“In a universe, on a continent, in a country, in a state, in a county, on a river, in a small yellow boat,' I said. 'That's what Mary used to say to explain the odds of us meeting. And you have to be born in roughly the same period. Those are the odds. And probably you need to speak the same language.'-- Cobb”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
“Don’t spit into heaven... Don’t tell the gods your plans; they’ll only laugh.”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
“We are alive, the wolves said. And the world is beautiful.”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
“It’s the Thanksgiving rule. That’s another life tip.” “Explain,” I said. “Oh, Thanksgiving is this massive meal that usually takes someone about three days to prepare, and then everyone sits down and eats it in about fifteen minutes. The trick is to learn to take your time with Thanksgiving. You have to get everyone to promise that they won’t get up for anything for at least an hour. Maybe two.”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
“All morning I thought how strange our meeting was. I mean, we have to be in a universe, on a continent, in a country, in a state, in a county, on a river, in a small yellow boat.[...]Long odds. And we had to leave our homes at the right time, drive at such and such a pace, stop for lunch, or not, get gas, or not. A thousand coincidences that arranged themselves so that we could meet. And then of course, we have to be attracted to each other. When I was little, my girlfriends and I called it Yeti love. You never expect to see it, but you've heard it's out there and it might just be a legend. But you keep looking for it anyway.”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
“I liked her smile. And I knew that I had fallen in love. I knew that I wanted to run rivers with her, and camp, and go out to dinner and dance, and meet people with her by my side, and establish routines, and hear every knock-knock joke in her repertoire. I knew that. The knowledge came as simply as clean linen.”
― Joseph Monninger, quote from Eternal on the Water
Joseph Monninger
Born place: in Baltimore, The United States
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“it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, quote from The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
“I was used to shooting beer cans off the back of an old washing machine, or at things that ran away from me that I intended to eat—not things that ran toward me with the intent of eating me.
I’d found that to be a significant difference.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from The Grendel Affair
“Listen to me, you broken-fanged, moss-wiped excuse for a back-drafted blood bag!” Jenks said, a silver-edged red dust slipping from him.”
― Kim Harrison, quote from The Witch With No Name
“It seemed like no time at all had passed, like it was summer again and she and Cord were playing their games—and yet everything was different. It was like an echo of that time, a little less sharp, a little less thrilling. They had both changed too much.”
― Katharine McGee, quote from The Thousandth Floor
“A big, sandy-haired man held his daughter on his shoulders, showing her the Statue of Liberty. I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me. And the American flag was flying from the top of the ship, above my head. I had seen the French flag drive the French into the most unspeakable frenzies, I had seen the flag which was nominally mine used to dignify the vilest purposes: now I would never, as long as I lived, know what other saw when they saw a flag.”
― James Baldwin, quote from Going to Meet the Man
The Farm
Inversions
Hitler
Temptation
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