Kat > Kat's Quotes

“Around nine the next morning, the Carl Hayden team rolled Stinky into a UCSB pool reserved for practice. Other teams were scattered around the perimeter and glanced at the newcomers. The robots on display looked like works of art to the Carl Hayden kids. The competitors appeared to have all the things they didn’t: glass syntactic foam, machined metal, elaborate control panels, and cool matching outfits. Cristian was proud of his robot, but he could see that it looked like a Geo Metro compared with the Lexuses and BMWs around the pool.”
― Joshua Davis, Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream

“In Phoenix, they were called illegal aliens and pegged as criminals. They were alternately viewed as American, Mexican, or neither. Now, for a moment, they were simply teenagers at a robotics competition by the ocean.”
― Joshua Davis, Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream

“Excuse me, madam.” He wasn’t used to approaching women by himself, let alone well-dressed white women. He saw apprehension flash across her face. Maybe she thought he was trying to sell magazines or candy bars, but he steeled himself. He explained that he was building a robot for an underwater contest sponsored by NASA, and his robot was leaking. He wanted to soak up the water with tampons but didn’t know which ones to buy. “Could you help me buy the most best tampons?” The woman broke into a big smile and led him to feminine hygiene. She handed him a box of o.b. ultra-absorbency. “These don’t have an applicator, so they’ll be easier to fit inside your robot.” He stared at the ground, mumbled his thanks, and headed quickly for the checkout. “I hope you win,” she called out, laughing.”
― Joshua Davis, Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream

“There was nothing pretty or elegant about their robot. Compared to the gleaming machines other teams had constructed, Stinky was a study in simplicity. The PVC, the balloon, the tape measure—in each case they had chosen the most straightforward solution to a problem. It was an approach that grew naturally out of watching family members fix cars, manufacture mattresses, and lay irrigation piping. To a large swath of the population, driveway mechanics, box-frame builders, and gardeners did not represent the cutting edge of engineering know-how. They were low-skilled laborers who didn’t have access to real technology. Stinky represented this low-tech approach to engineering. But that was exactly what had impressed the judges. Lisa Spence, the NASA judge, believed that there was no reason to come up with a complex solution when an elementary one would suffice. She felt that Carl Hayden’s robot was “conceptually similar” to the machines she encountered at NASA. The guys were in shock. They marched back up to the stage and looked out at the audience with dazed smiles. Lorenzo felt a rush of emotion. The judges’ Special Prize wasn’t a consolation award. These people were giving them real recognition.”
― Joshua Davis, Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream

“Fredi realized that something extraordinary was about to occur. He leaned across the table and grabbed Lorenzo’s shirt. “Lorenzo, if what I think is about to happen does happen, I do not, under any circumstances, want to hear you say the word Hooters onstage.”
― Joshua Davis, Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream

“Fredi had always focused on getting kids excited to learn. He cared less about covering the required curriculum and more about finding hands-on projects. To many students, school felt sterile and bureaucratic. Fredi’s music was just one way he tried to change the ambience. It didn’t necessarily matter if they liked it. It was enough to be different. He also fought for unstructured time in the school day. When he arrived at Carl Hayden in 1987, he started a class called Science Seminar. There was no curriculum. Fredi just told students to find something fun to build or an idea to test. Over the years, students had embarked on a variety of unusual projects. One student tried to teach color-blind rats the differences among colors. Another student constructed a 1:60 clay model of downtown Phoenix, placed it in a wind tunnel, and blew carbon dioxide across it. The goal: determine how architecture could be used to increase air circulation and help dissipate trapped air pollution. Fredi’s room became the refuge of tinkerers, inventors, and frustrated dreamers.”
― Joshua Davis, Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream

“the trail just disappeared: smooshed into nonexistence by what seemed to have been a large herd of elephants suddenly deciding to take a group nap.”
― Bill Buford, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking

“I looked up—a sheer, flat, white rocky face (the kind you would take a ski lift to reach the top of or wear a parachute to jump from)—and thought: Oh, shit.”
― Bill Buford, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking

“Saint Sulpice had only been granted protective status as a national treasure in 1994. But it was now officially a monument, in the fullest sense of the word: It marked a place where something happened which now was gone.”
― Bill Buford, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking

“The image was like finding an automobile factory in your closet.”
― Bill Buford, Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking

“Women got that feeling about him, that funny one we all get when we know something isn't right, but we don't know how to politely extricate ourselves from the situation without escalating the threat of violence or harassment. That is not a skill women are taught, the same way men are not taught that it is okay to leave a woman alone if what she wants is to be left alone.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“I've tried to make sense of how someone who didn't stalk his victims in advance ended up going after the best and the brightest. And I think that's it, the thing they all had in common - a light that outshone his. He targets college campuses and sorority houses because he's looking for the cream of the crop. He wants to extinguish us - we are the ones who remind him that he's not that smart, not that good-looking, and there's nothing particularly special about him.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“anger in women is treated as a character disorder, as a problem to be solved, when oftentimes it is entirely appropriate, given the circumstances that trigger it.”
― Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women

“Social normalization of deviance means that people within the organization become so much accustomed to a deviant behavior that they don’t consider it as deviant, despite the fact that they far exceed their own rules for elementary safety,” Vaughan said in an interview. “But it is a complex process with some kind of organizational acceptance. The people outside see the situation as deviant whereas the people inside get accustomed to it and do not. The more they do it, the more they get accustomed.”
― Gardiner Harris, No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

“The sad truth is that the FDA ignored, enabled, or encouraged every Johnson & Johnson disaster in this book. But the 1982 Tylenol poisonings stand out because of an element not present in the others: the most corrupt FDA commissioner in history.”
― Gardiner Harris, No More Tears: The Dark Secrets of Johnson & Johnson

“When an economic system actively destroys what we love, isn't it time for a different system?”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“In fact, the “monster” in Potawatomi culture is Windigo, who suffers from the illness of taking too much and sharing too little. It is a cannibal, whose hunger is never sated, eating through the world. Windigo thinking jeopardizes the survival of the community by incentivizing individual accumulation far beyond the satisfaction of “enoughness.” Contemporary Windigos who cannibalize life for accumulation of money need their own name.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“In a gift economy, wealth is understood as having enough to share, and the practice for dealing with abundance is to give it away.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“Public libraries seem to me a powerful example of the way that gift economies can coexist with market economies, at a larger scale. . . to me, they embody the civic-scale practice of a gift economy and the notion of common property. Libraries are models of gift economies, providing free access not only to books but also music, tools, seeds, and more. We don't each have to own everything. The books at the library belong to everyone. . . Take the books, enjoy them, bring them back so someone else can enjoy them, with literary abundance for all. And all you need is a library card, which is a kind of agreement to respect and take care of the common good.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“Gratitude and reciprocity are the currency of a gift economy, and they have the remarkable property of multiplying with every exchange, their energy concentrating as they pass from hand to hand, a truly renewable resource.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World

“Ecopsychologists have shown that the practice of gratitude puts brakes on hyperconsumption. The relationships nurtured by gift thinking diminish our sense of scarcity and want. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World