no better, more particularly the latest of them, which brought us to the very brink of perdition; or shall we too join the great discard of those that were weighed and found wanting? The finger of history, like that of Daniel before Belshazzar, bids us beware lest we too go the way of Nineveh, and our civilization, like its many proud forerunners, be destroyed by the forces it created but could not curb, by a demon it might invoke but could not exorcize.

T.A. Rickard, Man and Metals: A History of Mining in Relation to the Development of Civilization (1932)

The word “nature” and the word “techno” mean the same thing. Depends if you look at it from the past or from the future. For example, a little cabin in the mountains: an ape thinks it’s techno, it is the future. But for us it has become nature. We must live with both. It is very important. We can’t be just nature or just techno.

Björk

Take that business of balanced employment of forces. Admiral Doenitz, as you know, has, since becoming a captive of the Allies, written an essay on “The War at Sea” from the German point of view of World War II. He points out that the German submarines in the first year of the war were ten times as effective per day at sea as they were in the second year of the war. One therefore gathers (though he doesn’t make this point) that if Germany had started the war with some 300 submarines instead of 60, they would have stood a very good chance of winning the war at sea, and therefore the whole war-and relatively early. Now, why didn’t they have those 300 submarines? Well, one reason is that they were enamored of the idea of a balanced force and devoted a good deal of their naval resources (which had to be limited in view of their ground and air force needs) to surface vessels, including battleships. That gave them what according to a static conception was a balanced force. The trouble was that it was highly unbalanced for a war with Great Britain. This is only one example of where the word “balance” denotes no ready answer. The balance must always be thought of in terms of strategic needs against the particular prospective enemy.

Bernard Brodie, “Characteristics of a Sound Strategy” (1952)

Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant-society collectively, over the separate individuals who compose it-its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence: and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs, as protection against political despotism.

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty

The second measurable quantity we will consider is the lifetime, or equivalently the decay rate, of unstable particle species. An unstable particle has a finite probability of decaying during any given time interval, and the decay rate, Γ, is the probability of decay in a given unit time, just as in the case of radioactive decay. The lifetime, τ, of a particle species is a measure of the average lifetime of a particle of this type before it decays, and is related to the decay rate by τ = 1/Γ. Equivalently, the lifetime is the time it takes for the size of a sample of such particles to decrease by a factor of e. A related quantity is the half-life: the time it would take a similar sample to halve in size. The half-life, t1/2 is related to the lifetime by t1/2 = τ ln 2. These quantities may be measured experimentally in one of two ways. First, if the lifetime is sufficiently long for the particle to be observed before decay, and if the decay products are observable, then the decay rate may be measured directly by counting the number of decays per unit time. More commonly in particle physics, however, the lifetime of an unstable particle is so short that the particle is not directly observed before decay. Instead, only the products of its decay are observed. Such a particle is known as resonance. In this case, the decay rate can be measured experimentally through statistical analysis of the invariant mass for groups of ­ particles. If the same final states appear many times in collisions, and the invariant masses are found to peak around a particular value, this is evidence of resonance with that mass.

One may expect that the invariant mass measurements should form an infinitesimally thin spike around the resonance mass rather than a broad peak, but remember that, since the particle is short-lived, there is considerable uncertainty in its energy. The width of the resonance peak at half maximum height is equal to the decay rate of the resonance (in natural units).

Robert Purdy, Particle Physics: An Introduction

When we were kids, free as the air
With a violence craving to turn up somewhere
A tap dancer, a memorized number
An avalanche of the deep red clay earth

When it got bad, Arkadelphia Road
I couldn’t cry, I just pick up the load
And feign a strength, try to force your hand
But you leave a promise wherever it may land

Waxahatchee (Katie Crutchfield), “Arkadelphia”

There was neither nonexistence nor existence
then; there was neither the realm of space nor the
sky which is beyond.
What stirred?
Where?
In whose protection?
Was there water, bottomlessly deep?
There was neither death nor immortality then.
There was no distinguishing sign of night or day.
That one breathed, windless, by its own impulse.
Other than that there was nothing beyond.
Darkness was hidden by darkness in the
beginning…

“The Hymn of the Dark Beginning,” from the Hindu Rigveda (c. 1500 BCE)

The locution “nothing but” is frequently used when philosophers discuss appearances. The appearances are said to be “nothing but” particles or corpuscles, for example, or structured brain events. Even Thomas Hobbes, who recognized and honored the appearances, employed the “nothing but” locution frequently. That locution did not mean he denied the appearances or reduced them to matter and motion. Hobbes’s materialism is at best an explanatory one, not an ontological one. He was very firm: there are appearances (phantasms) and reality (matter and motion). Our contemporary materialists are not so clear about what they are affirming or denying. Often, they seem to me to confuse two claims: (a) all phenomena, all seemings or appearings, can be explained in terms of or by reference to, e.g., brain events, and (b) there are only brain events (and other physical events in the environment). The recent vogue for talking about supervenience may be an attempt to have it both ways, somehow to combine (a) and (b). Perhaps the appeals to supervenience are a genuine recognition that phenomena, qualia and mental events are also real, also exist.

To follow claim (a) rigidly may eliminate the need for any causal explanation of appearances, qualia or awareness. Whether supervenience is a causal relation, I am unclear. Most often, it seems to be treated as an explanatory relation: awareness or consciousness arises from, or emerges out of, a specific organization and structure of brain processes. But whatever the relation is, to talk of supervenience would seem to lead to the recognition that what supervenes, what arises from, differs in some ways from that from which it has emerged, or what it supervenes on: the supervenee and the supervened would seem to differ, at least numerically. With perceptual qualia or phenomenal properties, the difference cannot just be numerical. There is a kind difference between seen color or heard sound and the physical and neural events that precede our experience of color or sound. Similarly, being aware of tables, computers, or coffee differs in kind from the physical and neural processes that correlate with such awareness.

John W. Yolton, Realism and Appearances: An Essay in Ontology

It never occurred to me the shooting an entire picture in one room would be a problem. In fact I felt I could turn it into an advantage. One of the most important dramatic elements for me was the sense of entrapment those men must have felt in that room. Immediately a ‘lens-plot’ occurred to me. As the picture unfolded, I wanted the room to seem smaller and smaller. That meant that I would slowly shift to longer lenses as the picture continued. Starting with a normal range (28mm-40mm) we progressed to 50mm, 75mm and 100mm lenses.

In addition, I shot the first third of the movie above eye level. And then, by lowering the camera, shot the second third at eye level and the last third below eye level. In that way, by the end, the ceiling began to appear. Not only were the walls closing in, the ceiling was as well. The sense of increasing claustrophobia did a lot to raise the tension of the last part of the movie.

On the final shot, an exterior that showed the jurors leaving the courtroom, I used a wide angle lens. Wider than any that had been used in the entire picture. I also raised the camera to the highest above eye-level-position. The intention was to literally give us all air, to let us finally breathe, after two increasingly confined hours.

Boris Kaufman, photographer, in Making Movies by Sidney Lumet

All [eye] cones contain a pigment molecule consisting of a curved chain of amino acids. When this molecule absorbs a photon, a double bond snaps, causing the chain to straighten and the molecule to change shape. This seemingly trivial incident, lasting just 200 millionths of a billionth of a second, underpins all human vision.

James Fox, The World According to Color

In the fourth epoch, so gradually that almost no one noticed, machines began taking the side of nature, and nature began taking the side of machines. Humans were still in the loop but no longer in control. Faced with a growing sense of this loss of agency, people began to blame “the algorithm,” or those who controlled “the algorithm,” failing to realize there no longer was any identifiable algorithm at the helm. The day of the algorithm was over. The future belonged to something else.

George Dyson, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

In a digital computer, one thing happens at a time. In an analog computer, everything happens at once. Brains process three-dimensional maps continuously, instead of processing one-dimensional algorithms step by step. Information is pulse-frequency coded, embodied in the topology of what connects where, not digitally coded by precise sequences of logical events. “The nervous system of even a very simple animal contains computing paradigms that are orders of magnitude more effective than are those found in systems built by humans,” argued Carver Mead, a pioneer of the digital microprocessor, urging a reinvention of analog processing in 1989. Technology will follow nature’s lead in the evolution of true artificial intelligence and control.

Electronics underwent two critical transitions over the past one hundred years: from analog to digital and from high-voltage, high-temperature vacuum tubes to silicon’s low-voltage, low-temperature solid state. That these transitions occurred together does not imply a necessary link. Just as digital computation was first implemented using vacuum tube components, analog computation can be implemented, from the bottom up, by solid state devices produced the same way we make digital microprocessors today, or from the top down through the assembly of digital processors into analog networks that treat the flow of bits not logically but statistically: the way a vacuum tube treats the flow of electrons, or a neuron treats the flow of pulses in a brain.

George Dyson, Analogia: The Emergence of Technology Beyond Programmable Control

We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformations that others underwent in his mind; we mean to say that the dependence of what he does on what others have done is excessively complex and irregular. There are works in the likeness of others, and works that are the reverse of others, but there are also works of which the relation with earlier productions is so intricate that we become confused and attribute them to the direct intervention of the gods.

Paul Valéry, “Letter About Mallarmé”