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Wealth of Words

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Amit Kalantri

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“Vogelstein’s challenge was that of the landscape artist: How does one convey the gestalt of a territory (in this case, the “territory” of a genome) in a few broad strokes of a brush? How can a picture describe the essence of a place?Vogelstein’s answer to these questions borrows beautifully from an insight long familiar to classical landscape artists: negative space can be used to convey expanse, while positive space conveys detail. To view the landscape of the cancer genome panoramically, Vogelstein splayed out the entire human genome as if it were a piece of thread zigzagging across a square sheet of paper. (Science keeps eddying into its past: the word mitosis -- Greek for "thread" -- is resonant herw again.)”

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Book:The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer
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“Yeah. It's a metaphor. Jess and I are partners.' I point across the bay at nearby San Francisco. 'Look at that city,' I say. 'That's society. It's Out There. I this its own illusions, its own abilities, its own tasks. We used to be a part of it. Oh, we are, in some way, but now we are something else. We are a distinct culture, a separate island. To get to Us, you have to swim across a bay in cold ocean waters. By the time you get here, you would have come to respect the ocean and the waters and the waves—and the beaches of this island would remind you of how great it is to be on land, to be in the presence of a great, married couple.' Jack laughs. 'Now you really are a megalomaniac. A true idealist.' 'I don't know, Jack,' I say. 'I think marriage is sacred.' 'I can tell.' He pulls out a cigarette and lights it. He blows smoke around and then looks at me. 'You want one?' he asks. 'This one's not a metaphor.”

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Book:The Hack
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“The ideal of explication differs not only from previous philosophy, and from Carnap’s own previous framework of rational reconstruction, but also from most present analytic philosophy. It differs from Quine’s influential programme, for instance, encapsulated in Neurath’s metaphor of reconstructing the boat of our conceptual scheme on the open sea, without being able to put it in dry-dock and reconstruct it from new materials. In Carnap’s framework, our collective mental life is not – to adopt the metaphor – all in the same boat. It consists rather of a give and take between two kinds of communicative devices that operate in different ways. Carnap’s boat is only one of these two parts, not both. It is the medium of action and practical decisions, in which vague concepts of ordinary language have a continuing, perhaps essential, role. This is not, in Carnap’s terms, a proper linguistic ‘framework’ at all. It is a medium not for the pursuit of truth but for getting things done, and it is well adapted to this purpose. To improve it further, we chip away at it and replace its components, a few at a time, with better ones – and this reconstruction, it is true, we carry out at sea. But the better components we acquire from the ports we call at, where we go shopping for proper linguistic frameworks. We take on board better materials and better navigational instruments that help us to reach whatever ports we hope to visit in future – where we can again bring on new and improved materials and instruments. Sometimes, the improved instruments will so influence our knowledge of where we are going that the whole plan of the journey will be revised, and we will change course. But the decision what port to head for next we have to make on board, in our pragmatic vernacular, with whatever improvements we have incorporated up to that point.”

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Book:Carnap and Twentieth-Century Thought: Explication as Enlightenment
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“Instead of The Closet, I’d like to propose a more humane metaphor. What if we talk about queer/trans people “coming out of our shells”? When you think about it, us queers are a lot like garden snails anyway. We love flowers. We have beautiful, curly shells. We are slimy and understand the power of proper lubrication. We leave a shiny, glittering trail wherever we go. And did you know that most snails are gender-neutral and play both “male” and “female” roles in procreation? That many snails change gender multiple times throughout the course of their lives?”

MetaphorTransgenderComing Out Of The Closet
Author:Jacob Tobia
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“One beautiful day, a day with a clear sky and soft sun rays shining about to warm the hearts of both young and old, my special bird released one of its colourful, soft, feathers. The feather brushed my face and made my heart start beating hard, racing with a rhythm only this special bird could hear and understand. Despite the fact that I am not a bird, the pull of our destiny was strong and it forced this special bird to land and build a nest on me … a Cactus tree.”

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Book:Cactus: Life Story and Fate, With an Unexpected Twist
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