Shift Quotes

“Extreme night shift work in high altitude astronomy is easily avoidable by using a split night shift where the first night shift starts before sunset and finishes at midnight and the second night shift starts with a new fresh person working through to after sunrise.”

“The Mauna Kea night shift was an 18 hour night in wintertime at the 13,796 feet summit (before sunset to after sunrise) with insufficient time for adequate sleep before the next night shift. Night shift was between 5 and 8 nights long and we slept at 9,200 feet. We sat at a desk staring at four large computer monitors and a large cathode ray tube television. I would also use my Wi-Fi laptop computer. I would have extreme fatigue by the end of every night shift and have chapped lips which I now associate with exposure to the artificial light from the computer screens. A good day of sleep between shifts was rare and starting the next shift fatigued was normal.”

“Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift.If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor.Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names.As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world.And the present moment is perfectly transparent.It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .”

“As usual I was working the graveyard shift—an irony I reveled in—at an emergency call center. What other shift would a vampire feel comfortable working?”

“If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift.We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be.We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.”

“Once you shift your thoughts for the better, your world begins to shift with them.”

“Reality shifts occur when we are in a dreamy state of energized awareness in which we are clear about what we prefer”

“How did I prepare for night shifts? When I was a small, anxious kid, I checked my mom in her sleep to make sure she was still breathing.”

“We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.”