Calculated Moves Quotes

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

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.

Yes, you see, there’s no such thing as coincidence. There are no accidents in life. Everything that happens is the result of a calculated move that leads us to where we are.

When he wants to be? She says it like it’s the endorsement of the year, but the way I see it, people should be nice because they are, not because it’s a calculated move on their part.

So Rhys went against orders, and marched in his whole legion to get Myriam out. For his friend, for my lover- and for that bastard Drakon's sake. Rhys sacrificed his legion in the process, got all of them captured and tortured afterward. Yet everyone insists Rhysand is soulless, wicked. But the male I knew was the most decent of them all. Better than that prick-prince. You don't lose that quality, no matter the centuries, and Rhys was too smart to do anything but have the vilification of his character be a calculated move. And yet here you are- his mate. The most powerful High Lord in the world lost his mate, and has not yet come to claim her, even when she is defenseless in the woods." Jurian Chuckled. "Perhaps that's because Rhysand has not lost you at all. But rather unleashed you upon us.

He moved like a jungle cat, all purposeful, calculated motion—wrapped up in fluid grace.

Sex was a practiced art to him. Each move calculated. His brain always worked while he performed, his body seducing his prey with ease, noting each response of his target. But in one moment, everything had changed. She swept him into a tidal wave of pure sensation, and he willingly let go and let her take him with her.

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.

To practice space is thus to repeat the joyful and silent experience of childhood; it is, in a place, to be other and to move toward the other...Kandinsky dreamed of: 'a great city built according to all the rules of architecture and then suddenly shaken by a force that defies all calculation.

The Trump marriage veered furthest away from my concept of the union — and surprised me most as a student of American politics. Donald and Melania seem to inhabit separate realms and to come together when necessary, when one could not move forward without the other. The presidency was one instance in which they were forced into a joint undertaking. If my choice of language sounds businesslike, that’s because that’s how I’ve come to view the Trumps. Having learned more about each partner’s history, I believe they are two highly ambitious individuals who benefit from their partnership. It’s a transaction: he gains a beautiful woman on his arm, a solid-seeming marriage, a son, and a savvy adviser. She gains wealth and international cachet.

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.

Archbishop James Usher (1580-1656) published Annales Veteris et Novi Testaments in 1654, which suggested that the Heaven and the Earth were created in 4004 B.C. 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 B.C., 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, [ie., everybody.] 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.

A bell cannot tell time, but it can be moved in just such a way as to say twelve o’clock – similarly, a man cannot calculate infinite numbers, but he can be moved in just such a way as to say pi.

Sculley found Jobs as memorable as his machine. " He seemed more a showman than a businessman. Every move seemed calculated, as if it was rehearsed, to create an occasion of the moment.

From this, one can make a deduction which is quite certainly the ultimate truth of jigsaw puzzles: despite appearances, puzzling is not a solitary game: every move the puzzler makes, the puzzlemaker has made before; every piece the puzzler picks up, and picks up again, and studies and strokes, every combination he tries, and tries a second time, every blunder and every insight, each hope and each discouragement have all been designed, calculated, and decided by the other.

The word courage is very interesting. It comes from a Latin root cor, which means “heart.” So to be courageous means to live with the heart. And weaklings, only weaklings, live with the head; afraid, they create a security of logic around themselves. Fearful, they close every window and door—with theology, concepts, words, theories—and inside those closed doors and windows, they hide. The way of the heart is the way of courage. It is to live in insecurity; it is to live in love, and trust; it is to move in the unknown. It is leaving the past and allowing the future to be. Courage is to move on dangerous paths. Life is dangerous, and only cowards can avoid the danger—but then, they are already dead. A person who is alive, really alive, vitally alive, will always move into the unknown. There is danger there, but he will take the risk. The heart is always ready to the the risk, the heart is a gambler. The head is a businessman. The head always calculates—it is cunning. The heart is noncalculating. This

I know he has something in mind because this man doesn't fly by the seat of his pants. He's done this enough to be calculating, his every move premeditated.

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.

The one who moves like a dancer, not always in Fluidity, but in calculation. As though anticipating each step, mapping out each movement.

ALONE One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard. I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing. After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.

I don't want to know more about her; don't want to know her weaknesses or calculate them. What I have is not for her; he gives me to understand she would not know what to do with it; it's not her fault. --One is married and there is nothing to be done.-- Yet he has said to me, I would marry you if I could, meaning: I want very much to marry you. I offended him a bit by not being moved. It's other things he's said that are the text I'm living by. I really do not know if I want any form of public statement, status, code; such as marriage. There's nothing more private and personal than the life of a mistress, is there? Outwardly, no one even knows we are responsible to each other.... 'This is the creature that has never been'--he told me a line of poetry about that unicorn, translated from German. A mythical creature. Un paradis inventé.

Producing a high body count was crucial for promotion in the officer corps. Many high-level officers established “production quotas” for their units, and systems of “debit” and “credit” to calculate exactly how efficiently subordinate units and middle-management personnel performed. Different formulas were used, but the commitment to war as a rational production process was common to all.11

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in,—glittering like the morning-star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream that, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.—But the age of chivalry is gone.—That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness.

My head ached. I was thinking of the pain, and wondering how it was possible for physical agony to be so intense. I had never imagined that such a torture could be endured. Yet here was I, both conscious and able to think clearly. And not only to think, but to observe the process and make calculations about it. The steel circle round my skull was closing in with faint cracking noises. How much farther could it shrink? I counted the cracking sounds. Since I took the triple dose of pain-killer, there had been two more. …I took out my watch and laid it on the table. “Give me morphia,” I said in a calm, hostile, icy tone. “You mustn’t take morphia! You know perfectly well. The very idea! And what are you doing with that watch?” “You will give me morphia within three minutes.” They looked me uneasily up and down. No one moved. Three minutes went by. Then ten more. I slipped the watch calmly into my pocket and rose unsteadily to my feet. “Then take me to the Fiakker Bar. They say it’s a good show, and to-night I want to enjoy myself.” The others jumped up with a feeling of relief. I never confessed the secret to anyone, either then or afterwards. I had made up my mind at the end of those three minutes — for the first and last time in my life — that if my headache had not stopped within the next ten I should throw myself under the nearest tram. It never came out whether I should have kept to my resolve, for the pain left with the suddenness of lighting.

Dushegubs are calculating, homicidal, moving trees that feed on animal life. They know that other creatures have emotions and what those emotions are, and they don’t care. Their first option is murder, their second option is murder, and if that fails, they go straight to murder.” “Well, at least they have their priorities straight.

Moreover, events often move too quickly to allow for precise calculation; leaders have to make judgments based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of decision. Management of risk is as critical to the leader as analytical skill.

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

Illness strips you back to an authentic self, but not one you need to meet. Too much is claimed for authenticity. Painfully we learn to live in the world, and to be false. Then all our defences are knocked down in one sweep. In sickness we can’t avoid knowing about our body and what it does, its animal aspect, its demands. We see things that never should be seen; our inside is outside, the body’s sewer pipes and vaults exposed to view, as if in a woodcut of our own martyrdom. The whole of life – the business of moving an inch – requires calculation. The suffering body must shape itself around the iron dawn routine, which exists for the very sick as well as the convalescent: the injection in the abdomen, pain relief, blood tests as needed, then the long haul out of bed, the shaking progress to the bathroom, the awesome challenge of washcloth and soap.

The longer they stayed on, and the better they knew each other, the better she at least could see their mistake, and the more misguided their lives became—like a long proof in mathematics in which the first calculation is wrong, following which all other calculations move you further away from how things were when they made sense.

Indeed, the calculated costs and benefits of passion and perseverance don’t always add up, at least in the short run. It’s often more “sensible” to give up and move on. It can be years or more before grit’s dividends pay off.

Starvation was the first indication of my self-discipline. I was devoted to anorexia. I went the distance of memorizing the calorie content within every bite of food while calculating the exact amount of exercise I needed to burn double my consumption. I was luckily young enough to mask my excessive exercise with juvenile hyperactivity. Nobody thought twice about the fact that I was constantly rollerblading, biking, and running for hours in stifling summer humidity. I learned to cut my food into tiny bites and move it around my plate. I read that standing burned more calories than sitting, so I refused to watch television without doing crunches, leg lifts, or at least walking in place. When socially forced to soldier through a movie, I tapped my foot in desperation to knock out about seventy-five extra calories. From age eleven to twelve, I dropped forty pounds and halted the one period I’d had.

A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can’t be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

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.

She moved lightly. I want to say that it was gentle and serene, like a fawn through snow. But Indigo’s grace was restrained, calculated, as if she knew that people like her could stomp the world into submission and she had no wish to bruise it further.

risk is everywhere and we all do take risk everyday, knowingly or unknowingly.Ordinary risk produces ordinary men and extraordinary risk equals extraordinary men. The unique line of boundary between the ordinary and the extraordinary is the risk they both take. Great and extraordinary people patiently take a visionary, calculated and an avant-garde risk regardless of the susurrant and cacophonic call of the masses to retreat. They fall, they learn and they move. Without taking a thoughtful risk, we risk our lives unthoughtfully each day

I've often wondered what people mean when they talk about an experience. I'm a technologist and accustomed to seeing things as they are. I see everything they are talking about very clearly; after all, I'm not blind. I see the moon over the Tamaulipas desert--it is more distinct than at other times, perhaps, but still a calculable mass circling around our planet, an example of gravitation, interesting, but in what way an experience? I see the jagged rocks, standing out black against the moonlight; perhaps they do look like the jagged backs of prehistoric monsters, but I know they are rocks, stone, probably volcanic, one should have to examine them to be sure of this. Why should I feel afraid? There aren't any prehistoric monsters any more. Why should I imagine them? I'm sorry, but I don't see any stone angels either; nor demons; I see what I see--the usual shapes due to erosion and also my long shadow on the sand, but no ghosts. Why get womanish? I don't see any Flood either, but sand lit up by the moon and made undulating, like water, by the wind, which doesn't surprise me; I don't find it fantastic, but perfectly explicable. I don't know what the souls of the damned look like; perhaps like black agaves in the desert at night. What I see are agaves, a plant that blossoms once only and dies. Furthermore, I know (however I may look at the moment) that I am not the last or the first man on earth; and I can't be moved by the mere idea that I am the last man, because it isn't true. Why get hysterical? Mountains are mountains, even if in a certain light they may look like something else, but it is the Sierra Madre Oriental, and we are not standing in a kingdom of the dead, but in the Tamaulipas desert, Mexico, about sixty miles from the nearest road, which is unpleasant, but in what way an experience? Nor can I bring myself to hear something resembling eternity; I don't hear anything, apart from the trickle of sand at every step. Why should I experience what isn't there?

CALCULATED RISKS IN LIFE ARE NECESSARY TO MOVE FORWARD.

I didn’t know then that this was just part of DC, that everyone was always looking ahead to the next step, peeking around to see what other people were doing, calculating the next move.

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!

In 1761, we moved to the town of Marlow, where we remained until we had four children. When we moved there it was no other than a desolate and dreary wilderness. Only four families resided within forty miles. Here I was thrown into a situation to appreciate more fully the talents and virtues of my excellent wife; for, as our children were deprived of schools, she assumed the charge of their education, and performed the duties of an instructress as none, save a mother, is capable of. Precepts accompanied with examples such as hers, were calculated to make impressions on the minds of the young, never to be forgotten.

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.

The ancient observed, and we also observe, that sometimes things fall to earth, or some things leave the earth, or whatever parts we may be near. Whence, he says, and we may also say if we like, that something has moved either upward or downward, but only with regard to a certain region, or in a certain perspective, something passing from us to the moon would look the opposite to those across from us on the moon; where we would say, something has ascended, those moon people, our anticephali, would say that something has descended. Such motions, therefore, make no distinction between up and down, hither and thither with respect to the infinite universe, but only the finite world in which we are, or within the boundaries of the infinite worlds' horizons, or according to the calculations of the innumerable stars; hence, the same thing, with the same motion, can be regarded differently and called at the same time "rising" and "falling". Determinate bodies, therefore, do not have infinite motion, but finite and determinate calculation within their own limits. But that which is indeterminate and infinite has neither finite nor infinite motion, and knows no differentiation of space or time.

Not just that every day more of our life is used up and less and less of it is left, but this too: if we live longer, can we be sure our mind will still be up to understanding the world—to the contemplation that aims at divine and human knowledge? If our mind starts to wander, we’ll still go on breathing, go on eating, imagining things, feeling urges and so on. But getting the most out of ourselves, calculating where our duty lies, analyzing what we hear and see, deciding whether it’s time to call it quits—all the things you need a healthy mind for . . . all those are gone. So we need to hurry. Not just because we move daily closer to death but also because our understanding—our grasp of the world—may be gone before we get there.

The relationship between physics and war is clear: the ruler and the general want to threaten or obliterate targets; destruction requires energy; the physicist is the expert on matter, motion, and energy. It's the physicist who invents the bomb. But to destroy a target, you have to locate it precisely, identify it accurately, and track it as it moves. That's where astrophysics comes in. Neither protagonists nor accomplices, astrophysicists are accessories to war. We don't design the bombs. We don't make the bombs. We don't calculate the damage a bomb will wreak. Instead, we calculate how stars in our galaxy self-destruct through thermonuclear explosions – calculations that may prove helpful to those who do design and make thermonuclear bombs.

In Korea, math moved fluidly. When the teacher asked questions, the kids answered as if math were a language that they knew by heart. As in Tom’s class in Poland, calculators weren’t allowed, so kids had learned mental tricks to manipulate numbers quickly.

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.

He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her into another kiss, and she melted into him, pressing as close as she could, and still he wanted to be closer. Her fingers threading into his hair, his around her waist, moving, exploring. Calculations had no room here, probability and chances washed away to a deeper longing. His tongue traced the contour of her lips, memorizing her taste, her motion, her method. The kiss lit a million suns in between his zeroes and ones, and made him infinite. He did not want to let go. He did not want to leave--he WOULD not. It was that voice that cried this, deep inside him, growing louder and louder. It was selfish. It was damning. But he did not want to forget the taste of her, her warmth, her curves, her smell. It was selfish and it was human. And for a moment he allowed himself to be. Until finally, she slid away, coming up for air. "You, too?" she whispered, her breath hot against his lips, hopeful, her eyes blazing like suns rising for him. He pressed his forehead against hers. "On iron and stars," he promised.

It happened to me. And I'll never forget it. Back when I was in the sixth grade, my whole family went out to go watch a baseball game at the stadium. I didn't really care about baseball, but I was surprised by what I saw when we got there. Everywhere I looked, I saw people. On the other side of the stadium, the people looked so small, like little moving grains of rice. It was so crowded. I thought that everyone in Japan had to be packed in there. So I turned to my dad and asked him, "Do you know how many people are here right now"? He said since the stadium was full, probably fifty thousand. After the game, the street was filled with people and I was really shocked to see that, too. To me, it seemed like there was a ton of people there. But then, I realized it could only be a tiny fraction of all the people in Japan. When I got home, I pulled out my calculator. In social studies, I'd learned that the population of Japan was a hundred some odd million. So I divided that by fifty thousand. The answer was one two-thousandth. That shocked me even more. I was only one little person in that big crowded stadium filled with people, and believe me, there were so many people there, but it was just a handful of the entire population. Up till then, I always thought that I was, I don't know, kind of a special person. It was fun to be with my family. I had fun with my classmates. And the school that I was going to, it had just about the most interesting people anywhere. But that night, I realized it wasn't true. All the stuff we did during class that I thought was so fun and cool, was probably happening just like that in classes in other schools all over Japan. There was nothing special about my school at all. When I realized that, it suddenly felt like the whole world around me started to fade into a dull gray void. Brushing my teeth and going to sleep at night, waking up and eating breakfast in the morning, that stuff happened all over the place. They were everyday things that everybody was doing. When I thought about it like that, everything became boring. If there's really that many people in the world, then there had to be someone who wasn't ordinary. There had to be someone who was living an interesting life. There just had to be. But why wasn't I that person? So, that's how I felt till I finished elementary school. And then I had another realization. I realized fun things wouldn't come my way just by waiting for them. I thought when I got into junior high, it was time for me to make a change. I'd let the world know I wasn't a girl who was happy sitting around waiting. And I've done my best to become that person. But in the end, nothing happened. More time went by and before I knew it, I was in high school. I thought that something would change.

Hindsight suggests that in spite of my obsession with my search, I must have chosen to spin my wheels. Perhaps I knew in the depths of my being that it would be difficult, and possibly more painful than it was worth, to reconnect with a parent who had left me without word and had never made any attempt to be in touch. And so, after a while, the search degenerated into the idea of the search, and for a time it was my romance. Sometimes there are elaborate calculations that lead to action, and sometimes there is no cognition, just action impetuously taken.

One could be forgiven for supposing that rationality (or, more softly, ‘reasonableness’) is irrelevant – and even possibly opposed – to being a good lover. This is perhaps because we tend to think of love as a feeling, rather than as an achievement of intelligence. A reasonable or rational person is not one who is only interested in logic, or someone who tries in a cold, robotic fashion to substitute calculation and analysis for kindness or yearning. We are reasonable when we are moved by accurate explanation. Thus a reasonable person is slow to anger; they do not jump to conclusions

For people condemned to death, tradition prescribes an austere ceremony, calculated to emphasize that all passions and anger have died down, and that the act of justice represents only a sad duty towards society which moves even the executioner to pity for the victim. Thus the condemned man is shielded from all external cares, he is granted solitude and, should he want it, spiritual comfort; in short, care is taken that he should feel around him neither hatred nor arbitrariness, only necessity and justice, and by means of punishment, pardon. But to us this was not granted, for we were many and time was short. And in any case, what had we to repent, for what crime did we need pardon?

We used to pay too little attention to utopias, or even disregard them altogether, saying with regret they were impossible of realisation. Now indeed they seem to be able to be brought about far more easily than we supposed, and we are actually faced by an agonising problem of quite another kind: how can we prevent their final realisation? ... Utopias are more realisable than those 'realist politics' that are only the carefully calculated policies of office-holders, and towards utopias we are moving. But it is possible that a new age is already beginning, in which cultured and intelligent people will dream of ways to avoid ideal states and to get back to a society that is less 'perfect' and more free.

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.

The Python was a double-action weapon, which meant the same trigger pull cocked the hammer and then dropped it, so he started early, getting the cylinder turning while the gun was still moving, seeing the hammer come up, feeling the cams and the levers, waiting, then firing, trusting millisecond timing and momentum and deflection and complex four-dimensional calculations.

This way of thinking about risk caused many investors to increase their exposures beyond what would normally be seen as prudent. They looked at the recent volatility in their VAR calculations, and by and large expected it to continue moving forward. This is human nature and it was dumb because past volatility and past correlations aren’t reliable forecasts of future risks.

As glitch feminists, this is our politic: we refuse to be hewn to the hegemonic line of a binary body. This calculated failure prompts the violent socio-cultural machine to hiccup, sigh, shudder, buffer. We want a new framework and for this framework, we want new skin. The digital world provides a potential space where this can play out. Through the digital, we make new worlds and dare to modify our own. Through the digital, the body 'in glitch' finds its genesis. Embracing the glitch is therefore a participatory action that challenges the status quo. It creates a homeland for those traversing the complex channels of gender's diaspora. The glitch is for those selves joyfully immersed in the in-between, those who have traveled away from their assigned site of gendered origin. The ongoing presence of the glitch generates a welcome and protected space in which to innovate and experiment. Glitch feminism demands an occupation of the digital as a means of world-building. It allows us to seize the opportunity to generate new ideas and resources for the ongoing (r)evolution of bodies that can inevitably move and shift faster than AFK mores or the societies that produce them under which we are forced to operate offline.

And are we not guilty of offensive disparagement in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art, hovering between those categories as Muhammad’s coffin hovered between heaven and earth, a unique link between pairs of opposites: ancient yet eternally new; mechanical in structure, yet made effective only by the imagination; limited to a geometrically fixed space, yet with unlimited combinations; constantly developing, yet sterile; thought that leads nowhere; mathematics calculating nothing; art without works of art; architecture without substance – but nonetheless shown to be more durable in its entity and existence than all books and works of art; the only game that belongs to all nations and all eras, although no one knows what god brought it down to earth to vanquish boredom, sharpen the senses and stretch the mind. Where does it begin and where does it end? Every child can learn its basic rules, every bungler can try his luck at it, yet within that immutable little square it is able to bring forth a particular species of masters who cannot be compared to anyone else, people with a gift solely designed for chess, geniuses in their specific field who unite vision, patience and technique in just the same proportions as do mathematicians, poets, musicians, but in different stratifications and combinations. In the old days of the enthusiasm for physiognomy, a physician like Gall might perhaps have dissected a chess champion’s brain to find out whether some particular twist or turn in the grey matter, a kind of chess muscle or chess bump, is more developed in such chess geniuses than in the skulls of other mortals. And how intrigued such a physiognomist would have been by the case of Czentovic, where that specific genius appeared in a setting of absolute intellectual lethargy, like a single vein of gold in a hundredweight of dull stone. In principle, I had always realized that such a unique, brilliant game must create its own matadors, but how difficult and indeed impossible it is to imagine the life of an intellectually active human being whose world is reduced entirely to the narrow one-way traffic between black and white, who seeks the triumphs of his life in the mere movement to and fro, forward and back of thirty-two chessmen, someone to whom a new opening, moving knight rather than pawn, is a great deed, and his little corner of immortality is tucked away in a book about chess – a human being, an intellectual human being who constantly bends the entire force of his mind on the ridiculous task of forcing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board, and does it without going mad!

The faculty of re-solution is possibly much invigorated by mathematical study, and especially by that highest branch of it which, unjustly, and merely on account of its retrograde operations, has been called, as if par excellence, analysis. Yet to calculate is not in itself to analyse. A chess-player, for example, does the one without effort at the other. It follows that the game of chess, in its effects upon mental character, is greatly misunderstood. I am not now writing a treatise, but simply prefacing a somewhat peculiar narrative by observations very much at random; I will, therefore, take occasion to assert that the higher powers of the reflective intellect are more decidedly and more usefully tasked by the unostentatious game of draughts than by a the elaborate frivolity of chess. In this latter, where the pieces have different and bizarre motions, with various and variable values, what is only complex is mistaken (a not unusual error) for what is profound. The attention is here called powerfully into play. If it flag for an instant, an oversight is committed resulting in injury or defeat. The possible moves being not only manifold but involute, the chances of such oversights are multiplied; and in nine cases out of ten it is the more concentrative rather than the more acute player who conquers. In draughts, on the contrary, where the moves are unique and have but little variation, the probabilities of inadvertence are diminished, and the mere attention being left comparatively unemployed, what advantages are obtained by either party are obtained by superior acumen. To be less abstract, let us suppose a game of draughts where the pieces are reduced to four kings, and where, of course, no oversight is to be expected. It is obvious that here the victory can be decided (the players being at all equal) only by some recherché movement, the result of some strong exertion of the intellect. Deprived of ordinary resources, the analyst throws himself into the spirit of his opponent, identifies himself therewith, and not unfrequently sees thus, at a glance, the sole methods (sometime indeed absurdly simple ones) by which he may seduce into error or hurry into miscalculation.

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.

Suddenly Arthur began to feel his apparently nonexistent scalp begin to crawl as he found himself moving slowly but inexorably forward toward the console, but it was only a dramatic zoom on the part of whoever had made the recording, he assumed. “I speak of none but the computer that is to come after me,” intoned Deep Thought, his voice regaining its accustomed declamatory tones. “A computer whose merest operational parameters I am not worthy to calculate—and yet I will design it for you. A computer that can calculate the Question to the Ultimate Answer, a computer of such infinite and subtle complexity that organic life itself shall form part of its operational matrix. And you yourselves shall take on new forms and go down into the computer to navigate its ten-million-year program! Yes! I shall design this computer for you. And I shall name it also unto you. And it shall be called … the Earth.

I wanted to be moved but it was a performance I'd seen too many times. Here is the part of the service where you sit. Here you stand. Here you bow. Here you proclaim unwavering belief. I stared into my prayer book, hoping my face gave nothing away, but just in case, I pulled the brim of my black silk hat lower - as constricted as I felt by it, at least it provided a place to hide. I counted pages, averaged how many we were covering per minute, and calculated when we would be done - the same game I'd played as a child when time had passed unbearably slowly.

For the psychologist Paul Bloom, this is a huge downside. Empathy, he argues, focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale.62 As Bertrand Russell is often reported to have said, “The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep,”63 but few of us are capable of truly feeling statistics in this way. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good. And yet the incentives to show empathy and spontaneous compassion are overwhelming. Think about it: Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses—“calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet, or “emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them? Sensing that emoters, rather than calculators, are generally preferred as allies, our brains are keen to advertise that we are emoters. Spontaneous generosity may not be the most effective way to improve human welfare on a global scale, but it’s effective where our ancestors needed it to be: at finding mates and building a strong network of allies.

The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again.

...computer technology functions more as a new mode of transportation than as a new means of substantive communication. It moves information—lots of it, fast, and mostly in a calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment of Descartes’ dream of the mathematization of the world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the process reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed), it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs.

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

without flaw, trying to calculate his surroundings and predicament. Knowledge flooded his thoughts, facts and images, memories and details of the world and how it works. He pictured snow on trees, running down a leaf-strewn road, eating a hamburger, the moon casting a pale glow on a grassy meadow, swimming in a lake, a busy city square with hundreds of people bustling about their business. And yet he didn’t know where he came from, or how he’d gotten inside the dark lift, or who his parents were. He didn’t even know his last name. Images of people flashed across his mind, but there was no recognition, their faces replaced with haunted smears of color. He couldn’t think of one person he knew, or recall a single conversation. The room continued its ascent, swaying; Thomas grew immune to the ceaseless rattling of the chains that pulled him upward. A long time passed. Minutes stretched into hours, although it was impossible to know for sure because every second seemed an eternity. No. He was smarter than that. Trusting his instincts, he knew he’d been moving for roughly half an hour. Strangely enough, he felt his fear whisked away like a swarm of gnats caught in the wind, replaced by an intense

For instance, the United States now has the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world: 39.1 percent (35 percent federal tax plus the average state tax). Even in Sweden, it’s only 22 percent. In France, it’s 34.4 percent—and their leaders are actual, card-carrying socialists! If that’s not enough to scare corporations away from building factories in America, consider all the other disincentives placed on them: the Obamacare mandates; the explosion of government regulations from the EPA, the FTC, and the whole alphabet soup of federal agencies; the fact that if they want to move money they made and had already paid taxes on in other nations back to America, where it could create jobs, we tax it again, eliminating their profits. The private research firm Audit Analytics calculated that between 2008 and 2013, American-owned corporations amassed over $2.1 trillion in profits overseas that were not brought back to the United States to be reinvested because they would be subject to double taxation. Imagine how big a “stimulus” it would be to job creation here at home to inject $2.1 trillion of nonborrowed money directly into private sector investment. Companies used to run to America; now they run from America.

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…

Gradually, his movements are freed from the shackles of his will, and he goes into a light trance which gives his gestures the perfection of conscious, automatic motion, without thought or calculation, and the scythe seems to move of its own accord. Levin delights in the forgetfulness that movement brings, where the pleasure of doing is marvelously foreign to the striving of the will. This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this—ridiculous journal of an aging concierge—if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsolicited proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.

From Bourcet he learnt the principle of calculated dispersion to induce the enemy to disperse their own concentration preparatory to the swift reuniting of his own forces. Also, the value of a 'plan with several branches', and of operating in a line which threatened alternative objectives. Moreover, the very plan which Napoleon executed in his first campaign was based on one that Bourcet had designed half a century earlier. Form Guibert he acquired an idea of the supreme value of mobility and fluidity of force, and of the potentialities inherent in the new distribution of an army in self-contained divisions. Guibert had defined the Napoleonic method when he wrote, a generation earlier: 'The art is to extend forces without exposing them, to embrace the enemy without being disunited, to link up the moves or the attacks to take the enemy in flank without exposing one's own flank.' And Guibert's prescription for the rear attack, as the means of upsetting the enemy's balance, became Napoleon's practice. To the same source can be traced Napoleon's method of concentrating his mobile artillery to shatter, and make a breach at, a key point in the enemy's front. Moreover, it was the practical reforms achieved by Guibert in the French army shortly before the Revolution which fashioned the instrument that Napoleon applied. Above all, it was Guibert's vision of a coming revolution in warfare, carried out by a man who would arise from a revolutionary state, that kindled the youthful Napoleon's imagination and ambition. While Napoleon added little to the ideas he had imbibed, he gave them fulfilment. Without his dynamic application the new mobility might have remained merely a theory. Because his education coincided with his instincts, and because these in turn were given scope by his circumstances, he was able to exploit the full possibilities of the new 'divisional' system. In developing the wider range of strategic combinations thus possible Napoleon made his chief contribution to strategy.

The fundamental problem with learning mathematics is that while the number sense may be genetic, exact calculation requires cultural tools—symbols and algorithms—that have been around for only a few thousand years and must therefore be absorbed by areas of the brain that evolved for other purposes. The process is made easier when what we are learning harmonizes with built-in circuitry. If we can’t change the architecture of our brains, we can at least adapt our teaching methods to the constraints it imposes. For nearly three decades, American educators have pushed “reform math,” in which children are encouraged to explore their own ways of solving problems. Before reform math, there was the “new math,” now widely thought to have been an educational disaster. (In France, it was called les maths modernes and is similarly despised.) The new math was grounded in the theories of the influential Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who believed that children are born without any sense of number and only gradually build up the concept in a series of developmental stages. Piaget thought that children, until the age of four or five, cannot grasp the simple principle that moving objects around does not affect how many of them there are, and that there was therefore no point in trying to teach them arithmetic before the age of six or seven.

What of the chain? Its position, defined by C, begins at 0 and reaches 1 when its next link moves forward to the fatal position, then 2 and so on. The chain must move in synch with the teeth on the sprocket at the center of the rear wheel, and that sprocket has n teeth, and so after a complete revolution of the rear wheel, when theta = 0 again, C = n. After a second complete revolution of the rear wheel, once again theta = 0 but now C = 2n. The next time it’s C = 3n and so on. But remember that the chain is not an infinite linear thing, but a loop having only l positions; at C = l it loops back around to C = 0 and repeats the cycle. So when calculating the value of C

The Roman general wanted to spare Archimedes, because he was so valuable—sort of like the Einstein of the ancient world—but some stupid Roman soldier killed him.” “There you go again,” Hazel muttered. “Stupid and Roman don’t always go together, Leo.” Frank grunted agreement. “How do you know all this, anyway?” he demanded. “Is there a Spanish tour guide around here?” “No, man,” Leo said. “You can’t be a demigod who’s into building stuff and not know about Archimedes. The guy was seriously elite. He calculated the value of pi. He did all this math stuff we still use for engineering. He invented a hydraulic screw that could move water through pipes.” Hazel scowled. “A hydraulic screw. Excuse me for not knowing about that awesome achievement.” “He also built a death ray made of mirrors that could burn enemy ships,” Leo said. “Is that awesome enough for you?” “I saw something about that on TV,” Frank admitted. “They proved it didn’t work.” “Ah, that’s just because modern mortals don’t know how to use Celestial bronze,” Leo said. “That’s the key. Archimedes also invented a massive claw that could swing on a crane and pluck enemy ships out of the water.” “Okay, that’s cool,” Frank admitted. “I love grabber-arm games.” “Well, there you go,” Leo said. “Anyway, all his inventions weren’t enough. The Romans destroyed his city. Archimedes was killed.

As soon as we look at the nature of inference at this many-moves-ahead level of perception, our attitude toward probability theory and the proper way to use it in science becomes almost diametrically opposite to that expounded in most current textbooks. We need have no fear of making shaky calculations on inadequate knowledge; for if our predictions are indeed wrong, then we shall have an opportunity to improve that knowledge, an opportunity that would have been lost had we been too timid to make the calculations. Instead of fearing wrong predictions, we look eagerly for them; it is only when predictions based on our present knowledge fail that probability theory leads us to fundamental new knowledge.

On 7 December 2017 a critical milestone was reached, not when a computer defeated a human at chess –that’s old news –but when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 was the world’s computer chess champion for 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as to decades of computer experience. It was able to calculate 70 million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only 80,000 such calculations per second, and its human creators never taught it any chess strategies –not even standard openings. Rather, AlphaZero used the latest machine-learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of a hundred games the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish, AlphaZero won twenty-eight and tied seventy-two. It didn’t lose even once. Since AlphaZero learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to human eyes. They may well be considered creative, if not downright genius. Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours. That’s not a typo. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide. 18

On December 7, 2017, a critical milestone was reached, not when a computer defeated a human at chess—that’s old news—but when Google’s AlphaZero program defeated the Stockfish 8 program. Stockfish 8 was the world’s computer chess champion for 2016. It had access to centuries of accumulated human experience in chess, as well as decades of computer experience. It was able to calculate seventy million chess positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero performed only eighty thousand such calculations per second, and its human creators had not taught it any chess strategies—not even standard openings. Rather, AlphaZero used the latest machine-learning principles to self-learn chess by playing against itself. Nevertheless, out of a hundred games the novice AlphaZero played against Stockfish, AlphaZero won twenty-eight and tied seventy-two. It didn’t lose even once. Since AlphaZero had learned nothing from any human, many of its winning moves and strategies seemed unconventional to the human eye. They may well be considered creative, if not downright genius. Can you guess how long it took AlphaZero to learn chess from scratch, prepare for the match against Stockfish, and develop its genius instincts? Four hours. That’s not a typo. For centuries, chess was considered one of the crowning glories of human intelligence. AlphaZero went from utter ignorance to creative mastery in four hours, without the help of any human guide.18

[Chang Yu relates the following anecdote of Kao Tsu, the first Han Emperor: “Wishing to crush the Hsiung-nu, he sent out spies to report on their condition. But the Hsiung-nu, forewarned, carefully concealed all their able-bodied men and well-fed horses, and only allowed infirm soldiers and emaciated cattle to be seen. The result was that spies one and all recommended the Emperor to deliver his attack. Lou Ching alone opposed them, saying: “When two countries go to war, they are naturally inclined to make an ostentatious display of their strength. Yet our spies have seen nothing but old age and infirmity. This is surely some ruse on the part of the enemy, and it would be unwise for us to attack.” The Emperor, however, disregarding this advice, fell into the trap and found himself surrounded at Po-teng.”] 19.  Thus one who is skillful at keeping the enemy on the move maintains deceitful appearances, according to which the enemy will act. [Ts’ao Kung’s note is “Make a display of weakness and want.” Tu Mu says: “If our force happens to be superior to the enemy’s, weakness may be simulated in order to lure him on; but if inferior, he must be led to believe that we are strong, in order that he may keep off. In fact, all the enemy’s movements should be determined by the signs that we choose to give him.” Note the following anecdote of Sun Pin, a descendent of Sun Wu: In 341 B.C., the Ch’i State being at war with Wei, sent T’ien Chi and Sun Pin against the general P’ang Chuan, who happened to be a deadly personal enemy of the later. Sun Pin said: “The Ch’i State has a reputation for cowardice, and therefore our adversary despises us. Let us turn this circumstance to account.” Accordingly, when the army had crossed the border into Wei territory, he gave orders to show 100,000 fires on the first night, 50,000 on the next, and the night after only 20,000. P’ang Chuan pursued them hotly, saying to himself: “I knew these men of Ch’i were cowards: their numbers have already fallen away by more than half.” In his retreat, Sun Pin came to a narrow defile, with he calculated that his pursuers would reach after dark. Here he had a tree stripped of its bark, and inscribed upon it the words: “Under this tree shall P’ang Chuan die.” Then, as night began to fall, he placed a strong body of archers in ambush near by, with orders to shoot directly they saw a light. Later on, P’ang Chuan arrived at the spot, and noticing the tree, struck a light in order to read what was written on it. His body was immediately riddled by a volley of arrows, and his whole army thrown into confusion. [The above is Tu Mu’s version of the story; the SHIH CHI, less dramatically but probably with more historical truth, makes P’ang Chuan cut his own throat with an exclamation of despair, after the rout of his army.] ] He sacrifices something, that the enemy may snatch at it. 20.  By holding out baits, he keeps him on the march; then with a body of picked men he lies in wait for him. [With an emendation suggested by Li Ching, this then reads, “He lies in wait with the main body of his troops.”] 21.  The clever combatant looks to the effect of combined energy, and does not require too much from individuals.

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.

Every year, Earth, and the Solar System with it, move some 500 million km (310 million miles) from where they were the previous year. It has been calculated that even the slightest deviation from celestial bodies' paths could have drastic consequences which might spell the end of the entire system. For example, the consequences of the Earth's deviating from its course by a mere 3 mm have been described in one source as follows: While rotating around the sun, the earth follows such an orbit that, every 18 miles, it only deviates 2.8 millimetres from a direct course. The orbit followed by the earth never changes, because even a deviation of 3 millimetres would cause catastrophic disasters: If the deviation were 2.5 mm instead of 2.8 mm, then the orbit would be very large, and all of us would freeze. If the deviation were 3.1 mm, we would be scorched to death.

The Ingallses had no way of knowing it, but the locust swarm descending upon them was the largest in recorded human history. It would become known as “Albert’s swarm”: in Nebraska, a meteorologist named Albert Child measured its flight for ten days in June, telegraphing for further information from east and west, noting wind speed and carefully calculating the extent of the cloud of insects. He startled himself with his conclusions: the swarm appeared to be 110 miles wide, 1,800 miles long, and a quarter to a half mile in depth. The wind was blowing at ten miles an hour, but the locusts were moving even faster, at fifteen. They covered 198,000 square miles, Child concluded, an area equal to the states of Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont combined.49 “This is utterly incredible,” he wrote, “yet how can we put it aside?”50 The cloud consisted of some 3.5 trillion insects.

They marched for the sake of the march. They plodded along slowly, dumbly, leaning forward against the heat, unthinking, all blood and bone, simple grunts, soldiering with their legs, toiling up the hills and down into the paddies and across the rivers and up again and down, just humping, one step and then the next and then another, but no volition, no will, because it was automatic, it was anatomy, and the war was entirely a matter of posture and carriage, the hump was everything, a kind of inertia, a kind of emptiness, a dullness of desire and intellect and conscience and hope and human sensibility. Their principles were in their feet. Their calculations were biological. They had no sense of strategy or mission. They searched the villages without knowing what to look for, not caring, kicking over jars of rice, frisking children and old men, blowing tunnels, sometimes setting fires and sometimes not, then forming up and moving on to the next village, then other villages, where it would always be the same.

Until the coming of quantum mechanics, nothing happened to modify in any degree what is the essential purport of the first two laws of motion, namely this: that the laws of dynamics are to be stated in terms of accelerations. In this respect, Copernicus and Kepler are still to be classed with the ancients; they sought laws stating the shapes of the orbits of the heavenly bodies. Newton made it clear that laws stated in this form could never be more than approximate. The planets do not move in exact ellipses, because of the perturbations caused by the attractions of other planets. Nor is the orbit of a planet ever exactly repeated, for the same reason. But the law of gravitation, which dealt with accelerations, was very simple, and was thought to be quite exact until two hundred years after Newton's time. When it was amended by Einstein, it still remained a law dealing with accelerations. It is true that the conservation of energy is a law dealing with velocities, not accelerations. But in calculations which use this law it is still accelerations that have to be employed.

But to kill men leads to nothing but killing more men. For one principle to triumph, another principle must be overthrown. The city of light of which Spartacus dreamed could only have been built on the ruins of eternal Rome, of its institutions and of its gods. Spartacus’ army marches to lay siege to a Rome paralyzed with fear at the prospect of having to pay for its crimes. At the decisive moment, however, within sight of the sacred walls, the army halts and wavers, as if it were retreating before the principles, the institutions, the city of the gods. When these had been destroyed, what could be put in their place except the brutal desire for justice, the wounded and exacerbated love that until this moment had kept these wretches on their feet.2 In any case, the army retreated without having fought, and then made the curious move of deciding to return to the place where the slave rebellion originated, to retrace the long road of its victories and to return to Sicily. It was as though these outcasts, forever alone and helpless before the great tasks that awaited them and too daunted to assail the heavens, returned to what was purest and most heartening in their history, to the land of their first awakening, where it was easy and right to die. Then began their defeat and martyrdom. Before the last battle, Spartacus crucified a Roman citizen to show his men the fate that was in store for them. During the battle, Spartacus himself tried with frenzied determination, the symbolism of which is obvious, to reach Crassus, who was commanding the Roman legions. He wanted to perish, but in single combat with the man who symbolized, at that moment, every Roman master; it was his dearest wish to die, but in absolute equality. He did not reach Crassus: principles wage war at a distance and the Roman general kept himself apart. Spartacus died, as he wished, but at the hands of mercenaries, slaves like himself, who killed their own freedom with his. In revenge for the one crucified citizen, Crassus crucified thousands of slaves. The six thousand crosses which, after such a just rebellion, staked out the road from Capua to Rome demonstrated to the servile crowd that there is no equality in the world of power and that the masters calculate, at a usurious rate, the price of their own blood.

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.

Once again, he was deducing a theory from principles and postulates, not trying to explain the empirical data that experimental physicists studying cathode rays had begun to gather about the relation of mass to the velocity of particles. Coupling Maxwell’s theory with the relativity theory, he began (not surprisingly) with a thought experiment. He calculated the properties of two light pulses emitted in opposite directions by a body at rest. He then calculated the properties of these light pulses when observed from a moving frame of reference. From this he came up with equations regarding the relationship between speed and mass. The result was an elegant conclusion: mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing. There is a fundamental interchangeability between the two. As he put it in his paper, “The mass of a body is a measure of its energy content.” The formula he used to describe this relationship was also strikingly simple: “If a body emits the energy L in the form of radiation, its mass decreases by L/V 2.” Or, to express the same equation in a different manner: L=mV 2. Einstein used the letter L to represent energy until 1912, when he crossed it out in a manuscript and replaced it with the more common E. He also used V to represent the velocity of light, before changing to the more common c. So, using the letters that soon became standard, Einstein had come up with his memorable equation: E=mc2

In the last few years I have been advocating a methodology of scientific research programmes, which solves some of the problems which both Popper and Kuhn failed to solve. First, I claim that the typical descriptive unit of great scientific achievements is not an isolated hypothesis but rather a research programme. Science is not simply trial and error, a series of conjectures and refutations. ‘All swans are white’ may be falsified by the discovery of one black swan. But such trivial trial and error does not rank as science. Newtonian science, for instance, is not simply a set of four conjectures—the three laws of mechanics and the law of gravitation. These four laws constitute only the ‘hard core’ of the Newtonian programme. But this hard core is tenaciously protected from refutation by a vast ‘protective belt’ of auxiliary hypotheses. And, even more importantly, the research programme also has a ‘heuristic’, that is, a powerful problem-solving machinery, which, with the help of sophisticated mathematical techniques, digests anomalies and even turns them into positive evidence. For instance, if a planet does not move exactly as it should, the Newtonian scientist checks his conjectures concerning atmospheric refraction, concerning propaga­tion of light in magnetic storms, and hundreds of other conjectures which are all part of the programme. He may even invent a hitherto unknown planet and calculate its position, mass and velocity in order to explain the anomaly.

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.

Tim bid us good-bye after helping us carry in my three-hundred-pound suitcase, and Marlboro Man and I looked around our quiet house, which was spick-and-span and smelled of fresh paint and leather cowboy boots, which lined the wall near the front door. The entry glowed with the light of the setting sun coming in the window, and I reached down to grab one of my bags so I could carry it to the bedroom. But before my hand made it to the handle, Marlboro Man grabbed me tightly around the waist and carried me over to the leather sofa, where we fell together in a tired heap of jet lag, emotional exhaustion, and--ironically, given the week we’d just endured--a sudden burst of lust. “Welcome home,” he said, nuzzling his face into my neck. Mmmm. This was a familiar feeling. “Thank you,” I said, closing my eyes and savoring every second. As his lips made their way across my neck, I could hear the sweet and reassuring sound of cows in the pasture east of our house. We were home. “You feel so good,” he said, moving his hands to the zipper of my casual black jacket. “You do, too,” I said, stroking the back of his closely cut hair as his arms wrapped more and more tightly around my waist. “But…uh…” I paused. My black jacket was by now on the floor. “I…uh…,” I continued. “I think I need to take a shower.” And I did. I couldn’t do the precise calculation of what it had meant for my hygiene to cross back over the international date line, but as far as I was concerned, I hadn’t showered in a decade. I couldn’t imagine christening our house in such a state. I needed to smell like lilac and lavender and Dove soap on the first night in our little house together. Not airline fuel. Not airports. Not clothes I’d worn for two days straight. Marlboro Man chuckled--the first one I’d heard in many days--and as he’d done so many times during our months of courtship, he touched his forehead to mine. “I need one, too,” he said, a hint of mischief in his voice. And with that, we accompanied each other to the shower, where, with a mix of herbal potions, rural water, and determination, we washed our honeymoon down the drain.

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.

One possibility is that many of these universes are unstable and decay to our familiar universe. We recall that the vacuum, instead of being a boring, featureless thing, is actually teeming with bubble universes popping in and out of existence, like in a bubble bath. Hawking called this the space-time foam. Most of these tiny bubble universes are unstable, jumping out of the vacuum and then jumping back in. In the same way, once the final formulation of the theory is found, one might be able to show that most of these alternate universes are unstable and decay down to our universe. For example, the natural time scale for these bubble universes is the Planck time, which is 10−43 seconds, an incredibly short amount of time. Most universes only live for this brief instant. Yet the age of our universe, by comparison, is 13.8 billion years, which is astronomically longer than the lifespan of most universes in this formulation. In other words, perhaps our universe is special among the infinity of universes in the landscape. Ours has outlasted them all, and that is why we are here today to discuss this question. But what do we do if the final equation turns out to be so complex that it cannot be solved by hand? Then it seems impossible to show that our universe is special among the universes in the landscape. At that point I think we should put it in a computer. This is the path taken for the quark theory. We recall that the Yang-Mills particle acts like a glue to bind quarks into a proton. But after fifty years, no one has been able to rigorously prove this mathematically. In fact, many physicists have pretty much given up hope of ever accomplishing it. Instead, the Yang-Mills equations are solved on a computer. This is done by approximating space-time as a series of lattice points. Normally, we think of space-time being a smooth surface, with an infinite number of points. When objects move, they pass through this infinite sequence. But we can approximate this smooth surface with a grid or lattice, like a mesh. As we let the spacing between lattice points get smaller and smaller, it becomes ordinary space-time, and the final theory begins to emerge. Similarly, once we have the final equation for M-theory, we can put it on a lattice and do the computation on a computer. In this scenario, our universe emerges from the output of a supercomputer. (However, I am reminded of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, when a gigantic supercomputer is built to find the meaning of life. After eons doing the calculation, the computer finally concluded that the meaning of the universe was “forty-two.”)

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

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.

Yoel Goldenberg makes exhibitions, photographs, models and media craftsmanship. His works are an examination of ideas, for example, validness and objectivity by utilizing an exhaustive methodology and semi exploratory exactness and by referencing documentaries, 'actuality fiction' and prominent experimental reciprocals. Yoel Goldenberg as of now lives and works in Brooklyn. By challenging the division between the domain of memory and the domain of experience, Goldenberg formalizes the circumstantial and underlines the procedure of synthesis that is behind the apparently arbitrary works. The manners of thinking, which are probably private, profoundly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream universes, are much of the time uncovered as collections. His practice gives a valuable arrangement of metaphorical instruments for moving with a pseudo-moderate approach in the realm of execution: these fastidiously arranged works reverberate and resound with pictures winnowed from the fantastical domain of creative energy. By trying different things with aleatoric procedures, Yoel Goldenberg makes work in which an interest with the clarity of substance and an uncompromising demeanor towards calculated and insignificant workmanship can be found. The work is detached and deliberate and a cool and unbiased symbolism is utilized. His works are highlighting unplanned, unintentional and sudden associations which make it conceivable to overhaul craftsmanship history and, far and away superior, to supplement it. Consolidating random viewpoints lead to astounding analogies. With a theoretical methodology, he ponders the firmly related subjects of file and memory. This regularly brings about an examination of both the human requirement for "definitive" stories and the inquiry whether tales "fictionalize" history. His gathered, changed and own exhibitions are being faced as stylishly versatile, specifically interrelated material for memory and projection. The conceivable appears to be genuine and reality exists, yet it has numerous countenances, as Hanna Arendt refers to from Franz Kafka. By exploring dialect on a meta-level, he tries to approach a wide size of subjects in a multi-layered route, likes to include the viewer in a way that is here and there physical and has faith in the thought of capacity taking after structure in a work. Goldenberg’s works are straightforwardly a reaction to the encompassing environment and uses regular encounters from the craftsman as a beginning stage. Regularly these are confined occasions that would go unnoticed in their unique connection. By utilizing a regularly developing file of discovered archives to make self-ruling works of art, he retains the convention of recognition workmanship into every day hone. This individual subsequent and recovery of a past custom is vital as a demonstration of reflection. Yoel’s works concentrate on the powerlessness of correspondence which is utilized to picture reality, the endeavor of dialog, the disharmony in the middle of structure and content and the dysfunctions of dialect. To put it plainly, the absence of clear references is key components in the work. With an unobtrusive moderate methodology, he tries to handle dialect. Changed into craftsmanship, dialect turns into an adornment. Right then and there, loads of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are intrinsic to the sensation, rise up to the top

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.

gave up on the idea of creating “socialist men and women” who would work without monetary incentives. In a famous speech he criticized “equality mongering,” and thereafter not only did different jobs get paid different wages but also a bonus system was introduced. It is instructive to understand how this worked. Typically a firm under central planning had to meet an output target set under the plan, though such plans were often renegotiated and changed. From the 1930s, workers were paid bonuses if the output levels were attained. These could be quite high—for instance, as much as 37 percent of the wage for management or senior engineers. But paying such bonuses created all sorts of disincentives to technological change. For one thing, innovation, which took resources away from current production, risked the output targets not being met and the bonuses not being paid. For another, output targets were usually based on previous production levels. This created a huge incentive never to expand output, since this only meant having to produce more in the future, since future targets would be “ratcheted up.” Underachievement was always the best way to meet targets and get the bonus. The fact that bonuses were paid monthly also kept everyone focused on the present, while innovation is about making sacrifices today in order to have more tomorrow. Even when bonuses and incentives were effective in changing behavior, they often created other problems. Central planning was just not good at replacing what the great eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith called the “invisible hand” of the market. When the plan was formulated in tons of steel sheet, the sheet was made too heavy. When it was formulated in terms of area of steel sheet, the sheet was made too thin. When the plan for chandeliers was made in tons, they were so heavy, they could hardly hang from ceilings. By the 1940s, the leaders of the Soviet Union, even if not their admirers in the West, were well aware of these perverse incentives. The Soviet leaders acted as if they were due to technical problems, which could be fixed. For example, they moved away from paying bonuses based on output targets to allowing firms to set aside portions of profits to pay bonuses. But a “profit motive” was no more encouraging to innovation than one based on output targets. The system of prices used to calculate profits was almost completely unconnected to the value of new innovations or technology. Unlike in a market economy, prices in the Soviet Union were set by the government, and thus bore little relation to value. To more specifically create incentives for innovation, the Soviet Union introduced explicit innovation bonuses in 1946. As early as 1918, the principle had been recognized that an innovator should receive monetary rewards for his innovation, but the rewards set were small and unrelated to the value of the new technology. This changed only in 1956, when it was stipulated that the bonus should be proportional to the productivity of the innovation. However, since productivity was calculated in terms of economic benefits measured using the existing system of prices, this was again not much of an incentive to innovate. One could fill many pages with examples of the perverse incentives these schemes generated. For example, because the size of the innovation bonus fund was limited by the wage bill of a firm, this immediately reduced the incentive to produce or adopt any innovation that might have economized on labor.