• Uses Death and Damage to save time

At the same time, the aspects of my personality became cylinders, and they were coming out of me into the room.

Who knew that pie, of all things, has turnedinto a frothing werewolf of hate.

He has a sort of stoat-like cunning which I envy and resent.

Meanings change in time even within a single culture. Antigods, Asuras (whose name incorporates the word asu, “breath”), are the equal and morally indistinguishable elder brothers and rivals of the gods in the Indo-European or at least Indo-Iranian period (when Ahura Mazda, the “great Asura,” is the chief god of the Avesta), but they later become totally demonic demons. (“Demons,” for that matter, were once benevolent daimons in Greek, before the Christians demonized them, as it were). Sanskrit then created a back formation, taking Asura to mean “non-Sura” (splitting off the initial a of asu to make an a in its privative sense, as in “a-theist”) and inventing the word “Suras” (now said to derive from sura, “wine”) to apply to the wine-drinking gods, the anti-antigods. Although this sort of reasoning might be called etymologic, certainly not logic, people persist in using lexicons as the basis of history and in building elaborate theories about social systems and homelands on this flimsy Indo-European linguistic scaffolding.

Just read this bit in Doniger and wanted to share it with you all

“the wine-drinking gods, the anti-antigods”

A final apparent reason not to read this book is Hill’s frequent, incorrigible, and awkward crankiness: “bid me strut myself off a cliff;” “meritocrats are crap meteorites;” “grand antidote no substitute for bling;” “rigour of stock conservation you dunce;” “check the electric circuits, you booby,” etcetera.

When you return to Earth, all of your friends will be long dead, but the answer to your problem will await you.

In general, the results were highly nondeterministic; I could obtain entirely different trees by dunking the same configuration more than once.

I survey proposals including soap bubbles, protein folding, quantum computing, quantum advice, quantum adiabatic algorithms, quantum-mechanical nonlinearities, hidden variables, relativistic time dilation, analog computing, Malament-Hogarth spacetimes, quantum gravity, closed timelike curves, and “anthropic computing.”

This prompted one nineteenth-century Englishman’s notorious tirade against “geography made up of seas of treacle and seas of butter.”