Quotes & Sayings About Optimal

Societies would _not_ be better off if everyone were like Mr Spock, all rationality and no emotion. Instead, a balance - a teaming up of the internal rivals - is optimal for brains ... Some balance of the emotional and rational systems is needed, and that balance may already be optimized by natural selection in human brains. — David Eagleman

Individuals achieve optimal stupidity when they're given substantial powers while being insulated from the results of their actions. — Jaron Lanier

Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz's Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worst had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. Depressives in grim situations handed down their genes, however despairingly, while the self-improvers converted to Christianity or moved away to sunnier locales. — Jonathan Franzen

The TMS is evolving into a logistics platform that can handle all nodes, all geographies and all transportation nodes. It's already talking to other applications in the supply chain, like warehouse management, order management and ERP systems. By adding underlying algorithms, a TMS can now understand the relationship between the cost of inventory and the cost of transportation and come up with an optimal solution to answer those questions. — John Murphy

If you are not trying new ways every single day in your company, you will not get to your optimal point. — Vineet Nayar

CDs are usually an hour long because that's the amount a CD could hold - not because that's the optimal amount of time for any given musical expression. — Annie E. Clark

European Union partners never said European Union partners're going to renege on any promises, European Union partners said that European Union partners promises concern a four-year parliamentary term, european Union partners will be spaced out in an optimal way, in a way that is in tune with our bargaining stance in Europe and also with the fiscal position of the Greek state. — Yanis Varoufakis

A rentier is an investor whose relationship to a company or enterprise is strictly limited to the ownership of financial wealth (such as stocks or bonds) and the receipt of income on that wealth (such as dividends or interest). The financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society's savings towards their optimal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment. — Doug Henwood

Occasionally I wonder why I can be so happy. The answer is that every day of my life I've worked only for myself and for the joy that comes from writing and creating. The image in my mirror is not optimistic, but the result of optimal behavior. — Ray Bradbury

I know that shorter messages are better in terms of reply rate. The optimal length is something like 50 characters. Characters, not words. — Christian Rudder

Theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow - the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

People who are too optimistic seem annoying. This is an unfortunate misinterpretation of what an optimist really is.
An optimist is neither naive, nor blind to the facts, nor in denial of grim reality. An optimist believes in the optimal usage of all options available, no matter how limited. As such, an optimist always sees the big picture. How else to keep track of all that's out there? An optimist is simply a proactive realist.
An idealist focuses only on the best aspects of all things (sometimes in detriment to reality); an optimist strives to find an effective solution. A pessimist sees limited or no choices in dark times; an optimist makes choices.
When bobbing for apples, an idealist endlessly reaches for the best apple, a pessimist settles for the first one within reach, while an optimist drains the barrel, fishes out all the apples and makes pie.
Annoying? Yes. But, oh-so tasty! — Vera Nazarian

WITH GOD YOU CAN TURN YOUR impeaching importunities into optimal opportunities. Frightful frustration into fortifying fortunes. Humble attitudes into higher altitudes .Distress disabilities into affluent abilities. Incalculable incapacity into calibrated capabilities. Protracted poverty into pronounced prosperity. Subtracting adversity into multiplying advantage. Intimidating invalidities into valuable validities. Weeping profession into a winning prowess .worrisome weariness into wholesome health. Multiple miseries into a myriad of treasures. Possessive problems into progressive productivity. Earthly human co-incidence into heavenly divine "God-incidence". — Ikechukwu Joseph

There is an optimal balance, depending on the manner of man's life, between the density of human population and the tolerances of nature. This balance, in the case of the United States would seem to me to have been surpassed when the American population reached, at a very maximum, two hundred million people, and perhaps a good deal less. — George F. Kennan

A lot of people recoil from the word "drugs" - which is understandable given today's noxious street drugs and their uninspiring medical counterparts. Yet even academics and intellectuals in our society typically take the prototypical dumb drug, ethyl alcohol. If it's socially acceptable to take a drug that makes you temporarily happy and stupid, then why not rationally design drugs to make people perpetually happier and smarter? Presumably, in order to limit abuse-potential, one would want any ideal pleasure drug to be akin - in one limited but important sense - to nicotine, where the smoker's brain finely calibrates its optimal level: there is no uncontrolled dose-escalation. — David Pearce

Psychopathy is like sunlight. Overexposure can hasten one's demise in grotesque, carcinogenic fashion. But regulated exposure at controlled and optimal levels can have a significant positive impact on well-being and quality of life. — Kevin Dutton

To stimulate optimal size and strength increases, it's imperative that you regularly attempt the momentarily impossible. For example, if you can curl 100 pounds for a maximum of 10 reps, but never attempt the 11th, your body has no reason to enlarge upon its existing capacity. It is only by regularly attempting to go beyond your existing capacity that inroads are made into your body's reserves. — Mike Mentzer

Humans are great optimizers. We look at everything around us, whether a cow, a house, or a share portfolio, and ask ourselves how we can manage it to get the best return. Our modus operandi is to break the things we're managing down into its component parts and understand how each part functions and what inputs will yield the greatest outputs . . . [but] the more you optimize elements of a complex system of humans and nature for some specific goal, the more you diminish that system's resilience. A drive for efficient optimal state outcome has the effect of making the total system more vulnerable to shocks and disturbances. — Stanley McChrystal

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction. — Stephen Jay Gould

If we assume, however, that the desire to achieve optimal experience is the foremost goal of every human being, the difficulties of interpretation raised by cultural relativism become less severe. Each social system can then be evaluated in terms of how much psychic entropy it causes, measuring that disorder not with reference to the ideal order of one or another belief system, but with reference to the goals of the members of that society. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Engineers love to optimize problems. Now I optimize logistical problems. I ask: 'What's the goal? What are our constraints? What is the optimal, elegant way to get to that goal within those constraints?' I break it down in terms of a data funnel: 'Where in the funnel are we inefficient?' That analytical background really helps. — Ruchi Sanghvi

As long as they aren't close to somethin' that can hurt them or somethin' breakable, we let 'em duke it out, Tack had told me. I wasn't certain this was an optimal parental choice but I'd never seen bikers raised from womb to badass. It was probably good they knew their way around a slug fest from a young age. — Kristen Ashley

The violence of men, though, is modulated by a slider: they can allocate their energy along a continuum from competing with other men for access to women to wooing the women themselves and investing in their children, a continuum that biologists sometimes call "cads versus dads."103 In a social ecosystem populated mainly by men, the optimal allocation for an individual man is at the "cad" end, because attaining alpha status is necessary to beat away the competition and a prerequisite to getting within wooing distance of the scarce women. — Steven Pinker

Pursuit of optimal fitness is a journey, a constant struggle, a lifestyle; a process where intensity during each exercise session, what you eat every single day and patience over years is what's required ... AIN'T GONNA HAPPEN OVERNIGHT! — The Fitness Doc

It is our duty to use whatever corrective tools and disciplines are available to us to resolve errors that might be compromising our health. In this way, we work to create optimal health in both mind and body to benefit our yoga practice. It is ill advised to use a spiritual goal to bypass what is our duty to correct with human effort. If — Shankaranarayana Jois

Flow is more than an optimal state of consciousness - one where we feel our best and perform our best - it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life? Flow is what makes life worth living. — Steven Kotler

Plant foods have several advantages, including easy digestibility and bioavailability (the rate at which the food is absorbed by the body and exerts an effect). Fatigue, bloating, cramping, and an upset stomach can often be attributed to poor digestion. Many whole plant foods have enzymes that facilitate quick and efficient digestion. The quicker nutrients are extracted from the food, the sooner the food can be eliminated - a key factor in optimal health. As well, insoluble fibrous plant matter (discussed in Chapter 5) speeds waste through our system, reducing the risk of toxins settling in the colon and then spreading throughout the body. Enzyme-rich foods help ensure the body makes use of the nutrients in the food. — Brendan Brazier

Own 100 percent of your focus. The most challenging of endurance drills will bring you to a level of optimal mental and physical performance. — Lorii Myers

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative. — Peter Watts

My take is that the optimal approach to food, for health and ethical reasons, may be vegetarianism. — Nicholas Kristof

Because mechanism designers do not generally know which outcomes are optimal in advance, they have to proceed more indirectly than simply prescribing outcomes by fiat; in particular, the mechanisms designed must generate the information needed as they are executed. — Eric Maskin

An optimal diet for preventing disease is a whole-foods, plant-based diet that is naturally low in animal protein, harmful fats and refined carbohydrates. What that means in practice is little or no red meat; mostly vegetables, fruits, whole grains, legumes and soy products in their natural forms; very few simple and refined carbohydrates such as sugar and white flour; and sufficient "good fats" such as fish oil or flax oil, seeds and nuts. A healthful diet should be low in "bad fats," meaning trans fats, saturated fats and hydrogenated fats. Finally, we need more quality and less quantity. — Anonymous

In Lovelock's view the earth was a 'super-organism,' a cybernetic feedback system that 'seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.' At the suggestion of his neighbor, author and screenwriter William Goldman, he called the system Gaia after the ancient Greek Earth goddess. — Steven Kotler

Maximum difficulty isn't the same as optimal difficulty. — Alfie Kohn

One difference is that individuals living in multilingual communities seem to settle on an optimal cognitive load. The hyperpolyglot possesses a similar patchwork of linguistic proficiencies. Yet he or she exceeds this optimum with a conspicuous consumption of brain power (...) For multilinguals, learning languages is an act of joining society. There's no motive, no separable 'will to plasticity' that's distinct from what it means to be a part of that society. Being a hyperpolyglot means exactly the opposite. The hyperpolyglot's pursuit of many languages may be a bridge to the rest of the world, but it walls him off from his immediate language community. — Michael Erard

It is the child in man that is the source of his uniqueness and creativeness, and the playground is the optimal milieu for the unfolding of his capacities and talents. — Eric Hoffer

Organisms [ ... ] are directed and limited by their past. They must remain imperfect in their form and function, and to that extent unpredictable since they are not optimal machines. We cannot know their future with certainty, if only because a myriad of quirky functional shifts lie within the capacity of any feature, however well adapted to a present role. — Stephen Jay Gould

ALL THINGS, material and spiritual, originate from one source and are related as if they were one family. The past, present, and future are all contained in the life force. The universe emerged and developed from one source, and we evolved through the optimal process of unification and harmonization. — Morihei Ueshiba

Positive emotions are not trivial luxuries, but instead might be critical necessities for optimal functioning. — Barbara Fredrickson

Recall that epic heroes were judged by their actions, not by the results. No matter how sophisticated our choices, how good we are at dominating the odds, randomness will have the last word. We are left only with dignity as a solution - dignity defined as the execution of a protocol of behavior that does not depend on the immediate circumstance. It may not be the optimal one, but it certainly is the one that makes us feel best. Grace under pressure, for example. Or in deciding not to toady up to someone, whatever — Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ebola, that little bastard of a bug, had popped up earlier in the summer in Sierra Leone in the worst outbreak in history. Was it possible that global warming had changed something important about the ecological balance in Africa and turned it into an optimal, continent-sized petri dish for breeding that virus? — Bobby Adair

Right now our blog on the presence of tape at EMC World is seeing twice as much traffic as all the other EMC World related content. Why? Many of our readers are coming to the obvious conclusion that tape, despite the negative marketing, is still an optimal way to protect and archive their information ... — George Arthur Crump

The art is in preparing the content for optimal human consumption. The data doesn't just talk back to you. You collect, you analyze, you tell stories. — Leslie Bradshaw

1. Eating fewer calories while maintaining optimal levels of all essential nutrients - CRON. 2. Eating and supplementing with generous amounts of broad- spectrum antioxidants. 3. Eating low glycemic impact foods and minimizing sugar. 4. Eating high quality foundational and fuel fats and supplementing with antioxidant essential fatty acids. — KC Craichy

After three decades of research, Zimbardo found that the healthiest, happiest, highest performers blend the best of both worlds. The optimal time perspective combines the energy, joy, and openness of Presents, with the strength, fortitude, and long-term vision of the Futures. — Steven Kotler

To establish principles of her kingdom is to function In Optimal Health — Sunday Adelaja

Simplicity and non-violence are obviously closely related. The optimal pattern of consumption, producing a high degree of human satisfaction by means of a relatively low rate of consumption, allows people to live without great pressure and strain and to fulfill the primary injunction of Buddhist teaching: "Cease to do evil; try to do good." As physical resources are everywhere limited, people satisfying their needs by means of a modest use of resources are obviously less likely to be at each other's throats than people depending upon a high rate of use. Equally, people who live in highly self-sufficient local communities are less likely to get involved in large-scale violence than people whose existence depends on world-wide systems of trade. — E.F. Schumacher

Optimal nutrition is eating the right things, in the right amounts, at the right time. — Siim Land

There's no way to design a society that's optimal or utopian. It's better than the one that was. Systems always undergo change. — Jacque Fresco

Even people who aren't sick may not have optimal wellness. — Brian Carter

There is no magic. There is no secret. You need your sleep. A lot of our society tries to get by, but the truth is it is up to each individual to get their optimal sleep amount. If you get less than that you can get by temporarily, but it's only temporary. — Richard Berry

I eat a bunch of spinach, but only to clean out my pipes to make room for more ribs, fool! I will submit to fruit and zucchini, yes, with gusto, so that my steak-eating machine will continue to masticate delicious charred flesh at an optimal running speed. By consuming kale, I am buying myself bonus years of life, during which I can eat a shit-ton more delicious meat. You don't put oil in your truck because it tastes good. You do it so your truck can continue burning sweet gasoline and hauling a manly payload. — Nick Offerman

The right amount of complexity is what creates the optimal simplicity — David Allen

Business executives do not understand true IT needs and are inspired by external vendors and other sources. The business dictates a solution, IT accepts it, and then IT resources are consumed by the complexity of a non-optimal solution. There is pressure to deliver and consequently a high failure rate, rework rate, and, hence, low confidence in IT. This leads to further breakdown in IT business relationships and fuels more misaligned initiatives from an IT perspective. — Ashu Bhatia

Like how there's this optimal money/happiness equation. Once you pass a certain amount of household income, life isn't any better. Apparently, money can't buy happiness, or it does, but it costs less than you imagined it would. — Catherine McKenzie

During chemo, you're more tired than you've ever been. It's like a cloud passing over the sun, and suddenly you're out. But you also find that you're stronger than you've ever been. You're clear. Your mortality is at optimal distance, not up so close that it obscures everything else, but close enough to give you depth perception. Previously, it has taken you weeks, months, or years to discover the meaning of an experience. Now it's instantaneous. — Melissa Bank

Some people have to move, physically, to "get" something. But if you're stuck in a chair, that's not your limitation - it's simply not an optimal condition for you. — David Allen

optimal literacy teaching and learning can only be achieved when skillful, knowledgeable, and dedicated teachers are given the freedom and latitude to use their professional judgment to make instructional decisions that enable students to achieve their full literacy potential. — Linda B. Gambrell

Just as physical exercise is a well-known and well-accepted means to improve health for anyone, regardless of age or background, so can the brain be put 'into shape' for optimal learning. — Naveen Jain

Optimal functioning of the immune system, it turns out, is dependent upon feeling good. — Marcey Shapiro

We either allow our past to keep interfering with our optimal expression of love and happiness, or we can move beyond our past with renewed passion for life — Deepak Chopra

Whether we accept it or not, this will likely be the century that determines what the optimal human population is for our planet. It will come about in one of two ways:
Either we decide to manage our own numbers, to avoid a collision of every line on civilization's graph - or nature will do it for us, in the form of famines, thirst, climate chaos, crashing ecosystems, opportunistic disease, and wars over dwindling resources that finally cut us down to size. — Alan Weisman

The Cowles Commission was the optimal environment for the type of research that I wanted to do. — Gerard Debreu

motivation for not eating meat and dairy is to maintain optimal health, not to rid myself of the obsession and compulsion that are the hallmark of addiction. If obsession and compulsion are the issue - smoking cigarettes, not being able to stop texting your toxic ex, self-harm - and you want to get past it, you need a Bright Line. If health is your objective, there is no evidence that perfect is better than "really good." Seriously. You can comply with a health goal 95 percent of the time, and it will benefit you as much as 100 percent perfection. — Susan Peirce Thompson

If workers are more insecure, that's very 'healthy' for the society, because if workers are insecure, they won't ask for wages, they won't go on strike, they won't call for benefits; they'll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that's optimal for corporations' economic health. — Noam Chomsky

Even though we can reach for the outer limits of our temperaments, it can often be better to situate ourselves squarely inside our comfort zones ...
Once you understand introversion and extroversion as preferences for certain levels of stimulation, you can begin consciously trying to situate yourself in environments favorable to your own personality
neither overstimulating nor understimulating, neither boring nor anxiety-making. You can organize your life in terms of what personality psychologists call "optimal levels of arousal" and what I call "sweet spots," and by doing so feel more energetic and alive than before. — Susan Cain

Optimal experience is thus something that we make happen. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

By happiness I mean here a deep sense of flourishing that arises from an exceptionally healthy mind. This is not a mere pleasurable feeling, a fleeting emotion, or a mood, but an optimal state of being. Happiness is also a way of interpreting the world, since while it may be difficult to change the world, it is always possible to change the way we look at it. — Matthieu Ricard

Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages. — Jonathan Franzen

Never Minimal. Never Maximal. Always Optimal. — Jordan Syatt

Mind is greedy. When you sense the benefits with people who previously thought rubbish about you, the mind forgoes those thoughts and inclines toward those people only to gain optimal benefits. — Ashish Patel

What is the society we wish to protect? Is it the society of complete surveillance for the commonwealth? Is this the wealth we seek to have in common - optimal security at the cost of maximal surveillance? — Tom Stoppard

Optimal results are not achievable without optimal behavior. — Douglas J. Lisle

Fame is fun, money is useful, celebrity can be exciting, but finally life is about optimal well-being and how we achieve that in dominator culture, in a greedy culture, in a culture that uses so much of the world's resources. How do men and women, boys and girls, live lives of compassion, justice and love? And I think that's the visionary challenge for feminism and all other progressive movements for social change. — Bell Hooks

When we understand who we are, and how our realities work, we can choose more consciously to shape our lives in an optimal way.
Knowledge of oneself is the very key to a happy life. Happiness is not something outside of our own consciousness that needs to be earned, and achieved. It is a choice that needs to be supported by positive actions. It is not enough to say that we want to be happy. Our desire of happiness, love and peace, needs to be supported by our state of being. — Raphael Zernoff

A society can be Pareto optimal and still perfectly disgusting. — Amartya Sen

People are clever, but almost no one ever devises an optimal quip precisely at the needed moment. Therefore, virtually all great one-liners are later inventions - words that people wished they had spouted, but failed to manufacture at the truly opportune instant. — Stephen Jay Gould

You see..." Nash said, acting doctorly, "you've got to keep the testicles away from the body's heat for optimal sperm count." He snatched two chicken balls from the container in front of him and cupped them in his hand. He laid a spring roll between them. "That's the biggest source of the sperm count issue for many men: their choice of underwear keeps their testicles snug up against the body. The testes become overheated. — Jean Oram

For optimal health and rejuvenation, we all need exercise, rest, time to feel deeply into ourselves, and meaningful and emotionally expressive human contact. — Alan Fogel

Physical fitness is vital for the optimal function of the brain, for retardation of the onset of serious arteriosclerosis which is beginning to appear in early adult life, and for longevity, and a useful and healthy life for our older citizens. — Paul Dudley White

It would take six months to get to Mars if you go there slowly, with optimal energy cost. Then it would take eighteen months for the planets to realign. Then it would take six months to get back, though I can see getting the travel time down to three months pretty quickly if America has the will. — Elon Musk

Universities are an example of organizations dominated wholly by intellectuals; yet, outside pure science, they have not been an optimal milieu for the unfolding of creative talents. In neither art, music, literature, technology and social theory, nor planning have the Universities figured as originators or as seedbeds of new talents and energies. — Eric Hoffer

In my opinion, no single design is apt to be optimal for everyone. — Donald Norman

I've always found hitting a man from behind to be the best way to go about things. This can sometimes be accomplished by dint of a simple ruse. Classics such as, "What's that over there?" work surprisingly often, but for truly optimal results it's best if the person doesn't ever know you were there. — Mark Lawrence

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text. — James Gleick

While versioning sets different prices for different versions of one product in order to approximate the optimal revenue rates of personal pricing, bundling aims to achieve that by offering several products in one package. Therefore, the customers may choose whether to acquire products separately or in a bundle. This approach is particularly useful, when it is assumed that the customers have heterogenous willingness to pay for each product. — Christof Weinhardt

Linear programming is viewed as a revolutionary development giving man the ability to state general objectives and to find, by means of the simplex method, optimal policy decisions for a broad class of practical decision problems of great complexity. In the real world, planning tends to be ad hoc because of the many special-interest groups with their multiple objectives. — George Dantzig

A propaganda model has a certain initial plausibility on guided free-market assumptions that are not particularly controversial. In essence, the private media are major corporations selling a product (readers and audiences) to other businesses (advertisers). The national media typically target and serve elite opinion, groups that, on the one hand, provide an optimal "profile" for advertising purposes, and, on the other, play a role in decision-making in the private and public spheres. The national media would be failing to meet their elite audience's needs if they did not present a tolerably realistic portrayal of the world. But their "societal purpose" also requires that the media's interpretation of the world reflect the interests and concerns of the sellers, the buyers, and the governmental and private institutions dominated by these groups. — Noam Chomsky

The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary - culturally and biologically - for the optimal development of a human being."12 In a summary of the relevant science, University of Virginia sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox finds much the same: Let me now conclude our review of the social scientific literature on sex and parenting by spelling out what should be obvious to all. The best psychological, sociological, and biological research to date now suggests that - on average - men and women bring different gifts to the parenting enterprise, that children benefit from having parents with distinct parenting styles, and that family breakdown poses a serious threat to children and to the societies in which they live.13 — Sherif Girgis

Statistics or graphs,'" are not optimal to understand the 'experience of suffering.'" (qtd in Sutton 11) — Paul Farmer

Jessica stopped a few feet away so that Ken could get an optimal view of her body posed against the seductive backdrop of the sea, sand, and palm trees. — Francine Pascal

For market discipline to constrain risk effectively, financial institutions must be allowed to fail. Under optimal financial regulatory and financial system infrastructures, such a failure would not threaten the overall system. — Henry Paulson

In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to flow as the time when you become lost in your actions, whether climbing a mountain peak, painting or playing soccer. — Beth Whitman

The goal of my diet-style is eating for optimal health and longevity. What greater benefit could there be than living healthfully and actively into old age with no dependence on medications and almost no risk of heart disease, diabetes or dementia? — Joel Fuhrman

Just as only one discordant note has the power to disturb an entire symphony, the accordance between a body and its soul can be a broken by only one discordant event. To ensure and maintain an optimal fit, one must deliberately and continuously choreograph the equilibrium of the body, mind, and soul. — Ina Catrinescu

The past three decades have witnessed unprecedented growth in what researchers now term ultimate human performance. This is not the same as optimal human performance, and the difference is in the consequences. Optimal performance is about being your best; ultimate performance is about being your best when any mistake could kill. Both common sense and evolutionary biology tell us that progress under these "ultimate" conditions should be a laggard's game, but that's not exactly what the data suggests. — Steven Kotler

The widely documented failure of late starters to achieve native-like proficiency, even when motivation, cognitive abilities, and opportunities are optimal and plentiful, all agree, is one of the most salient facts about SLA. It is a weighty empirical problem, in Laudan's sense, crying out for a solution. — Michael H. Long

The world community simply should not support such extreme measures when there are so many other pressing issues at hand. The optimal response to greenhouse gases is to start modestly. — Robert O. Mendelsohn

a world of known risk, in short, risk (Figure 2-3, center). I use this term for a world where all alternatives, consequences, and probabilities are known. Lotteries and games of chance are examples. Most of the time, however, we live in a changing world where some of these are unknown: where we face unknown risks, or uncertainty (Figure 2-3, right). The world of uncertainty is huge compared to that of risk. Whom to marry? Whom to trust? What to do with the rest of one's life? In an uncertain world, it is impossible to determine the optimal course of action by calculating the exact risks. We have to deal with "unknown unknowns." Surprises happen. Even when calculation does not provide a clear answer, however, we have to make decisions. — Gerd Gigerenzer

The American Medical Association not only represents the roughly 800,000 practicing physicians in the United States, but also sets the official standards for treatment for virtually every patient malady, and is instrumental in directing and controlling the supply of doctors entering medical school. By virtue of an affiliated licensing body called the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME), the AMA determines which medical schools receive its official accreditation, and for over a hundred years it has been very stingy with its approval process. Furthermore, the AMA together with its close affiliate, the American Association of Medical Colleges, conducts regular studies to assess the necessary supply of medical doctors and advises existing medical schools as well as state and federal regulators as to optimal admission levels for new students - and these too have been artificially and unnecessarily constricted[22]. — Reid Jenner