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Making models was reputed to be hugely enjoyable... But when you got the kit home and opened the box the contents turned out to be of a uniform leaden gray or olive green, consisting of perhaps sixty thousand tiny parts, some no larger than a proton, all attached in some organic, inseparable way to plastic stalks like swizzle sticks. The tubes of glue by contrast were the size of large pastry tubes. No matter how gently you depressed them they would blurp out a pint or so of a clear viscous goo whose one instinct was to attach itself to some foreign object—a human finger, the living-room drapes, the fur of a passing animal—and become an infinitely long string. Any attempt to break the string resulted in the creation of more strings. Within moments you would be attached to hundreds of sagging strands, all connected to something that had nothing to do with model airplanes or World War II. The only thing the glue wouldn’t stick to, interestingly, was a piece of plastic model; then it just became a slippery lubricant that allowed any two pieces of model to glide endlessly over each other, never drying. The upshot was that after about forty minutes of intensive but troubled endeavor you and your immediate surroundings were covered in a glistening spiderweb of glue at the heart of which was a gray fuselage with one wing on upside down and a pilot accidentally but irremediably attached by his flying cap to the cockpit ceiling. Happily by this point you were so high on the glue that you didn’t give a shit about the pilot, the model, or anything else.
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p. 81

 

Bill Bryson

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I think my business is about people making you feel self-conscious. All eyeballs are on you when you're a model, when you're on the runway or in front of the camera, you're always looked up and down and back up, so that comes with the territory. But at the end of the day I feel like my parents gave me a good solid foundation. I know who I am and there are things I wouldn't do. I wouldn't starve myself, I also never wanted to chop my hair off when people said I should do this and I should do that. And I always knew who I was and said they're going to book me like this or not book me. I don't want to be a role model because I'm just a person too, so I can have mistakes and some people don't like what I do. People always push this role model thing on you. I just want to be a good role model for my children.

 

Heidi Klum

 

The part that wasn't a jackpot was his baseball mound of red pubic hair that looked like it had literally been attached with a glue gun. I couldn't believe how much there was, and wondered how he had never heard of scissors, or--more appropriate for that kind of growth--hedge trimmers. I didn't understand what porn he was watching to not be aware of the trimming that was happening all across the world among his compatriots. I'm not a finicky person when it comes to pubic hair maintenance and I certainly don't expect men to shave it all off, leaving themselves to look like a hairless cat. That's even creepier then than seeing what Austin had, which could really only be compared to one thing: A clown in a leg lock.

 

Chelsea Handler

 

Think of it: the lowest common denominator in being digital is not your operating system, modem, or model of computer. It's a tiny piece of plastic, designed decades ago by Bell Labs' Charles Krumreich, Edwin Hardesty, and company, who thought they were making an inconspicuous plug for a few telephone handsets. Not in their wildest dreams was Registered Jack 11 — a modular connector more commonly known as the RJ-11 — meant to be plugged and unplugged so many times, by so many people, for so many reasons, all over the world.

 

Nicholas Negroponte

 

I find that a paradigm shift takes place in two ways. First, for all scientists to start working on the new paradigm like happened with Newtonian physics, it takes a long time. But there is another way where a group of people hang onto a model that they are all happy with and they are all finding new problems to work on within that model. For me that model has been that consciousness is the ground of being and now, lots of people are accepting that model. This is a great achievement. This change has happened in less than three generations. That's a tremendous achievement. Old paradigmers, like some of my colleagues from the U of O physics department, will take a long time to change.

 

Amit Goswami

 

"... the first consequence of the principle of bounded rationality is that the intended rationality of an actor requires him to construct a simplified model of the real situation in order to deal with it. He behaves rationally with respect to this model, and such behavior is not even approximately optimal with respect to the real world. To predict his behavior we must understand the way in which this simplified model is constructed, and its construction will certainly be related to his psychological properties as a perceiving, thinking, and learning animal."

 

Herbert Simon