Tag Archives: tree

09-SHOR

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Pathway

Adrian du Buisson for Quanta Magazine – March 12, 2019

Cells in embryos make their way across a steep “developmental landscape” to their eventual fate.

Embryonic cells continuously monitor their changing surroundings and make small corrective adjustments, optimizing as development proceeds, locking in on their planned identity relatively late.

Processing positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. (Some cells unfortunately take the wrong paths and are unable to get back on track.)

All the information is there in the landscape and processing that information effectively may be the phenomenon that makes a bunch of loosely stuck-together atoms behave like the thing we call life.

Had I been like a man living in a wood from which he knows there is no exit, I could have lived; but I was like one lost in a wood who, horrified at having lost his way, rushes about wishing to find the road.”

-Leo Tolstoy

04-DUAL

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Transcontinental

Forge your own path, trust in the magic of individuality.

Though the methods vary, the mission is the same: to realize that we are all of us temporary & fragile beings.

Shot here from who knows where, bound for who can tell, we can love ourselves and each other while we’re here.

Elizabeth Berg

30-PROD

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Production

My Tasks ToDo tracking list has 28 items. Starting at the top row, it’s nice to know, without having to decide, what’s to be worked on next.

Monet’s Garden

All 28 tasks in the sequence can be done in one day, but completing the entire list, even at nine minutes per item, would be 252 minutes, or 4.2 hours out of the 16 available to me.

23-REET

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Seasons

Agenda for Your Life

  • In your teens, play all you can.
  • In your 20s, take all the risks you can.
  • 30s, learn all you can.
  • 40s, earn all you can.
  • 50s, lead all you can.
  • 60s, leave with all the style you can.
  • Thereafter, or in the hereafter, enjoy all you can.

–Neuharth

18-FORT

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Quenching

Mark Singer: Is there anything you’ve been able to draw upon, David? Is there comfort in the past?

David Milch : I feel the past falling away and the attachments of regret for what wasn’t done or was done badly or was done without sufficient sympathy, and it was for that reason that our granddaughter’s visit was such a redemptive and compelling occurrence. Everything is an adventure for her and a delight and a surprise, an opening up, and that’s a big gratification.

Mark Singer: I’ve never thought of you as a sentimental person, but maybe I misread that. How would you characterize yourself?

David Milch: As an unsentimental person.

Third Act by Mark Singer (New Yorker May 20, 2019)

08-NARL

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Impetus

Up & Over the Sidewalk (2022)

A man walks upright. For him it is strenuous to climb a steep hill, because he has to keep pushing his own vertical mass upward and cannot gain any momentum.

The rabbit is better off. His forelegs support his horizontal body and the great back legs do the work. They are more than equal to thrusting uphill the light mass in front of them.

Rabbits can go fast uphill. In fact, they have so much power behind that they find going downhill awkward, and sometimes, in flight down a steep place, they may actually go head over heels.

WATERSHIP DOWN (1972) by Richard George Adams

01-LOCK

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Flocking

Seven older gentlemen of various political persuasions gather in the courtyard under the squawking birds to politely discuss and examine, in regulated heartbeat, the current issues and events of the week.

High-school classmates, both living & dead, unknown to others outside of Los Gatos, they also like to talk about.

Exclusive club it is.