Calculate Your Moves Quotes

Don't exist. Live. Get out, explore. Thrive. Challenge authority. Challenge yourself. Evolve. Change forever. Become who you say you always will. Keep moving. Don't stop. Start the revolution. Become a freedom fighter. Become a superhero. Just because everyone doesn't know your name doesn't mean you dont matter. Are you happy? Have you ever been happy? What have you done today to matter? Did you exist or did you live? How did you thrive? Become a chameleon-fit in anywhere. Be a rockstar-stand out everywhere. Do nothing, do everything. Forget everything, remember everyone. Care, don't just pretend to. Listen to everyone. Love everyone and nothing at the same time. Its impossible to be everything,but you can't stop trying to do it all. All I know is that I have no idea where I am right now. I feel like I am in training for something, making progress with every step I take. I fear standing still. It is my greatest weakness. I talk big, but often don't follow through. That's my biggest problem. I don't even know what to think right now. It's about time I start to take a jump. Fuck starting to take. Just jump-over everything. Leap. It's time to be aggressive. You've started to speak your mind, now keep going with it, but not with the intention of sparking controversy or picking a germane fight. Get your gloves on, it's time for rebirth. There IS no room for the nice guys in the history books. THIS IS THE START OF A REVOLUTION. THE REVOLUTION IS YOUR LIFE. THE GOAL IS IMMORTALITY. LET'S LIVE, BABY. LET'S FEEL ALIVE AT ALL TIMES. TAKE NO PRISONERS. HOLD NO SOUL UNACCOUNTABLE, ESPECIALLY NOT YOUR OWN. IF SOMETHING DOESN'T HAPPEN, IT'S YOUR FAULT. Make this moment your reckoning. Your head has been held under water for too long and now it is time to rise up and take your first true breath. Do everything with exact calculation, nothing without meaning. Do not make careful your words, but make no excuses for what you say. Fuck em' all. Set a goal for everyday and never be tired.

Consider and then act, don't react. A worthy opponent will calculate his move to entice a response from you. Make your own play.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified, Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

I see how it is,” I snapped. “You were all in favor of me breaking the tattoo and thinking on my own—but that’s only okay if it’s convenient for you, huh? Just like your ‘loving from afar’ only works if you don’t have an opportunity to get your hands all over me. And your lips. And . . . stuff.” Adrian rarely got mad, and I wouldn’t quite say he was now. But he was definitely exasperated. “Are you seriously in this much self-denial, Sydney? Like do you actually believe yourself when you say you don’t feel anything? Especially after what’s been happening between us?” “Nothing’s happening between us,” I said automatically. “Physical attraction isn’t the same as love. You of all people should know that.” “Ouch,” he said. His expression hadn’t changed, but I saw hurt in his eyes. I’d wounded him. “Is that what bothers you? My past? That maybe I’m an expert in an area you aren’t?” “One I’m sure you’d just love to educate me in. One more girl to add to your list of conquests.” He was speechless for a few moments and then held up one finger. “First, I don’t have a list.” Another finger, “Second, if I did have a list, I could find someone a hell of lot less frustrating to add to it.” For the third finger, he leaned toward me. “And finally, I know that you know you’re no conquest, so don’t act like you seriously think that. You and I have been through too much together. We’re too close, too connected. I wasn’t that crazy on spirit when I said you’re my flame in the dark. We chase away the shadows around each other. Our backgrounds don’t matter. What we have is bigger than that. I love you, and beneath all that logic, calculation, and superstition, I know you love me too. Running away and fleeing all your problems isn’t going to change that. You’re just going to end up scared and confused.” “I already feel that way,” I said quietly. Adrian moved back and leaned into his seat, looking tired. “Well, that’s the most accurate thing you’ve said so far.” I grabbed the basket and jerked open the car door. Without another word, I stormed off, refusing to look back in case he saw the tears that had inexplicably appeared in my eyes. Only, I wasn’t sure exactly which part of our conversation I was most upset about.

Here is my favorite biblical direction: Be not afraid. It's truly the secret of life. Fear is what stunts our growth, narrows our ambitions, kills our dreams. So fear not. ...You are surely afraid: of leaving what you know, of seeking what you want, of taking the wrong path, of failing the right one. But you can't allow any of that to warp your life. You must have the strength to say no to the wrong things and to embrace the right ones, even if you are the only one who seems to know the difference, even if you find the difference hard to calculate. Acts of bravery don't always take place on battle fields. They can take place in your heart, when you have the courage to honor your character, your intellect, your inclinations, and yes, your soul by listening to its clean, clear voice of direction instead of following the muddied messages of a timid world. So carry your courage in an easily accessible place, the way you do your cellphone or your wallet. You may still falter or fail, but you will always know that you pushed hard and aimed high. Take a leap of faith. Fear not. Courage is the ultimate career move.

I'll be a son of a bitch," Patrick said. Aidan could barely make his eyes move, forcing them from the papers onto him. "What?" “I make a living, even life and death judgments, by reading peoples' body language, their raw reactions to situations. And I'd almos swear you've never seen those documents before." "Well," Aidan said, swallowing hard, calculating what fame and money had cost him. "I'd say you're damn good at your job, because I haven't.

If I understand you right,' he says, 'you're saying that you're basically a calculating manipulative person who always says what you think will get somebody to approve of you or form some impression of you you think you want.' I told him that was maybe a little simplistic but basically accurate, and he said further that as he understood it I was saying that I felt as if I was trapped in this false way of being and unable ever to be really open and tell the truth irregardless of whether it'd make me look good in others' eyes or not. And I somewhat resignedly said yes, and that I seemed always to have had this fraudulent, calculating part of my brain firing way all the time, as if I were constantly playing chess with everybody and figuring out that if I wanted them to move a certain way I had to move in such a way as to induce them to move that way. He asked if I ever played chess, and I told him I used to in middle school but quit because I couldn't be as good as I eventually wanted to be, how frustrating it was to get just good enough to know what getting really good at it would be like but not being able to get that good, etc.

You can learn to enjoy calculated risk and uncertainty in exchange for adventure, flexibility, freedom, and opportunity.

Fear of this uncertainty motivates people to spin their wheels for days considering all the possible outcomes, calculating them in a spreadsheet using utility cost analysis or some other fancy method that even the guy who invented it doesn't use. But all that analysis just keeps you on the sidelines. Often you're better off flipping a coin and moving in any clear direction. Once you start moving, you get new data regardless of where you're trying to go. And the new data makes the next decision and the next better than staying on the sidelines desperately trying to predict the future without that time machine.

Immortal.” Melanie paused and stared into space for a moment, her mouth moving with nothing coming out. “That is way cool,” she said finally. “That probably means you’re old. How old are you?” “Hmm, let’s see. I never remember the answer to that question.” Nick calculated for a moment. “819 years old.” “No way, José!” Melanie stopped and stared at him. “That’s even older than my parents!

One by one our skies go black. Stars are extinguished, collapsing into distances too great to breach. Soon, not even the memory of light will survive. Long ago, our manifold universes discovered futures would only expand. No arms of limit could hold or draw them back. Short of a miracle, they would continue to stretch, untangle and vanish – abandoned at long last to an unwitnessed dissolution. That dissolution is now. Final winks slipping over the horizons share what needs no sharing: There are no miracles. You might say that just to survive to such an end is a miracle in itself. We would agree. But we are not everyone. Even if you could imagine yourself billions of years hence, you would not begin to comprehend who we became and what we achieved. Yet left as you are, you will no more tremble before us than a butterfly on a windless day trembles before colluding skies, still calculating beyond one of your pacific horizons. Once we could move skies. We could transform them. We could make them sing. And when we fell into dreams our dreams asked questions and our skies, still singing, answered back. You are all we once were but the vastness of our strangeness exceeds all the light-years between our times. The frailty of your senses can no more recognize our reach than your thoughts can entertain even the vaguest outline of our knowledge. In ratios of quantity, a pulse of what we comprehend renders meaningless your entire history of discovery. We are on either side of history: yours just beginning, ours approaching a trillion years of ends. Yet even so, we still share a dyad of commonality. Two questions endure. Both without solution. What haunts us now will allways hunt you. The first reveals how the promise of all our postponements, ever longer, ever more secure – what we eventually mistook for immortality – was from the start a broken promise. Entropy suffers no reversals. Even now, here, on the edge of time’s end, where so many continue to vanish, we still have not pierced that veil of sentience undone. The first of our common horrors: Death. Yet we believe and accept that there is grace and finally truth in standing accountable before such an invisible unknown. But we are not everyone. Death, it turns out, is the mother of all conflicts. There are some who reject such an outcome. There are some who still fight for an alternate future. No matter the cost. Here then is the second of our common horrors. What not even all of time will end. What plagues us now and what will always plague you. War.

Don't exist. Live. Get out, explore. Thrive. Challenge authority. Challenge yourself. Evolve. Change forever. Become who you say you always will. Keep moving. Don't stop. Start the revolution. Become a freedom fighter. Become a superhero. Just because everyone doesn't know your name doesn't mean you don't matter. Are you happy? Have you ever been happy? What have you done today to matter? Did you exist or did you live? How did you thrive? Become a chameleon—fit in anywhere. Be a rockstar—stand out everywhere. Do nothing, do everything. Forget everything, remember everyone. Care, don't just pretend to. Listen to everyone. Love everyone and nothing at the same time. Its impossible to be everything, but you can't stop trying to do it all. . . . Leap. It's time to be aggressive. You've started to speak your mind, now keep going with it. . . . Get your gloves on, it's time for rebirth. There IS no room for the nice guys in the history books. THIS IS THE START OF A REVOLUTION. THE REVOLUTION IS YOUR LIFE. THE GOAL IS IMMORTALITY. LET'S LIVE, BABY. LET'S FEEL ALIVE AT ALL TIMES. TAKE NO PRISONERS. HOLD NO SOUL UNACCOUNTABLE, ESPECIALLY NOT YOUR OWN. IF SOMETHING DOESN'T HAPPEN, IT'S YOUR FAULT. Make this moment your reckoning. Your head has been held under water for too long and now it is time to rise up and take your first true breath. Do everything with exact calculation, nothing without meaning. Do not make careful your words, but make no excuses for what you say. Fuck em' all. Set a goal for everyday and never be tired.

Everyone's here except for St. Clair." Meredith cranes her neck around the cafeteria. "He's usually running late." "Always," Josh corrects. "Always running late." I clear my throat. "I think I met him last night. In the hallway." "Good hair and an English accent?" Meredith asks. "Um.Yeah.I guess." I try to keep my voice casual. Josh smirks. "Everyone's in luuurve with St. Clair." "Oh,shut up," Meredith says. "I'm not." Rashmi looks at me for the first time, calculating whether or not I might fall in love with her own boyfriend. He lets go of her hand and gives an exaggerated sigh. "Well,I am. I'm asking him to prom. This is our year, I just know it." "This school has a prom?" I ask. "God no," Rashmi says. "Yeah,Josh. You and St. Clair would look really cute in matching tuxes." "Tails." The English accent makes Meredith and me jump in our seats. Hallway boy. Beautiful boy. His hair is damp from the rain. "I insist the tuxes have tails, or I'm giving your corsage to Steve Carver instead." "St. Clair!" Josh springs from his seat, and they give each other the classic two-thumps-on-the-back guy hug. "No kiss? I'm crushed,mate." "Thought it might miff the ol' ball and chain. She doesn't know about us yet." "Whatever," Rashi says,but she's smiling now. It's a good look for her. She should utilize the corners of her mouth more often. Beautiful Hallway Boy (Am I supposed to call him Etienne or St. Clair?) drops his bag and slides into the remaining seat between Rashmi and me. "Anna." He's surprised to see me,and I'm startled,too. He remembers me. "Nice umbrella.Could've used that this morning." He shakes a hand through his hair, and a drop lands on my bare arm. Words fail me. Unfortunately, my stomach speaks for itself. His eyes pop at the rumble,and I'm alarmed by how big and brown they are. As if he needed any further weapons against the female race. Josh must be right. Every girl in school must be in love with him. "Sounds terrible.You ought to feed that thing. Unless..." He pretends to examine me, then comes in close with a whisper. "Unless you're one of those girls who never eats. Can't tolerate that, I'm afraid. Have to give you a lifetime table ban." I'm determined to speak rationally in his presence. "I'm not sure how to order." "Easy," Josh says. "Stand in line. Tell them what you want.Accept delicious goodies. And then give them your meal card and two pints of blood." "I heard they raised it to three pints this year," Rashmi says. "Bone marrow," Beautiful Hallway Boy says. "Or your left earlobe." "I meant the menu,thank you very much." I gesture to the chalkboard above one of the chefs. An exquisite cursive hand has written out the morning's menu in pink and yellow and white.In French. "Not exactly my first language." "You don't speak French?" Meredith asks. "I've taken Spanish for three years. It's not like I ever thought I'd be moving to Paris." "It's okay," Meredith says quickly. "A lot of people here don't speak French." "But most of them do," Josh adds. "But most of them not very well." Rashmi looks pointedly at him. "You'll learn the lanaguage of food first. The language of love." Josh rubs his belly like a shiny Buddha. "Oeuf. Egg. Pomme. Apple. Lapin. Rabbit." "Not funny." Rashmi punches him in the arm. "No wonder Isis bites you. Jerk." I glance at the chalkboard again. It's still in French. "And, um, until then?" "Right." Beautiful Hallway Boy pushes back his chair. "Come along, then. I haven't eaten either." I can't help but notice several girls gaping at him as we wind our way through the crowd.

Robot men with computers for brains Space ships, cars, trains and planes All calculated to blow your mind Moving faster than your sense of time Living luxuriously soft while the people slave hard For the Devil would have you believe he is God Chemical drugs that keep you high While the Mean Machine creates another lie For power and glory and world wide fame While Running the Same Game with Another Name It's the computer's equation for world wide invasion That comes in the name of peace and goodwill But all of them are lying as they keep on trying To set the people up for the kill

If he noticed a female convict with a baby in her arms, he would approach, fondle the baby and snap his fingers at it to make it laugh. These things he did for many years, right up to his death; eventually he was famous all over Russia and all over Siberia, among the criminals, that is. One man who had been in Siberia told me that he himself had witnessed how the most hardened criminals remembered the general, and yet the general, when he visited the gangs of convicts, was rarely able to give more than twenty copecks to each man. It’s true that he wasn’t remembered with much affection, or even very seriously. Some ‘unfortunate wretch’, who had killed twelve people, or put six children to the knife solely for his own amusement (there were such men, it is said), would suddenly, apropos of nothing, perhaps only once in twenty years, sigh and say: ‘Well, and how’s the old general now, is he still alive?’ He would even, perhaps, smile as he said it – and that would be all. How can you know what seed had been cast into his soul for ever by this ‘old general’, whom he had not forgotten in twenty years? How can you know, Bakhmutov, what significance this communication between one personality and another may have in the fate of the personality that is communicated with?… I mean, we’re talking about the whole of a life, and a countless number of ramifications that are hidden from us. The very finest player of chess, the most acute of them, can only calculate a few moves ahead; one French player, who was able to calculate ten moves ahead, was described in the press as a miracle. But how many moves are here, and how much is there that is unknown to us? In sowing your seed, sowing your ‘charity’, your good deeds in whatever form, you give away a part of your personality and absorb part of another; a little more attention, and you are rewarded with knowledge, with the most unexpected discoveries. You will, at last, certainly view your deeds as a science; they will take over the whole of your life and may fill it. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds you have sown, which perhaps you have already forgotten, will take root and grow; the one who has received from you will give to another. And how can you know what part you will play in the future resolution of the fates of mankind? If this knowledge, and a whole lifetime of this work, exalts you, at last, to the point where you are able to sow a mighty seed, leave a mighty idea to the world as an inheritance, then…

She always surprises you this way, by knowing more than you think she does. Louis wonders if they're calculated, these little demonstrations of self-knowledge that pepper Clarissa's wise, hostessy performance. She seems, at times, to have read your thoughts. She disarms you by saying, essentially, I know what you're thinking and I agree, I'm ridiculous, I'm far less than I could have been and I'd like it to be otherwise but I can't seem to help myself. You find that you move, almost against your will, from being irritated with her to consoling her, helping her back into her performance so that she can be comfortable again and you can resume feeling irritated.

With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages, the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success, the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It’s Now Time To Reread and the Books You’ve Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It’s Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them.

What the-“ he began, already heading toward the house, with Elizabeth walking quickly behind him. Ian opened the front door just as Jake came hurrying in from the back of the cottage. “I got some milk-“ Jake began, then he stopped abruptly as the stench hit him. His gaze snapped from Ian and Elizabeth, who were just rushing inside, to Lucinda, who was sitting exactly where she had been, serenely indifferent to the smell of burning bacon and incinerated eggs as she fanned herself with a black silk fan. “I took the liberty of removing the utensil from the stove,” she informed them. “However, I was not in time to save its contents, which I sincerely doubt were worth saving in any case.” “Couldn’t you have moved ‘em before they burned?” Jake burst out. “I cannot cook, sir.” “Can you smell?” Ian demanded. “Ian, there’s nothing for it-I’ll have to ride to the village and hire a pair o’ wenches to come up here and get this place in order for us or we’ll starve.” “My thoughts exactly!” Lucinda seconded promptly, already standing up. “I shall accompany you.” “Whaat?” Elizabeth burst out. “What? Why?” Jake echoed, looking balky. “Because selecting good female servants is best done by a woman. How far must we go?” If Elizabeth weren’t so appalled, she’d have laughed at Jake Wiley’s expression. “We can be back late this afternoon, assumin’ there’s anyone in the village to do the work. But I-“ “Then we’d best be about it.” Lucinda paused and turned to Ian, passing a look of calculating consideration over hum; then she glanced at Elizabeth. Giving her a look that clearly said “Trust me and do not argue,” she said, “Elizabeth, if you would be so good as to excuse us, I’d like a word alone with Mr. Thornton.” With no choice but to do as bidden, Elizabeth went out the front door and stared in utter confusion at the trees, wondering what bizarre scheme Lucinda might have hatched to solve their problems. In the cottage Ian watched through narrowed eyes as the gray-haired harpy fixed him with her basilisk stare. “Mr. Thornton,” she said finally, “I have decided you are a gentleman.” She made that pronouncement as if she were a queen bestowing knighthood on a lowly, possibly undeserving serf. Fascinated and irritated at the same time, Ian leaned his hip against the table, waiting to discover what game she was playing by leaving Elizabeth alone here, unchaperoned. “Don’t keep me in suspense,” he said coolly. “What have I done to earn your good opinion?” “Absolutely nothing,” she said without hesitation. “I’m basing my decision on my own excellent intuitive powers and on the fact that you were born a gentleman.

Purchase Price $250,000 Down Payment $ 25,000 Mortgage Amount $225,000 At 7% Interest Rate 30 Years $1,349 $485,636 15 Years $1,899 $341,762 Difference $550 $143,874 Five hundred fifty dollars more per month, and you will save almost $150,000 and fifteen years of bondage. The really interesting thing I have observed is that fifteen-year mortgages always pay off in fifteen years. Again, part of a Total Money Makeover is putting in place systems that automate smart moves, which is what a fifteen-year mortgage is. Thirty-year mortgages are for people who enjoy slavery so much they want to extend it for fifteen more years and pay thousands of dollars more for the privilege. If you must take out a mortgage, pretend only fifteen-year mortgages exist. If you have a great interest rate, it is not necessary to refinance to pay a mortgage off in fifteen years or earlier. Simply make payments as if you have a fifteen-year mortgage, and your mortgage will pay off in fifteen years. If you want to pay any mortgage off in twelve years or any number you want, visit my website or get a calculator and calculate the proper payment at your interest rate on your balance for a twelve-year mortgage (or the number you want). Once you have that payment amount, add to your monthly mortgage payment the difference between the new principal and interest payment and your current principal and interest payment, and you will pay off your home in twelve years.

Punish me for my awful pride," she said to him, clasping him in her arms so tightly as almost to choke him. "You are my master, dear, I am your slave. I must ask your pardon on my knees for having tried to rebel." She left his arms to fall at his feet. "Yes," she said to him, still intoxicated with happiness and with love, "you are my master, reign over me for ever. When your slave tries to revolt, punish her severely." In another moment she tore herself from his arms, and lit a candle, and it was only by a supreme effort that Julien could prevent her from cutting off a whole tress of her hair. "I want to remind myself," she said to him, "that I am your handmaid. If I am ever led astray again by my abominable pride, show me this hair and say, 'It is not a question of the emotion which your soul may be feeling at present, you have sworn to obey, obey on your honour.' As he was moving his hand over the soft ground in the darkness and satisfying himself that the mark had entirely disappeared, he felt something fall down on his hands. It was a whole tress of Mathilde's hair which she had cut off and thrown down to him. She was at the window. "That's what your servant sends you," she said to him in a fairly loud voice, "It is the sign of eternal gratitude. I renounce the exercise of my reason, be my master." Julien was quite overcome and was on the point of going to fetch the ladder again and climbing back into her room. Finally reason prevailed. (A few days later...) In a single minute mademoiselle de la Mole reached the point of loading Julien with the signs of the most extreme contempt. She had infinite wit, and this wit was always triumphant in the art of torturing vanity and wounding it cruelly. Hearing himself overwhelmed with such marks of contempt which were so cleverly calculated to destroy any good opinion that he might have of himself, he thought that Mathilde was right, and that she did not say enough. As for her, she found it deliciously gratifying to her pride to punish in this way both herself and him for the adoration that she had felt some days previously. She did not have to invent and improvise the cruel remarks which she addressed to him with so much gusto. Each word intensified a hundredfold Julien's awful unhappiness. He wanted to run away, but mademoiselle de la Mole took hold of his arm authoritatively. "Be good enough to remark," he said to her, "that you are talking very loud. You will be heard in the next room." "What does it matter?" mademoiselle de la Mole answered haughtily. "Who will dare to say they have heard me? I want to cure your miserable vanity once and for all of any ideas you may have indulged in on my account." When Julien was allowed to leave the library he was so astonished that he was less sensitive to his unhappiness. "She does not love me any more," he repeated to himself... "Is it really possible she was nothing to me, nothing to my heart so few days back?" Mathilde's heart was inundated by the joy of satisfied pride. So she had been able to break with him for ever! So complete a triumph over so strong an inclination rendered her completely happy. "So this little gentleman will understand, once and for all, that he has not, and will never have, any dominion over me." She was so happy that in reality she ceased to love at this particular moment.

Mr. Sulu,” Jim said, “I can’t avoid the impression that you’re counting all the asteroids in this neighborhood.” “Not counting them as such, Captain. We’re building a recognition database, tagging the asteroids with nominal IDs, and noting their masses for future reference. If you know an asteroid’s mass within a couple of significant figures, you can very quickly calculate what kind of forces would need to be applied to it to make it move. Once Khiy and I get them all tagged, or all the ones in this area, we can get the ship’s computer to alert us when an enemy vessel is getting close enough for one of the asteroids to be a threat. Then either Bloodwing or Enterprise gives the necessary rock a pull with a tractor or a push with a pressor …” Jim grinned. In slower-than-light combat, the lightspeedor-faster weapons came into their own, as long as you kept away from the higher, near-relativistic impulse speeds. “You’re concentrating on the asteroids nearer to the processing facility, I see.” “Yes, sir—a sphere about a hundred thousand kilometers in diameter, including almost the entire breadth of the belt in this area. Any ship outside that diameter isn’t going to be a threat to us at subwarp speeds. If they want to engage with us, they’ve got to drop their speed and come inside the sphere.” “‘Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly…’” Jim said. “Get on with it, Mr. Sulu. In a situation like this, every little bit helps. Are you going to be able to have this ready by the time the ‘flies’ arrive?” “We’ll do our best, Captain. There are some inconsistencies between the ways Bloodwing’s computer handles large amounts of data like this, and the way ours does. We’ve got to solve them on the fly.” And Sulu chuckled.

I opened the door with a smile on my face that soon melted when I saw his messy appearance. The doorframe held him up as he leaned all of his weight against it. Expressionless, bloodshot eyes stared back at me as he lifted his hand and ran it roughly down his unshaved face. His hair was disheveled and there was blood on the front of his shirt. Panic rose up as I took him in. I rushed to him and ran my fingers down his body, as I checked for injuries. “You’re bleeding! Oh my God, Devin! What happened? Are you OK?” “It’s not my blood,” he slurred. I took a better look at his gorgeous face. His unfocused eyes attempted to meet mine and it was then that the smell of liquor reached me. “You’re drunk?” “Abso-fucking-lutely.” He attempted to move toward me and almost fell over. I wrapped my arms around him and helped him into my apartment. Once we made it to the couch I let him collapse onto the cushion before I went straight to work on his clothes. I removed his blood-stained shirt first and threw it to the side. Quickly checked him over again just to be sure that he wasn’t injured somewhere. His skin felt cold and clammy against my fingertips. His knuckles were busted open, so I went to the bathroom and got a wet towel and the first aid kit. I cleaned his fingers then wrapped them up. I felt fingers in my hair and looked up to see a very drunk Devin staring back at me. “You’re so fucking beautiful,” he whispered as his heavy head fell against the back of my couch again. Shaking my head, I dropped onto my knees on the floor and removed his boots. Once I was done getting Devin out of his shoes, I went to the hallway closet and pulled out a blanket for him. When I got back to the couch, he was standing there looking back at me in all his tattooed, muscled glory. He was still leaning a bit to the side when his eyes locked on mine. “Come here,” he rasped. He looked as if he was about to crumble and I couldn’t tell if it was the alcohol or if something was really breaking him down. “Are you OK, baby?” I asked. He closed his eyes and sighed. “I love it when you call me baby.” I went to him and he groaned as I softly ran my hands up his chest and put my arms around his neck. On my tiptoes, I softly kissed the line of his neck and his chin. “Tell me what happened, Devin.” When he finally opened his eyes, he looked at me differently. The calm and collected Devin was gone and an anxiety-ridden shell of a man stood before me. His shoulders felt tense beneath my fingers and his eyes held a crazed demeanor. “I need you, Lilly.” He captured my face softly in his hands as he slurred the words. “Please tell me what happened?” “Make it go away, baby,” he whispered as he leaned in and started to kiss me. I let him as I melted against his body. He collapsed against the couch once more, but this time he took me with him. Not once did he break our kiss, and soon, I felt his velvet tongue against mine. I kissed him back and let my fingers play in the hair at the back of his neck. He broke the kiss and started down the side of my neck. “I need you, Lilly,” he repeated against my skin. “I’m here.” I bit at my bottom lip to stop myself from moaning. “Please, just make it all go away,” he drunkenly begged. “I don’t know what’s going on, but tell me what to do to make it better. I want to make it better, Devin.” I stopped him and stared into his eyes as I waited for his response. “Don’t leave me,” he said desperately. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m here. I’ll do whatever it takes to make it better.” I wanted to cry. He looked so hurt and afraid. It was strange to see such a strong, confident man so lost and unsure. He flipped me onto my back on the couch and crawled on top of me. His movements were less calculated—slower than usual. “I want you. I need to be inside you,” he said aggressively.

Distinguish Between Worry/Rumination and Helpful Problem Solving If you’re smart and you’ve experienced a lifetime of being rewarded for your thinking skills, it makes sense that you’ll default to trying to think your way out of emotional pain. However, because anxiety tends to make thinking negative, narrow, and rigid, it’s difficult to do creative problem solving when you’re feeling highly anxious. People who are heavy worriers tend to believe that worrying helps them make good decisions. However, rather than helping you problem-solve, rumination and worry usually just make it difficult to see the forest for the trees. Do you think people who worry a lot about getting cancer are more likely to do self-exams, have their moles mapped, or eat a healthy diet? According to research, the opposite is probably true. Worriers and ruminators wait longer before taking action. For example, one study showed that women who were prone to rumination took an average of 39 days longer to seek help after noticing a breast lump. That’s a scary thought. If you think about it, worry often comes from lack of confidence in being able to handle situations. Here’s an example: Technophobes who worry a lot about their hard drives crashing are the same people who are scared of accidentally wiping all their files if they attempt to do a backup. Therefore, worry is often associated with not doing effective problem solving. My experience of dealing with technophobic ruminators is that they don’t usually back up their computers! Experiment: To check for yourself whether ruminating and worrying lead to useful actions, try tracking the time you spend ruminating or worrying for a week. If a week is too much of a commitment, you could try two days—one weekday and one weekend day. When you notice yourself ruminating or worrying, write down the approximate number of minutes you spend doing it. The following day, note any times when ruminating/worrying led to useful solutions. Calculate your ratio: How many minutes did you spend overthinking for each useful solution it generated?

Queen Anne of England established the Longitude Act in 1714, and offered a monetary prize of over a million in today’s dollars to anyone who invented a method to accurately calculate longitude at sea. Longitude is about determining one’s point in space. So one might ask what it has to do with clocks? Mathematically speaking, space (distance) is the child of time and speed (distance equals time multiplied by speed). Thus, anything that moves at a constant speed can be used to calculate distance, provided one knows for how long it has been moving. Many things have constant speeds, including light, sound, and the rotation of the Earth. Your brain uses the near constancy of the speed of sound to calculate where sounds are coming from. As we have seen, you know someone is to your left or right because the sound of her voice takes approximately 0.6 milliseconds to travel from your left to your right ear. Using the delays it takes any given sound to arrive to your left and right ears allows the brain to figure out if the voice is coming directly from the left, the right, or somewhere in between. The Earth is rotating at a constant speed—one that results in a full rotation (360 degrees) every 24 hours. Thus there is a direct correspondence between degrees of longitude and time. Knowing how much time has elapsed is equivalent to knowing how much the Earth has turned: if you sit and read this book for one hour (1/24 of a day), the Earth has rotated 15 degrees (360/24). Thus, if you are sitting in the middle of the ocean at local noon, and you know it is 16:00 in Greenwich, then you are “4 hours from Greenwich”—exactly 60 degrees longitude from Greenwich. Problem solved. All one needs is a really good marine chronometer. The greatest minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not overlook the longitude problem: Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton all devoted their attention to it. In the end, however, it was not a great scientist but one of the world’s foremost craftsman who ultimately was awarded the Longitude Prize. John Harrison (1693–1776) was a self-educated clockmaker who took obsessive dedication to the extreme.

When I threw the stick at Jamie, I hadn't intended to hit him with it. But the moment it left my hand, I knew that's what was going to happen. I didn't yet know any calculus or geometry, but I was able to plot, with some degree of certainty, the trajectory of that stick. The initial velocity, the acceleration, the impact. The mathematical likelihood of Jamie's bloody cheek. It had good weight and heft, that stick. It felt nice to throw. And it looked damn fine in the overcast sky, too, flying end over end, spinning like a heavy, two-pronged pinwheel and (finally, indifferently, like math) connecting with Jamie's face. Jamie's older sister took me by the arm and she shook me. Why did you do that? What were you thinking? The anger I saw in her eyes. Heard in her voice. The kid I became to her then, who was not the kid I thought I was. The burdensome regret. I knew the word "accident" was wrong, but I used it anyway. If you throw a baseball at a wall and it goes through a window, that is an accident. If you throw a stick directly at your friend and it hits your friend in the face, that is something else. My throw had been something of a lob and there had been a good distance between us. There had been ample time for Jamie to move, but he hadn't moved. There had been time for him to lift a hand and protect his face from the stick, but he hadn't done that either. He just stood impotent and watched it hit him. And it made me angry: That he hadn't tried harder at a defense. That he hadn't made any effort to protect himself from me. What was I thinking? What was he thinking? I am not a kid who throws sticks at his friends. But sometimes, that's who I've been. And when I've been that kid, it's like I'm watching myself act in a movie, reciting somebody else's damaging lines. Like this morning, over breakfast. Your eyes asking mine to forget last night's exchange. You were holding your favorite tea mug. I don't remember what we were fighting about. It doesn't seem to matter any more. The words that came out of my mouth then, deliberate and measured, temporarily satisfying to throw at the bored space between us. The slow, beautiful arc. The spin and the calculated impact. The downward turn of your face. The heavy drop in my chest. The word "accident" was wrong. I used it anyway.

Mowbray! Been a while since you bothered with the season. What brings you to town?” Lord Adrian Montfort, Earl of Mowbray, shifted his gaze from the couples whirling past on the dance floor and to the man who approached: the tall, fair, eminently good-looking Reginald Greville. He and Greville, his cousin, had once been the best of friends. However, time and distance had weakened the bond—with a little help from the war with France, Adrian thought bitterly. Ignoring Reginald’s question, he offered a somewhat rusty smile in greeting, then turned his gaze back to the men and women swinging elegantly about the dance floor. He replied instead, “Enjoying the season, Greville?” “Certainly, certainly. Fresh blood. Fresh faces.” “Fresh victims,” Mowbray said dryly, and Reginald laughed. “That too.” Reginald was well-known for his success in seducing young innocents. Only his title and money kept him from being forced out of town. Shaking his head, Adrian gave that rusty smile again. “I wonder you never tire of the chase, Reg. They all look sadly similar to me. I would swear these were the very same young women who were entering their first season the last time I attended…and the time before that, and the time before that.” His cousin smiled easily, but shook his head. “It has been ten years since you bothered to come to town, Adrian. Those women are all married and bearing fruit, or well on their way to spinsterhood.” “Different faces, same ladies,” Adrian said with a shrug. “Such cynicism!” Reg chided. “You sound old, old man.” “Older,” Adrian corrected. “Older and wiser.” “No. Just old,” Reg insisted with a laugh, his own gaze turning to the mass of people moving before them. “Besides, there are a couple of real lovelies this year. That blonde, for instance, or that brunette with Chalmsly.” “Hmmm.” Adrian looked the two women over. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but my guess is that the brunette—lovely as she is—doesn’t have a thought in her head. Rather like that Lady Penelope you seduced when last I was here.” Reg’s eyes widened in surprise at the observation. “And the blonde…” Adrian continued, his gaze raking the woman in question and taking in her calculating look. “Born of parents in trade, lots of money, and looking for a title to go with it. Rather like Lily Ainsley. Another of your conquests.” “Dead-on,” Reginald admitted, looking a bit incredulous. His gaze moved between the two women and then he gave a harsh laugh. “Now you have quite ruined it for me. I was considering favoring one or both of them with my attentions. But now you have made them quite boring.” -Reg & Adrian

Rich Purnell sipped coffee in the silent building. Only his cubicle illuminated the otherwise dark room. Continuing with his computations, he ran a final test on the software he'd written. It passed. With a relieved sigh, he sank back in his chair. Checking the clock on his computer, he shook his head. 3:42am. Being an astrodynamicist, Rich rarely had to work late. His job was the find the exact orbits and course corrections needed for any given mission. Usually, it was one of the first parts of a project; all the other steps being based on the orbit. But this time, things were reversed. Iris needed an orbital path, and nobody knew when it would launch. A non-Hoffman Mars-transfer isn't challenging, but it does require the exact locations of Earth and Mars. Planets move as time goes by. An orbit calculated for a specific launch date will work only for that date. Even a single day's difference would result in missing Mars entirely. So Rich had to calculate many orbits. He had a range of 25 days during which Iris might launch. He calculated one orbital path for each. He began an email to his boss. "Mike", he typed, "Attached are the orbital paths for Iris, in 1-day increments. We should start peer-review and vetting so they can be officially accepted. And you were right, I was here almost all night. It wasn't that bad. Nowhere near the pain of calculating orbits for Hermes. I know you get bored when I go in to the math, so I'll summarize: The small, constant thrust of Hermes's ion drives is much harder to deal with than the large point-thrusts of presupply probes. All 25 of the orbits take 349 days, and vary only slightly in thrust duration and angle. The fuel requirement is nearly identical for the orbits and is well within the capacity of EagleEye's booster. It's too bad. Earth and Mars are really badly positioned. Heck, it's almost easier to-" He stopped typing. Furrowing his brow, he stared in to the distance. "Hmm." he said. Grabbing his coffee cup, he went to the break room for a refill. ... "Rich", said Mike. Rich Purnell concentrated on his computer screen. His cubicle was a landfill of printouts, charts, and reference books. Empty coffee cups rested on every surface; take-out packaging littered the ground. "Rich", Mike said, more forcefully. Rich looked up. "Yeah?" "What the hell are you doing?" "Just a little side project. Something I wanted to check up on." "Well... that's fine, I guess", Mike said, "but you need to do your assigned work first. I asked for those satellite adjustments two weeks ago and you still haven't done them." "I need some supercomputer time." Rich said. "You need supercomputer time to calculate routine satellite adjustments?" "No, it's for this other thing I'm working on", Rich said. "Rich, seriously. You have to do your job." Rich thought for a moment. "Would now be a good time for a vacation?" He asked. Mike sighed. "You know what, Rich? I think now would be an ideal time for you to take a vacation." "Great!" Rich smiled. "I'll start right now." "Sure", Mike said. "Go on home. Get some rest." "Oh, I'm not going home", said Rich, returning to his calculations. Mike rubbed his eyes. "Ok, whatever. About those satellite orbits...?" "I'm on vacation", Rich said without looking up. Mike shrugged and walked away.

I’d known him just ten days, and it had just left his mouth in an unexpected whisper. It had been purely instinctive, it seemed--something entirely unplanned. He clearly hadn’t planned to say those words to me that night; that wasn’t the way he operated. He was a man who had a thought and acted on it immediately, as evidenced by his sweet, whispery phone calls right after our dates. He spent no time at all calculating moves; he had better things to do with his time. When we held each other on that chilly spring night and his feelings had come rushing to the surface, he’d felt no need to slap a filter over his mouth. It had come out in a breath: I love you. It was as if he had to say it, in the same way air has to escape a person’s longs. It was involuntary. Necessary. Natural. But as beautiful and warm a moment as it was, I froze on the spot. Once I realized it had been real--that he’d actually said the words--it seemed too late to respond; the window had closed, the shutters had clapped shut. I responded in the only way my cowardice would allow: by holding him tighter, burying my face deeper into his neck, feeling equal parts stupid and awkward. What is your problem? I asked myself. I was in the midst of what was possibly the most romantic, emotionally charged moment of my life, in the embrace of a man who embodied not only everything I’d ever understood about the textbook definition of lust, but everything I’d ever dreamed about in a man. He was a specimen--tall, strong, masculine, quiet. But it was much more than that. He was honest. Real. And affectionate and accessible, quite unlike J and most of the men I’d casually dated since I’d returned home from Los Angeles months earlier. I was in a foreign land. I didn’t know what to do. I love you. He’d said it. And I knew his words had been sincere. I knew, because I felt it, too, even though I couldn’t say it. Marlboro Man continued to hold me tightly on that patio chair, undeterred by my silence, likely resting easily in the knowledge that at least he’d been able to say what he felt. “I’d better go home,” I whispered, suddenly feeling pulled away by some imaginary force. Marlboro Man nodded, helping me to my feet. Holding hands, we walked around his house to my car, where we stopped for a final hug and a kiss or two. Or eight. “Thanks for having me over,” I managed. Man, I was smooth. “Any time,” he replied, locking his arms around my waist during the final kiss. This was the stuff that dreams were made of. I was glad my eyes were closed, because they were rolled all the way into the back of my head. It wouldn’t have been an attractive sight. He opened the door to my car, and I climbed inside. As I backed out of his driveway, he walked toward his front door and turned around, giving me his characteristic wave in his characteristic Wranglers. Driving away, I felt strange, flushed, tingly. Burdened. Confused. Tortured. Thirty minutes into my drive home, he called. I’d almost grown to need it. “Hey,” he said. His voice. Help me. “Oh, hi,” I replied, pretending to be surprised. Even though I wasn’t. “Hey, I…,” Marlboro Man began. “I really don’t want you to go.” I giggled. How cute. “Well…I’m already halfway home!” I replied, a playful lilt to my voice. A long pause followed. Then, his voice serious, he continued, “That’s not what I’m talking about.

Motion in space can proceed in any direction and back again. Motion in time only proceeds in one direction in the everyday world, whatever seems to be going on at the particle level. It’s hard to visualize the four dimensions of spacetime, each at right angles to the other, but we can leave out one dimension and imagine what this strict rule would mean if it applied to one of the three dimensions we are used to. It’s as if we were allowed to move either up or down, either forward or back, but that sideways motion was restricted to shuffling to the left, say. Movement to the right is forbidden. If we made this the central rule in a children’s game, and then told a child to find a way of reaching a prize off to the right-hand side (“backward in time”) it wouldn’t take too long for the child to find a way out of the trap. Simply turn around to face the other way, swapping left for right, and then reach the prize by moving to the left. Alternatively, lie down on the floor so that the prize is in the “up” direction with reference to your head. Now you can move both “up” to grasp the prize and “down” to your original position, before standing up again and returning your personal space orientation to that of the bystanders.* The technique for time travel allowed by relativity theory is very similar. It involves distorting the fabric of space-time so that in a local region of space-time the time axis points in a direction equivalent to one of the three space directions in the undistorted region of space-time. One of the other space directions takes on the role of time, and by swapping space for time such a device would make true time travel, there and back again, possible. American mathematician Frank Tipler has made the calculations that prove such a trick is theoretically possible. Space-time can be distorted by strong gravitational fields,and Tipler’s imaginary time machine is a very massive cylinder, containing as much matter as our sun packed into a volume 100 km long and 10 km in radius, as dense as the nucleus of an atom, rotating twice every millisecond and dragging the fabric of space-time around with it. The surface of the cylinder would be moving at half the speed of light. This isn’t the sort of thing even the maddest of mad inventors is likely to build in his backyard, but the point is that it is allowed by all the laws of physics that we know. There is even an object in the universe that has the mass of our sun, the density of an atomic nucleus, and spins once every 1.5 milliseconds, only three times slower than Tipler’s time machine. This is the so-called “millisecond pulsar,” discovered in 1982. It is highly unlikely that this object is cylindrical—such extreme rotation has surely flattened it into a pancake shape. Even so, there must be some very peculiar distortions of space-time in its vicinity. “Real” time travel may not be impossible, just extremely difficult and very, very unlikely. That thin end of what might be a very large wedge may, however, make the normality of time travel at the quantum level seem a little more acceptable. Both quantum theory and relativity theory permit time travel, of one kind or another. And anything that is acceptable to both those theories, no matter how paradoxical that something may seem, has to be taken seriously. Time travel, indeed, is an integral part of some of the stranger features of the particle world, where you can even get something for nothing, if you are quick about it.

Swift released the bowl in a strong drive. It sped obediently down the green, perfectly reproducing Daisy’s shot, though with more calculated momentum. Hitting Daisy’s bowl cleanly off the grass, it took her place right in front of the jack. “He knocked my bowl into the ditch,” Daisy protested. “Is that legal?” “Oh, yes,” Lord Llandrindon said. “A bit ruthless, but perfectly legal. Now it is properly referred to as a ‘dead bowl.’” “My bowl is dead?” Daisy asked indignantly. Swift returned her scowl with an implacable glance. “Never do an enemy a small injury.” “Only you would quote Machiavelli during lawn bowling,” Daisy said through gritted teeth. “Pardon,” Lord Llandrindon said politely, “but I believe it’s my turn.” Seeing that neither of them were paying attention, he shrugged and went to the delivery line. His bowl careened down the green and ended just beyond the jack. “I always play to win,” Swift said to Daisy. “Good God,” Daisy said in exasperation, “you sound exactly like my father. Have you ever considered the possibility that some people play just for the fun of it? As a pleasant activity to pass the time? Or must everything be brought down to life-and-death conflict?” “If you’re not out to win, the game is pointless.” Seeing that she had completely slipped from Swift’s notice, Cassandra Leighton sought to intervene. “I fancy it’s my shot now, Mr. Swift. Would you please be so kind as to retrieve a bowl for me?” Swift complied with barely a glance at her, his attention riveted on Daisy’s small, tense face. “Here,” he said brusquely, thrusting the bowl into Miss Leighton’s hands. “Perhaps you could advise me…” Miss Leighton began, but her voice faded as Swift and Daisy continued to bicker. “All right, Mr. Swift,” Daisy said coolly. “If you can’t enjoy a simple game of bowls without making it into a war, you’ll have a war. We’ll play for points.” She wasn’t quite certain if she had moved forward or if he had, but suddenly they were standing very close, his head bent over hers. “You can’t beat me,” Swift said in a low voice. “You’re a novice, and a woman besides. It wouldn’t be fair unless I was assigned a handicap.” “Your teammate is Miss Leighton,” she whispered sharply. “In my opinion, that’s enough of a handicap. And are you implying that women can’t bowl as well as men?” “No. I’m saying straight out they can’t.” Daisy felt a rush of outrage, augmented by a fiery desire to pound him into the ground. “War,” she repeated, stalking back to her side of the green.

1. Find the Fringe: Cast a wide enough net to harness information from the fringe. This involves creating a map showing nodes and the relationships between them, and rounding up what you will later refer to as “the unusual suspects.” 2. Use CIPHER: Uncover hidden patterns by categorizing data from the fringe. Patterns indicate a trend, so you’ll do an exhaustive search for Contradictions, Inflections, Practices, Hacks, Extremes, and Rarities. 3. Ask the Right Questions: Determine whether a pattern really is a trend. You will be tempted to stop looking once you’ve spotted a pattern, but you will soon learn that creating counterarguments is an essential part of the forecasting process, even though most forecasters never force themselves to poke holes into every single assumption and assertion they make. 4. Calculate the ETA: Interpret the trend and ensure that the timing is right. This isn’t just about finding a typical S-curve and the point of inflection. As technology trends move along their trajectory, there are two forces in play—internal developments within tech companies, and external developments within the government, adjacent businesses, and the like—and both must be calculated. 5. Create Scenarios and Strategies: Build scenarios to create probable, plausible, and possible futures and accompanying strategies. This step requires thinking about both the timeline of a technology’s development and your emotional reactions to all of the outcomes. You’ll give each scenario a score, and based on your analysis, you will create a corresponding strategy for taking action. 6. Pressure-Test Your Action: But what if the action you choose to take on a trend is the wrong one? In this final step, you must make sure the strategy you take on a trend will deliver the desired outcome, and that requires asking difficult questions about both the present and the future.

During the era of the Warring States in ancient China, the state of Qi found itself threatened by the powerful armies of the state of Wei. The Qi general consulted the famous strategist Sun Pin (a descendant of Suntzu himself), who told him that the Wei general looked down on the armies of Qi, believing that their soldiers were cowards. That, said Sun Pin, was the key to victory. He proposed a plan: Enter Wei territory with a large army and make thousands of campfires. The next day make half that number of campfires, and the day after that, half that number again. Putting his trust in Sun Pin, the Qi general did as he was told. The Wei general, of course, was carefully monitoring the invasion, and he noted the dwindling campfires. Given his predisposition to see the Qi soldiers as cowards, what could this mean but that they were defecting? He would advance with his cavalry and crush this weak army; his infantry would follow, and they would march into Qi itself. Sun Pin, hearing of the approaching Wei cavalry and calculating how fast they were moving, retreated and stationed the Qi army in a narrow pass in the mountains. He had a large tree cut down and stripped of its bark, then wrote on the bare log, “The general of Wei will die at this tree.” He set the log in the path of the pursuing Wei army, then hid archers on both sides of the pass. In the middle of the night, the Wei general, at the head of his cavalry, reached the place where the log blocked the road. Something was written on it; he ordered a torch lit to read it. The torchlight was the signal and the lure: the Qi archers rained arrows on the trapped Wei horsemen. The Wei general, realizing he had been tricked, killed himself. Sun Pin based his baiting of the Wei general on his knowledge of the man’s personality, which was arrogant and violent. By turning these qualities to his advantage, encouraging his enemy’s greed and aggression, Sun Pin could control the man’s mind. You, too, should look for the emotion that your enemies are least able to manage, then bring it to the surface. With a little work on your part, they will lay themselves open to your counterattack.

This principle of only hiring people who are better than the ones we currently have means we don’t make desperation hires to fill an open position. And the raise-the-average rule makes hiring decisions surprisingly easy. It’s easy to visualize in your mind the average person in your sales force or on your brewery floor or even in senior management and it’s easy for your intuition to evaluate whether a candidate is better than the average person. Your gut will tell you. If you’re used to traditional hiring, you might feel uncomfortable turning to intuition. Aren’t we taking too big a risk by relying on our gut feelings about somebody rather than rationally assessing facts such as past experience or education? I would counter that we’re fooling ourselves by not relying primarily on intuition. As recent neuroscience has shown, our brains don’t work rationally. If you hook a functional MRI machine to a chess grandmaster, you find that the best of them are not rationally calculating their next moves; they’re imagining what will happen, unconsciously bringing to bear the hundreds of thousands of moves they’ve already seen. They’re arriving at a feeling that guides their actions. They are using the nonrational part of their brain. The quantitatively logical part of your brain is pretty paltry. Just try counting by prime numbers while you’re multiplying other numbers by seventeen. Impossible. But reading emotions by looking at someone’s facial expressions while you’re navigating a crowded sidewalk is easy for your brain.

Such firms realize that in contrast to the concept of “terminal value” from net present value (NPV)–oriented calculations, what one has instead is “asset debt”—the investment necessary to keep all assets at competitive best in class.

IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.

We go back to our silent fishing, but I'm smiling the whole time. The tension has dimmed. Well, until Blake shoves Graham into the river. A gasp leaves me, my mouth hanging open as I watch my roommate sputter to the surface of the dirty water. I drop my fishing pole, frozen in place. My dad mutters, “What the hell?” Blake throws his head back and laughs like I have never seen nor heard him laugh before. The loud and hearty sound is cut off short when Graham comes barreling out of the water, his body aimed straight for him, his eyes daggers of retribution. He lunges for his brother, wrapping his arms around his stomach and heaving him toward the water. Blake stumbles back, landing on his rear just inside the water. The sound of jeans smacking into water is sharp. He swipes water out of his eyes as Graham smirks at him. “What is wrong with you two?” I demand, more annoyed than worried. They seem to be getting along, even if they are being brutish about it. Suddenly I have the attention of two wet men, twin calculating gleams in their eyes. Graham is closest, his steps slow and purposeful as he approaches me. “Don't even think about it.” I put my hands out in front of me to ward him off. His grin deepens as he reaches me. Water drips from his hair down his face to become one with his soggy clothes. “Don't think about what?” A glance over my shoulder tells me a tree, the first form of cover I think of, is too far away. Not one to give up, I move for it anyway, but a wet, strong hand grabs the back of my shirt and pulls me away from where I want to go until I am flush with a cold chest. Cold clothes; warm body, I should say. His skin is burning through the dampness of his shirt. “Graham, I swear, if you throw me in that water, I will never speak to you again.” His voice is low and close as he says, “You make it sound like that wouldn't be a good thing.” I haven't even finished my sound of incredulity before I am gathered into his arms, my arms unconsciously going around his neck to anchor me to him. His touch is gentle, his eyes are smiling. “I mean it. This won't be good for you.” “Oh, I don't know about that.” His arms swing out, and I tighten my hold on him, threatening him even as he is laughing at me. He does it again as we move closer to the water and I glare all my irk at him. “If I go, you go.” He tilts his head as he studies me. His voice is unnaturally sober as he tells me, “That's fine with me.” I don't have time to process that before he lets go of me. I hit the water, refusing to let go of his neck, and we both go under. Lucky for me, the water is only a couple feet deep. Unlucky for Graham, I twist around until I am straddling him, keeping him down with my weight so the only thing above water is his head. I give him a sweet smile. He doesn't return it. “Hi,” I purr. He grunts in response. “Fancy meeting you here.” “What can I say? Where you go, I follow.” I pat his cheek. “That's so sweet.” “I'm a sweet guy.” “So sweet,” I agree. “Hey! You're scaring the fish away.” This from Blake, who is now standing near my father. “The fish love me!” I declare, sweeping my arms out wide and losing my balance. I splash into the water, first laughing, and then choking as water goes down my throat. Graham lifts me out of the water by my shirt. “The weight of your arrogance obviously tipped you over.” “It was more like the air couldn't handle all my splendor.” Half of his mouth lifts. “Something like that.” “Fishing with the three of you is impossible,” Dad grumbles and stomps to the cooler, opening a can of soda and gulping it down

Is Bitcoin Mining Worth The Hype In 2021? The world of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies has experienced a whirlwind of ups and downs over the past few years. However, through its course, it has also witnessed dramatic growth, especially in 2020, and has also managed to keep up with the trends in the market. Since then, various new platforms similar to Bitcoin have started to appear. However, Bitcoin remains the king of them all, thanks to its decentralized type of cryptocurrency. However, even with Bitcoin, the value continues to grow along the same lines of their application process. And this is where many begin to wonder, “Is Bitcoin Mining Profitable or Worth it in 2021? This article will go through Bitcoin, how it works, and where it stands on the market today. So, let’s get started! How Does Bitcoin Mining Work? All transactions and payments made via Bitcoin are recorded and stored in the blockchain network. After you make a new transaction, the records will be forwarded for verification to the miners. This process of confirmation involves several calculations every minute to confirm the data send through the blockchain network. The more mining that is done and supplied with blockchain technology, the more Bitcoin will start to soar with the newer declining blocks over time. This is known as Bitcoin Halving, where the value continues to rise and diminish periodically. In any cryptocurrency (be it Bitcoin or Ethereum, and so on), mining is a vital element responsible for most of the prevalent coins. Moreover, it is an essential component that helps verify transactions, ensures the security of your network, infuses the cryptocurrency market, and so on. This helps create a scattered way through which cryptocurrency uses all the newly minted coins to offer bonuses and other rewards. In addition to this, some of the already existing cryptocurrency businesses like Ethereum are slowly moving from traditional mining (a.k.a proof-of-work) to skating (a.k.a proof-of-stake). This way, even though people’s reliance on mining will decrease, it will never completely disappear. Is Bitcoin Mining Still Profitable In 2021? The answer to this is a little bit complicated. Therefore, it will greatly help you if you take a lot of things into consideration. The reason is that there are several barriers to this. However, Bitcoin mining is still profitable in 2021. This company is slowly and steadily on its way to becoming a trillion-dollar asset, thanks to the continuing upward trends. As it becomes more and more sought after, people are slowly getting interested in educating themselves about the process of Bitcoin mining. Sure, mining is an expensive practice, as you will need to know the basics of technical knowledge on the software and hardware of Bitcoin mining. However, if you are determined to learn, you can easily find a way to learn mining to create a return or bonus Bitcoin. If you would like to know more on how to get free Bitcoin, take a general overview of the current Bitcoin mining situation to get an idea of where you need to begin. Bitcoin Mining Today Currently, for Bitcoin, price is paramount on a brisk hike where the value continues to grow over 340% more than last year. At the same time, its hash rate has also seen a meteoric uptrend in its hash rate, which was boosted to over 4.1% last year. This helped BTC to reach a whopping $63,500. However, it can still be a little challenging to track the stats of Bitcoin mining if it makes a good profit. This is because you will need a little insight into it. So, if you are curious about Bitcoin mining, we recommend you try it using GPUs. However, ASICs are also becoming extremely popular recently, but this is more suited for professional miners.

As I racked the balls, I held the last one in my palm, the way you might cradle the weight of a breast when your lover moves over you and your breath is searing in and out, in and out. As I leaned over the cue I let the yellow light handing low over the table slide over the hollows in my wrist up the long smooth muscle of my bare arms and lose itself in the dip and shadowed curve of collarbone and breasts. As I drew the cue-the long beautifully polished warm strong cue-back over the sensitive webbing between thumb and index finger, I enjoyed the sensation and let my face show it, and then I thrust with my hips with my arm with my cue, into the ball, through it, and the pretty-coloured triangle exploded into a dozen rolling pieces. I threw back my head and laughed as the balls dropped in the pockets: one, two, three. Around the table with the cue now, picking up the chalk-stroke it, rub it around the tip, the rounded velvet tip, cherish it, make sure that not a millimeter is ignored-laying my left breast plump against the felt and stroking that cue back and forth, back and forth, calculating, measuring, waiting as my breathing quickened my breathing quickened and the moment trembled then thrusting again, and round the table and again, and again and again until the felt was all green and clean and I straightened, nipples hard against the silk of my waistcoat, and smiled a slow, satiated smile. And then she smiled back at me from a table and stood and stepped forward like a young deer leaving the shelter of the trees.

Hire and Develop the Best: Leaders raise the performance bar with every hire and promotion. They recognize exceptional talent, and willingly move them throughout the organization. Leaders develop leaders and take seriously their role in coaching others. We work on behalf of our people to invent mechanisms for development like Career Choice. Insist on the Highest Standards: Leaders have relentlessly high standards—many people may think these standards are unreasonably high. Leaders are continually raising the bar and drive their teams to deliver high quality products, services, and processes. Leaders ensure that defects do not get sent down the line and that problems are fixed so they stay fixed. Think Big: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Leaders create and communicate a bold direction that inspires results. They think differently and look around corners for ways to serve customers. Bias for Action: Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk taking. Frugality: Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency and invention. There are no extra points for growing headcount, budget size or fixed expense.

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven't Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn't Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out: the Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment, the Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case, the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer, the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves, the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified. Now you have been able to reduce the countless embattled troops to an array that is, to be sure, very large but still calculable in a finite number; but this relative relief is then undermined by the ambush of the Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread and the Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them. With a zigzag and a dash you shake them off and leap straight into the citadel of the New Books Whose Author or Subject Appeals To You. Even inside this stronghold you can make some breaches in the ranks of the defenders, dividing them into New (for you in general) and New Books By Authors Or On Subjects Completely Unknown (at least to you), and defining the attraction they have for you on the basis of your desires and needs for the new and the not new (for the new you seek in the not new and for the not new you seek in the new). All this means that, having rapidly glanced over the titles of the volumes displayed in the bookshop, you turn toward a stack of If on a winter’s night a traveler fresh off the press, you have grasped a copy, and you have carried it to the cashier so that your right to own it can be established. You cast another bewildered look at the books around you (or, rather: it was the books that looked at you, with the bewildered gaze of dogs who, from their cages in the city pound, see a former companion go off on the leash of his master, come to rescue him), and out you went. You derive a special pleasure from a just-published book, and it isn’t only a book you are taking with you but the novelty as well, which could also merely be that of an object fresh from the factory, the youthful bloom of new books, which lasts until the dust jacket begins to yellow, until a veil of smog settles on the top edge, until the bindings become dog-eared, in the rapid autumn of libraries. No, you hope always to encounter true newness, which having been new once, will continue to be so. Having read the freshly published book, you will take possession of this newness at the first moment, without having to pursue, to chase it. Will it happen this time? You can never tell. Let’s see how it begins.

whole field and discipline of economics, by which we plan and justify what we do as a society, is simply riddled with absences, contradictions, logical flaws, and most important of all, false axioms and false goals. We must fix that if we can. It would require going deep and restructuring that entire field of thought. If economics is a method for optimizing various objective functions subject to constraints, then the focus of change would need to look again at those “objective functions.” Not profit, but biosphere health, should be the function solved for; and this would change many things. It means moving the inquiry from economics to political economy, but that would be the necessary step to get the economics right. Why do we do things? What do we want? What would be fair? How can we best arrange our lives together on this planet? Our current economics has not yet answered any of these questions. But why should it? Do you ask your calculator what to do with your life? No. You have to figure that out for yourself.

Traits of Companies That Attract Intrapreneurs 1. Their executives are comfortable taking calculated risks and encouraging creativity. 2. Their compensation plan incentivizes innovation and outstanding performers. 3. Their executives play offense (improve) instead of just playing defense (cover their asses). 4. Their executives elevate potential stars rather than hold them back. 5. Their executives actively seek out ideas from all layers of the organization. 6. Their executives actively look for young talent to keep the company vibrant and innovative.

Jackson used this tactic time and again when facing numerically superior forces. “Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible,” he said, “... such tactics will win every time and a small army may thus destroy a large one.” This law applies not only to war but to everyday situations. People are always trying to read the motives behind your actions and to use your predictability against you. Throw in a completely inexplicable move and you put them on the defensive. Because they do not understand you, they are unnerved, and in such a state you can easily intimidate them. Pablo Picasso once remarked, “The best calculation is the absence of calculation. Once you have attained a certain level of recognition, others generally figure that when you do something, it’s for an intelligent reason. So it’s really foolish to plot out your movements too carefully in advance. You’re better off acting capriciously.

In classical computing, all calculations—and all data—exploit whether a "bit" has the value of 0 or 1. Yes, it's all 0s and 1s. Our info-tech universe is binary. Quantum computing instead uses "qubits." A qubit can be a 0 or 1, just like its classical cousin. But a qubit can also be a continuous combination of 0 or 1: a little bit of 0 and a lot of 1; a lot of 0 and a little bit of 1; equal amounts of both; and everything in between. In quantum-speak we call this a superposition of the two states. Not knowing whether a qubit is a 0 or 1 is not a shortcoming of quantum computing; it's a coveted feature that challenges our binary brains to embrace it. In the universe, two or more seemingly contradictory facts can be simultaneously true. How about on Earth? Can you be both male and female? Can you be neither? Can you move fluidly between being a man and a woman? Is your sexual preference fluid too? Maybe we're all male-female qubits. Such questions are hard for some people to grasp, embedded in a culture that sees the world as a landscape of rigid categories, where things must be one or the other, and not fall on a continuum.

Just like the pro athletes do, you can start a few days ahead of time by doing the following: • Take ½ milligram of melatonin at specific times during the day (it depends on how many time zones you’re crossing and which direction you’re going). • Soak up (or avoid) bright light exposure in the mornings and/or evenings. • Gradually move your sleep and wake times to help you achieve alignment with the new time. • For the custom specifics you’ll need to make this work, talk to your doctor or a sleep physician once you know your travel details, or try a jet lag optimization calculator, which is easy to find online.

To work less and make more, all you need to do is move the needle on one metric: Effective Hourly Rate (EHR). Here’s how to calculate your EHR: Take the amount of revenue you make in a month and subtract your costs. What you have left is your monthly profit. (If you have a job, then your wage is your profit.) Divide your profit by the number of hours you worked in the month to get it. The number you have now is your EHR. Let’s say you make $20,000 a month in revenue, and your fixed and variable costs come to $15,000. That means your profit will be $5,000. If you work 250 hours a month to achieve that profit then: $5,000/250 = EHR $20/hour

I detected no danger to us, yet Shea was uneasy and certain we were not alone almost from the beginning. I dismissed her fears, thinking her separation from Jacques the cause.” “It was only Shea who could detect the vampire in the woods,” Jacques said. Shea found herself the center of attention. Instinctively she moved toward Jacques. He wrapped an arm around her waist, his body protective toward hers. “I know you’re all thinking it was Rand. I don’t want it to be him. I want to have a family.” “You have a family,” Mikhail said gently. “I am your family. Raven is your family. Our child will be, and of course you have Jacques. Someday you will have children.” He sent a slight grin in Gregori’s direction. “You can even claim the healer as family. We do, although he dislikes it intensely. We are together, and we are close. These past several days are not a real example of what our existence is like. We are under attack, and must defend ourselves. Most of the time our life is much like that of the human world. Do not judge us by recent days. These are exceptional times.” “Maybe Byron can tell us who betrayed him,” Shea suggested desperately. “Can’t we wait for what he has to say before we condemn Rand?” What was it that bothered her so much? And what was it Rand said had? Jacques held her close. “No one wants it to be Rand, little red hair, and you can be assured no one will act without certain proof.” Shea knew he was seeking to reassure her, even as he believed implicitly that her father was the betrayer. Some part of her knew it to be true. Away from Rand, she was able to see things more clearly. He wasn’t just a man confused and tormented by her mother’s death. He could be a calculating, cold killer. Shea closed her eyes, unable to face where her thoughts were going. Jacques could not be the one to take Rand’s life. He just couldn’t. Warmth flooded her mind, and his arm tightened protectively around her. There is no need for me to hunt Rand should he prove to be the vampire preying on our people. The others can take care of it. We can go far from this place if that is your desire, my love.

Rhythm is evident everywhere in the world. In the Way of Noh dance, minstrels with their wind and string instruments all have their own harmonious, regular rhythms. In the Way of martial arts, releasing an arrow, firing a gun and even riding a horse have distinctive cadences. Rhythm must never be contravened in any of the arts. Rhythm is also present in things that are invisible. For the samurai, there is rhythm in how he succeeds in service or falls from grace. There is rhythm for harmony and rhythm for discord. In the Way of commerce, there is cadence in the accumulation of great wealth and a rhythm for losing it. Each Way has its own rhythm. Judge carefully the rhythms signifying prosperity and those that spell regression. There are myriad rhythms in strategy. First, the warrior must know the cadence of harmony and then learn that of discord. He must know the striking, interval and counter cadences that manifest among big and small, fast and slow rhythms [between attacks]. In combat, it is critical for success to know how to adopt the “counter rhythm.” You must calculate the cadences of various enemies and employ a rhythm that is unexpected to them. Use your wisdom to detect and strike concealed cadences to seize victory. I devote much explanation to the question of cadence in all the scrolls. Consider what I record and train assiduously. As written above, your spirit will naturally expand through training diligently from morning to night in the Way of my school’s combat strategy. I hereby convey to the world for the first time in writing my strategy for collective and individual combat in the five scrolls of Ground, Water, Fire, Wind and Ether. For those who care to learn my principles of combat strategy, follow these rules in observing the Way: 1. Think never to veer from the Way 2. Train unremittingly in the Way 3. Acquaint yourself with all arts 4. Know the Ways of all vocations 5. Discern the truth in all things 6. See the intrinsic worth in all things 7. Perceive and know what cannot be seen with the eyes 8. Pay attention even to trifles 9. Do not engage in superfluous activities Train in the Way of combat strategy keeping these basic principles in mind. Particularly in this Way, inability to comprehensively see the most fundamental matters will make it difficult to excel. If you learn these principles successfully, however, you will not lose to twenty or even thirty foes. First, by dedicating your energies wholeheartedly to learning swordsmanship and practicing the “Direct Way,” you will defeat men through superior technique, and even beat them just by looking with your eyes. Your body will learn to move freely through the rigors of arduous training and you will also overcome your opponent physically. Furthermore, with your spirit attuned to the Way you will triumph over the enemy with your mind.

Rhythm must never be contravened in any of the arts. Rhythm is also present in things that are invisible. For the samurai, there is rhythm in how he succeeds in service or falls from grace. There is rhythm for harmony and rhythm for discord. In the Way of commerce, there is cadence in the accumulation of great wealth and a rhythm for losing it. Each Way has its own rhythm. Judge carefully the rhythms signifying prosperity and those that spell regression. There are myriad rhythms in strategy. First, the warrior must know the cadence of harmony and then learn that of discord. He must know the striking, interval and counter cadences that manifest among big and small, fast and slow rhythms [between attacks]. In combat, it is critical for success to know how to adopt the “counter rhythm.” You must calculate the cadences of various enemies and employ a rhythm that is unexpected to them. Use your wisdom to detect and strike concealed cadences to seize victory. I devote much explanation to the question of cadence in all the scrolls. Consider what I record and train assiduously. As written above, your spirit will naturally expand through training diligently from morning to night in the Way of my school’s combat strategy. I hereby convey to the world for the first time in writing my strategy for collective and individual combat in the five scrolls of Ground, Water, Fire, Wind and Ether. For those who care to learn my principles of combat strategy, follow these rules in observing the Way: 1. Think never to veer from the Way 2. Train unremittingly in the Way 3. Acquaint yourself with all arts 4. Know the Ways of all vocations 5. Discern the truth in all things 6. See the intrinsic worth in all things 7. Perceive and know what cannot be seen with the eyes 8. Pay attention even to trifles 9. Do not engage in superfluous activities Train in the Way of combat strategy keeping these basic principles in mind. Particularly in this Way, inability to comprehensively see the most fundamental matters will make it difficult to excel. If you learn these principles successfully, however, you will not lose to twenty or even thirty foes. First, by dedicating your energies wholeheartedly to learning swordsmanship and practicing the “Direct Way,” you will defeat men through superior technique, and even beat them just by looking with your eyes. Your body will learn to move freely through the rigors of arduous training and you will also overcome your opponent physically. Furthermore, with your spirit attuned to the Way you will triumph over the enemy with your mind. Having come so far, how can you be beaten by anyone? In the case of large-scale strategy [implemented by generals, victory is had in many forms]: win at having men of excellence, win at maneuvering large numbers of men [effectively], win at conducting oneself properly, win at governance, win at nourishing the people, and win at conducting the laws of the world the way they are meant to be.

Current theories on the creation of the Universe state that, if it were created at all and didn't just start, as it were, unofficially, it came into being between ten and twenty thousand million years ago. By the same token the Earth itself is generally supposed to be about four and a half thousand million years old. These dates are incorrect. Medieval Jewish scholars put the date of the Creation at 3760 BC. Greek Orthodox theologians put Creation as far back as 5508 BC. These suggestions are also incorrect. Archbishop James Ussher (1580-1656) published 'Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti' in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 BC. One of his aides took the calculation further, and was able to announce triumphantly that the Earth was created on Sunday the 21st of October, 4004 BC, at exactly 9.00 a.m., because God liked to get work done early in the morning while he was feeling fresh. This too was incorrect. By almost a quarter of an hour. The whole business with the fossilized dinosaur skeletons was a joke the paleontologists haven't seen yet. This proves two things: Firstly, that God moves in extremely mysterious, not to say, circuitous ways. God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared from the perspective of any of the other players, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time. Secondly, the Earth's a Libra. The astrological prediction for Libra in the 'Your Stars Today' column of the 'Tadfield Advertiser', on the day this history begins, read as follows:- "LIBRA. 24 September-23 October. You may be feeling run down and always in the same old daily round. Home and family matters are highlighted and are hanging fire. Avoid unnecessary risks. A friend is important to you. Shelve major decisions until the way ahead seems clear. You may be vulnerable to a stomach upset today, so avoid salads. Help could come from an unexpected quarter." This was perfectly correct on every count except for the bit about the salads.

What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing? What is Freelancing? We already know that, Now let's see What to do to be an Expert in Freelancing - Things to do for Self Development: Get positive feedback from clients by practicing what you are good at, and finding work that matches your skills. This is the key to your improvement and the first step to success. When you start to succeed, choose the opportunities that work best for you. Use the time appropriately and fully. Some of the processes of Self-Presentation after Self-Development are discussed below - Process of Introducing Yourself: 1. Enhance your profile and build your portfolio with accurate information about yourself. 2. Create your own signature that will identify you in your work. 3. Always use your own photo and signature for original work. 4. Run your own campaign. For example: commenting on others' posts, making full use of social sites, keeping in touch with others, doing service work, teaching others, participating in various seminars, and distributing leaflets or posters. Showing Professionalism: How to express or calculate that you are a professional? There are many ways, by which you can easily express that you are a professional entrepreneur or employee. The ways are: 1. Professionals never work for free, so before starting a job, you must be sure about the remuneration. 2. Professionals don't work on balance, if you want to show professionalism you must pay in cash or promise to pay half in advance and the rest at the end of the job. 3. A professional never lacks any research or communication for his work. Win the Client's Heart: There are thousands of freelancers in front of a client for a job, but only one gets the job. The person who got the job got it because he presented himself in the client's mind. Mistakes to Avoid: Only humans are fallible. It is natural for people to make mistakes, but if people can't learn from those mistakes then it is better not to make such mistakes. The Mistakes are: 1. Failure to identify oneself. 2. Show Engagement. 3. Lack of communication with the client etc. Being Punctual: It is wise to do the work on time. Never leave work. Because if you leave work, the amount of work will increase and not decrease. Therefore, it is better to do the work of time in time and move towards the formation of life by being respectful of time. So, if the above tasks are done or followed correctly, achieving success as a freelancer is just a saying. To make yourself a successful and efficient freelancer, the importance and importance of the above topics is immense.

Forgiveness is never about measuring the wrong against you, about weighing the injuries and calculating the moral equation. It’s about freeing yourself to move on, and allowing the other person to move on, too. It’s unlocking the room you’re trapped in together.

*EVEN IF YOU HAVE SELF-DOUBT, SELF-DENIAL, SELF-HATRED, THIS CHATURMASYA TILL VIJAYADASHAMI - OCTOBER 15TH, DECIDE TO SPEND YOUR TIME AND SPACE ON THE GREAT TRUTH - CONSCIOUS SOVEREIGNTY. DECIDE TO REALISE CONSCIOUS SOVEREIGNTY, ESPECIALLY MANIFESTING POWERS THROUGH CONSCIOUS SOVEREIGNTY. *WE CALL THIS CHATURMASYA, BECAUSE BY THE HINDU CALENDAR IT IS CALCULATED FROM PURNIMA TO PURNIMA. USUALLY AFTER VIJAYADASHAMI THERE WILL BE CELEBRATION FOR 2-3 DAYS. TILL THAT PURNIMA, IT IS CHATURMASYA AND AFTER THAT THE SANYASIS HAVE TO START MOVING.

Respect the distance, take each breath purposefully, make every step count, calculate the surges, watch your heart rate, stay hydrated, maintain your calories. Do all of these things continuously while remaining incorruptibly patient. An ultramarathon moves slowly very quickly.

We have heard that when it arrived in Europe, zero was treated with suspicion. We don't think of the absence of sound as a type of sound, so why should the absence of numbers be a number, argued its detractors. It took centuries for zero to gain acceptance. It is certainly not like other numbers. To work with it requires some tough intellectual contortions, as mathemati­cian Ian Stewart explains. "Nothing is more interesting than nothing, nothing is more puzzling than nothing, and nothing is more important than nothing. For mathematicians, nothing is one of their favorite topics, a veritable Pandora's box of curiosities and paradoxes. What lies at the heart of mathematics? You guessed it: nothing. "Word games like this are almost irresistible when you talk about nothing, but in the case of math this is cheat­ing slightly. What lies at the heart of math is related to nothing, but isn't quite the same thing. 'Nothing' is ­well, nothing. A void. Total absence of thingness. Zero, however, is definitely a thing. It is a number. It is, in fact, the number you get when you count your oranges and you haven't got any. And zero has caused mathematicians more heartache, and given them more joy, than any other number. "Zero, as a symbol, is part of the wonderful invention of 'place notation.' Early notations for numbers were weird and wonderful, a good example being Roman numerals, in which the number 1,998 comes out as MCMXCVIII ­one thousand (M) plus one hundred less than a thousand (CM) plus ten less than a hundred (XC) plus five (V) plus one plus one plus one (III). Try doing arithmetic with that lot. So the symbols were used to record numbers, while calculations were done using the abacus, piling up stones in rows in the sand or moving beads on wires.

much capacity is sufficient? When you’ve raised your AeT to be within 10 percent (elite athletes can have a Z3 spread of 6–7 percent or only 10 beats) of your LT as measured by either heart rate or pace. With more than a 10 percent spread between thresholds, an athlete still has aerobic deficiency and needs to build more aerobic base. Those who have less than a 10 percent spread between thresholds will need to reduce or even drop Z2 training, substituting Z3 workouts. Here’s how to do the 10 percent test: Determine your AeT using one of the methods described on pages 152 to 155 (AeT Testing). Then do the LT test (see page 155). Calculate the percentage difference between the AeT heart rate and the LT heart rate by dividing the higher heart rate by the lower heart rate. We know this is not the conventional way to calculate percentage, but it works well for our purposes. Example: Suppose your AeT heart rate is 128 as determined by a laboratory test. Your LT hill-climb test shows an average heart rate of 150. 150/128 = 1.17. This shows that the LT heart rate is 17 percent greater than the AeT heart rate. You still have a lot of potential to improve your aerobic base with Z1–2 and should not be too eager to move to adding Z3 or higher intensity yet. ZONE

Sorry, Commander. Just finishing off this carrot. Ahm…Dublin, let’s see. Seventy-five…Eighteen seventy-five.” “I thought so! This place is completely different. The humans have even managed to change the shape of the coastline.” Foaly was silent for a moment. Root could just imagine him wrestling with the problem. The centaur did not like to be told that any part of his system was out of date. “Okay,” he said at last. “Here’s what I’m going to do. We have a Scope on a satellite TV bird with a footprint in Ireland.” “I see,” muttered Root—which was basically a lie. “I’m going to e-mail last week’s sweep direct to your visor. Luckily there’s a video card in all the new helmets.” “Luckily.” “The tricky bit will be to coordinate your flight pattern with the video feed.…” Root had had enough. “How long, Foaly?” “Ahm…Two minutes, give or take.” “Give or take what?” “About ten years if my calculations are off.” “They’d better not be off then. I’ll hover until we know.” One hundred and twenty-four seconds later, Root’s black-and-white blueprints faded out, to be replaced by full-color daylight imaging. When Root moved, it moved, and Holly’s locator beacon dot moved too. “Impressive,” said Root. “What was that, Commander?” “I said impressive,” shouted Root. “No need to get a swelled head.” The commander heard the sound of a roomful of laughter, and realized that Foaly had him on the speakers. Everyone had heard him complimenting the centaur’s work. There’d be no talking to him for at least a month. But it was worth it. The video he was receiving now was bang up to date. If Captain Short was being held in a building, the

The Confessor laughed gently. “How very sweet. But you’re not quite one of them, are you, Cass? You’re worth more than any of them. This Piper, at least, must have realized what you could be worth to them, or he’d have killed you as soon as he got hold of you, to be rid of Zach.” She cocked her head slightly as she stared at me. “Though I’m beginning to wonder whether I didn’t overestimate you. Whether we all didn’t. I’m sure you have your moments. I’m guessing we have you to thank for the evacuation of most of the islanders; probably the fire at New Hobart, too. But I’m surprised at your blind spots. You still haven’t harnessed what you’re capable of, it seems.” She’d drawn even closer to us, but as always it was her mental presence that was most confronting. The calculation behind her still eyes; the probing that made me want to wince. “You’re disappointing, Cass. Like these machines. It turns out they’re not everything we might have hoped. Oh, they’re great for storing the information. It’s all in there.” She waved vaguely at the stacks of machines below. “You should have seen the record chambers at Wyndham, before Zach and I had it moved into the computers here. They had the information, but it was so unwieldy. Now, if I need to find something straightforward, it’s phenomenally good. Think of the thousands of clerks we’d need, all scuttling about with millions of files, just to keep track of the basic details. With the computer, it’s all synthesized, in one system. Like a live thing. So I can tap into it, interact with it, use the information as fluently as thinking. If we’d stayed with paper records, we’d never have been able to do what we’ve done.” “And what a tragic loss that would be.

Most people assume that life is like a game of chess, each decision cold, calculating and ultimately leading toward one large goal - our purpose in life, whatever that may be. I've never agreed with that idea. To me, like is like Jenga; we stack decisions on top of one another without a guide or any real idea of what we're doing. One wrong move causes it to all come crashing down, leaving you to deal with the ruins your life has become.

May I help you?" She did not look up. "You've miscalculated column F." What in hell? "I have not." She pushed her glasses up her nose and tucked a stray strand of blond hair behind her ear, entirely focused on the ledger. "You have. The proper calculation should be one hundred and twelve thousand, three hundred forty-six and seventeen pence." Impossible. He stood, moving to look over her shoulder. "That's what it says." She shook her head, placing one long finger on the tabulation line. He noticed the tip of the finger was slightly crooked, leaning a touch to the right. "You've written one hundred twelve thousand, three hundred, forty-five and seventeen pence. You-" She looked up at him, eyes owl-like behind her spectacles as she took in his height and his bare chest. "You- you've lost a quid." He bent over her, deliberately crowding her and enjoying the way her breath caught at his nearness. "That is a six." She cleared her throat and looked again. "Oh." She leaned in and checked the number again. "I suppose you've lost your handwriting skills, instead," she said dryly, and he chuckled as she reached for a pencil and repaired the number. He watched, riveted to the callus at the tip of her second finger, before he whispered low in her ear, "Are you an accounting fairy sent in the dead of night to check my figures?" She leaned away from the whisper and and turned to look at him. "It's one o'clock in the afternoon," she said, matter-of-factly, and he had an intense desire to take her spectacles from her face and kiss her senseless, just to see what this odd young woman would say.

Reason #1: Downtime Aids Insights Consider the following excerpt from a 2006 paper that appeared in the journal Science: The scientific literature has emphasized the benefits of conscious deliberation in decision making for hundreds of years… The question addressed here is whether this view is justified. We hypothesize that it is not. Lurking in this bland statement is a bold claim. The authors of this study, led by the Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis, set out to prove that some decisions are better left to your unconscious mind to untangle. In other words, to actively try to work through these decisions will lead to a worse outcome than loading up the relevant information and then moving on to something else while letting the subconscious layers of your mind mull things over. Dijksterhuis’s team isolated this effect by giving subjects the information needed for a complex decision regarding a car purchase. Half the subjects were told to think through the information and then make the best decision. The other half were distracted by easy puzzles after they read the information, and were then put on the spot to make a decision without having had time to consciously deliberate. The distracted group ended up performing better. Observations from experiments such as this one led Dijksterhuis and his collaborators to introduce unconscious thought theory (UTT)—an attempt to understand the different roles conscious and unconscious deliberation play in decision making. At a high level, this theory proposes that for decisions that require the application of strict rules, the conscious mind must be involved. For example, if you need to do a math calculation, only your conscious mind is able to follow the precise arithmetic rules needed for correctness. On the other hand, for decisions that involve large amounts of information and multiple vague, and perhaps even conflicting, constraints, your unconscious mind is well suited to tackle the issue. UTT hypothesizes that this is due to the fact that these regions of your brain have more neuronal bandwidth available, allowing them to move around more information and sift through more potential solutions than your conscious centers of thinking. Your conscious mind, according to this theory, is like a home computer on which you can run carefully written programs that return correct answers to limited problems, whereas your unconscious mind is like Google’s vast data centers, in which statistical algorithms sift through terabytes of unstructured information, teasing out surprising useful solutions to difficult questions. The implication of this line of research is that providing your conscious brain time to rest enables your unconscious mind to take a shift sorting through your most complex professional challenges. A shutdown habit, therefore, is not necessarily reducing the amount of time you’re engaged in productive work, but is instead diversifying the type of work you deploy.

No!” she screams as I cover her body with mine. “Get off me!” I still have the kitchen knife in my hand, and once I’ve calculated my next move, I force the tip of the sharp blade into the wood right beside her head quicker than the eye can see, right above her shoulder. “Ah!” she squeaks and then sobs. “Oh, God. Please!” Reaching in my back pocket, I take out my own knife and force it into the table beside her head on the other side, locking her in. Just a little friendly persuasion. “Now―” I sigh, cracking my neck. “I didn’t want to do all this. But you gave me no other choice, sweetheart. You’re locked in a prison of your own devise.

The first neuroscientists who studied decision-making were surprised to find that people who’d damaged the logical, calculating areas of their brains had no trouble making good choices. On the other hand, when people had damaged parts of their brains that handled emotion, they became unable to make any kind of decision. They would weigh options endlessly, dithering and comparing, but never moving forward. They could reason all day, but they couldn’t recognize a good decision if it bit them on both legs.