Tsang Chui Mei（Chinese, B.1972）

We are the granddaughters of the witches you weren’t able to burn.

Unknown

夾鏡鳴琴 35. Double Reflections and the Sound of a Lute 'Forty Scenes of the Yuanmingyuan'

You don’t pass or fail at being a person, dear.

Neil Gaiman The Ocean at the End of the Lane

btw, the molotov cocktail got named that by Finns who used them when fighting back against the Soviet Union’s imperialist invasion of their country, as a mocking reference to Vyacheslav Molotov’s propaganda about said invasion (“we’re not bombing them, we’re just flying in food deliveries because they’re starving!”)

so i’m not gonna stop y'all from making molotov cocktail jokes, but you’d better not turn around and post soviet apologia afterwards. respect the cocktail’s history

The Appetizer for Fuzzy

"Bart Kosko, the leading proponent of fuzzy thinking, has degrees in philosophy, economics, mathematics and electrical engineering but even in his book there is a clear-cut thesis that ties all this complex thinking together: to explore the paradigm shift from black and white to gray, from bivalence and binary (either/or) thinking to multivalence, a less simplistic but more accurate way of thinking that responds to life in matters of degree, integrating probability and ambiguity in all modes of operation. (Kosko, Bart. Fuzzy Thinking. New York: Hyperion Press, 1993.)

Fuzzy thinking demands that you increase your options. What are all the possible things or events or conditions that could occur as you explore something? You must use your imagination much more actively than usual. Fuzzy thinking comes from fuzzy math sets in which endless possibilites have been explored. So to unite fuzzy thinking with traditional logic, you need to know more, feel more and think more exhaustively.

Perhaps the word "fuzzy" is misleading for undergraduates. Gratuitous ambiguity due to laziness is not the goal, but rather an inclusion of degree, probability and ambiguity in the formulation of structures that respond to phenomena. In other words it is harder and more intellectually demanding to engage in fuzzy thinking. Kosko has a thorough understanding of traditional logic and its fallacies as well as all the specific scientific applications of fuzzy thinking.

Traditional logic, with all its artificiality, is based on language, but the irony is that the flesh of language is our bodily experience, the cries and sighs and gurgles of needs and wants that slowly grow into more complex sounds that usually connote more than they denote. Nature constantly speaks a language that is homospatial and homotemporal, layered and nonlinear in space and time, and this language still resides in our subconscious world of dreams. While expository writing necessitates so-called logical, grammatically correct sentences that grow into coherent, well-developed paragraphs integrated by a thesis, this type of writing should not exclude the multivalent nature of experience, of our bodies, our dreams and our environments. Clarity in expository writing is important so you must redefine words in the context in which you are using them but it's okay to struggle with solutions, to end with answers and to obfuscate a cause-effect relationship with a provocative "what if?" "

- Julia L. Keefer

The reality of millions of years of adaptation to a ruggedly physical existence will not just go away because desks were invented.

Mark Rippetoe

original artwork for Agalloch, by Fursy Teyssier of Les Discrets

We sometimes encounter people, even perfect strangers, who begin to interest us at first sight, somehow suddenly, all at once, before a word has been spoken.

Fyodor Dostoevsky