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I'll take a potato chip...AND EAT IT!!
-For le famous anime/manga "Death Note
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Tsugumi Ohba (Death Note, Vol. 2: Confluence (Death Note, #2))
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At Lockwood & Co., George was famous for not being able to throw or catch with any accuracy. Back in the kitchen at Portland Row, even the casual passing out of fruit or bags of chips became an exercise fraught with danger.
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Jonathan Stroud (The Creeping Shadow (Lockwood & Co., #4))
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I’ll be back with the sandwiches,” she said. “But I had some leftover seven-layer dip.”
“Yum.” Percy dug in with a tortilla chip. “She’s kinda famous for this, guys.”
Sally ruffled his hair. “There’s guacamole, sour cream, refried beans, salsa—”
“Seven layers?” I looked up in wonder. “You knew seven is my sacred number? You invented this for me?”
Sally wiped her hands on her apron. “Well, actually, I can’t take credit—”
“You are too modest!” I tried some of the dip. It tasted almost as good as ambrosia nachos. “You will have immortal fame for this, Sally Jackson!
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Rick Riordan (The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo, #1))
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God, all those months of seeing Kelsey’s pictures and hearing about her travels, and I had been raging with jealousy. And now it was my turn.
I wanted to mind the gap at the tube station and eat fish and chips and try to make the Queen’s guards laugh. I wanted to see Big Ben and the Globe and the London Bridge and Dame Judi Dench. Or Maggie Smith. Or Alan Rickman. Or Sir Ian McKellen. Or anybody famous and British, really.
Holy crap. This was really happening.
And I wasn’t just a tourist. I was visiting with someone who’d grown up in the city. With my fiancé.
Take that, world.
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Cora Carmack (Keeping Her (Losing It, #1.5))
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‘And what about a [band] name?’ said Tony [Iommi]. The three of us looked at each other.
‘We should all take a couple of days to think about it,’ I said. ‘I dunno about you two, but I’ve got a special place where I go to get ideas for important stuff like this. It’s never failed me yet.’
Forty-eight hours later I blurted out: ‘I’ve got it!’
‘Must have been that dodgy bird you poked the other night,’ said Geezer. ‘Has your whelk turned green yet?’
Tony and Bill snickered into their plates of egg and chips. We were sitting in a greasy spoon caff in Aston. So far, everyone was getting along famously.
‘Very funny, Geezer,’ I said, waving an eggy fork at him. ‘I mean the name for our band.’
The snickering died down.
‘Go on then,’ said Tony [Iommi].
‘Well, I was on the shitter last night, and...'
‘That’s your special place?’ spluttered Bill, blobs of mushed-up egg and HP sauce flying out of his mouth.
‘Where the f**k did you think it was, Bill?’ I said. ‘The hanging gardens of f**king Babylon?
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Ozzy Osbourne (I Am Ozzy)
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The desire to be famous is infantile, and humanity has never lived in an age when infantilism was more sanctioned and encouraged than now. Infantile foods in the form of crisps, chips, sweet fizzy drinks and pappy burgers or hot dogs smothered in sugary sauce are considered mainstream nutrition for millions of adults. Intoxicating drinks disguised as milkshakes and soda pops exist for those whose taste buds haven't grown up enough to enjoy the taste of alcohol. As in food so in the wider culture. Anything astringent, savoury, sharp, complex, ambiguous or difficult is ignored in favour of the colourful, the sweet, the hollow and the simple.
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Stephen Fry (The Fry Chronicles)
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If drunk were cookies, I’d be Famous Amos.” We laughed. “Chips Ahoy! would have been funnier,
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John Green (Looking for Alaska)
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The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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I reached into the pile and pulled out a few connected chips and then was about to shove them into my mouth, when I saw what appeared to be the face of an angel sitting next to me. And, if it was in fact my actual guardian angel, then it probably would have been poor form not to offer a few chips to extend an olive branch.
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Phil Wohl (Death Made Me Famous)
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But what I really needed was a mom. I still wanted to take advantage of that free laundry service at home. I wasn’t about to turn away the homemade potato-chip casseroles or her famous turkey tacos. I didn’t even mind when the “chore chart” was put up on the fridge. That was the normalcy I craved. I wanted Mom to continue to bring warm cookies to the set, making me the guy with the best mom around.
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Kirk Cameron (Still Growing: An Autobiography)
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The remainder of the lion... was still in my freezer that spring when I happened to turn up at the Rock Creek Lodge. This bar... is regionally famous for its annual Testicle Festival, a liquor-filled carnival where ranchers, hippies, loggers, bikers, and college kids get together in September in order to get drunk, shed clothes, dance, and occasionally fight... But on this day the Testicle Festival was still a half year away, and the bar was mostly empty except for a plastic bag of hamburger buns and an electric roasting pan that was filled with chipped meat and a tangy barbecue sauce. I was well into my third sandwich... when the owner of the place came out and asked how I liked the cougar meat. ...When I left the bar, the man called after me to announce a slogan that he'd just thought of: "Rock Creek Lodge: Balls in the fall, pussy in the spring!
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Steven Rinella (Meat Eater: Adventures from the Life of an American Hunter)
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Deep down, Story Easton knew what would happen if she attempted to off herself—she would fail It was a matter of probability. This was not a new thing, failure. She was, had always been, a failure of fairy-tale proportion. Quitting wasn’t Story’s problem. She had tried, really tried, lots of things during different stages of her life—Girl Scours, the viola, gardening, Tommy Andres from senior year American Lit—but zero cookie sales, four broken strings, two withered azalea bushes, and one uniquely humiliating breakup later, Story still had not tasted success, and with a shriveled-up writing career as her latest disappointment, she realized no magic slippers or fairy dust was going to rescue her from her Anti-Midas Touch. No Happily Ever After was coming.
So she had learned to find a certain comfort in failure. In addition to her own screw-ups, others’ mistakes became cozy blankets to cuddle, and she snuggled up to famous failures like most people embrace triumph.
The Battle of Little Bighorn—a thing of beauty.
The Bay of Pigs—delicious debacle.
The Y2K Bug—gorgeously disappointing fuck-up.
Geraldo’s anti-climactic Al Capone exhumation—oops!
Jaws III—heaven on film.
Tattooed eyeliner—eyelids everywhere, revolting. Really revolting.
Fat-free potato chips—good Lord, makes anyone feel successful.
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Elizabeth Leiknes (The Understory)
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It’s our long absence from the city that makes us so popular,” Jordan joked, tossing chips into the center of the table.
Ian scarcely heard him. His mind was on Elizabeth, who had been at the mercy of her loathsome uncle for two years. The man had bartered his own flesh and blood-and Ian was the purchaser. It wasn’t true, of course, but he had an uneasy feeling Elizabeth would see it that way as soon as she discovered what had been done without her knowledge or consent. In Scotland she’d drawn a gun on him. In London he wouldn’t blame her if she fired it. He was toying with the idea of trying to court her for a few days before he told her they were already betrothed, and simultaneously wondering if she was going to hate the idea of marrying him. Belhaven might be a repulsive toad, but Ian had grievously and repeatedly wronged her. “I don’t mean to criticize your strategy, my friend”-Jordan’s drawl drew Ian’s wandering attention-“but you have just wagered $1,000 on what appears to be a pair of absolutely nothing.”
Ian glanced down at the hand he’d just turned over and actually felt a flush of embarrassment steal up his neck. “I have something on my mind,” he explained.
“Whatever it is, it is assuredly not cards. Either that or you’ve lost your famous touch.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Ian said absently, stretching out his long legs and crossing them at the ankles.
“Do you want to play another hand?”
“I don’t think I can afford it,” Ian joked wearily.
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Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
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The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.”Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward- leaning products.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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The exponential growth of this industry was correlated with the phenomenon famously discovered by Moore, who in 1965 drew a graph of the speed of integrated circuits, based on the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip, and showed that it doubled about every two years, a trajectory that could be expected to continue. This was reaffirmed in 1971, when Intel was able to etch a complete central processing unit onto one chip, the Intel 4004, which was dubbed a “microprocessor.” Moore’s Law has held generally true to this day, and its reliable projection of performance to price allowed two generations of young entrepreneurs, including Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, to create cost projections for their forward-leaning products. The
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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Among the girls at this party were a number of the now-famous wives of Americans and Britons who are not permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Pretty and rather sad girls. They cannot join their husbands in England or America, and so they are employed by their embassies until some final decision is reached. There are many things we cannot understand about the Soviet Union, and this is one of them. There are not more than fifty of these women. They are no good to the Soviet Union. They are suspected. Russians do not associate with them, and yet they are not permitted to leave. And on these fifty women, these fifty unimportant women, the Soviet Union has got itself more bad publicity than on any other single small item. Of course this situation cannot arise again, since by a new decree no Russian may marry a foreigner. But here they sit in Moscow, these sad women, no longer Russians, and they have not become British or American. And we cannot understand the reasoning which keeps them here. Perhaps it is just that the Russians do not intend to be told what to do about anything by anyone else. It might be as simple as that. When Clement Attlee personally requested that they be sent out of Russia, he was told, in effect, to mind his own business. It is just one more of the international stupidities which seem to be on the increase in the world. Sometimes it seems that the leaders of nations are little boys with chips on their shoulders, daring each other to knock them off.
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John Steinbeck (A Russian Journal)
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I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.
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Jimmy Carter (A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety)
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Moore’s Law, the rule of thumb in the technology industry, tells us that processor chips—the small circuit boards that form the backbone of every computing device—double in speed every eighteen months. That means a computer in 2025 will be sixty-four times faster than it is in 2013. Another predictive law, this one of photonics (regarding the transmission of information), tells us that the amount of data coming out of fiber-optic cables, the fastest form of connectivity, doubles roughly every nine months. Even if these laws have natural limits, the promise of exponential growth unleashes possibilities in graphics and virtual reality that will make the online experience as real as real life, or perhaps even better. Imagine having the holodeck from the world of Star Trek, which was a fully immersive virtual-reality environment for those aboard a ship, but this one is able to both project a beach landscape and re-create a famous Elvis Presley performance in front of your eyes. Indeed, the next moments in our technological evolution promise to turn a host of popular science-fiction concepts into science facts: driverless cars, thought-controlled robotic motion, artificial intelligence (AI) and fully integrated augmented reality, which promises a visual overlay of digital information onto our physical environment. Such developments will join with and enhance elements of our natural world. This is our future, and these remarkable things are already beginning to take shape. That is what makes working in the technology industry so exciting today. It’s not just because we have a chance to invent and build amazing new devices or because of the scale of technological and intellectual challenges we will try to conquer; it’s because of what these developments will mean for the world.
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Eric Schmidt (The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business)
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thepsychchic chips clips ii
If you think of yourself instead as an almost-victor who thought correctly and did everything possible but was foiled by crap variance? No matter: you will have other opportunities, and if you keep thinking correctly, eventually it will even out. These are the seeds of resilience, of being able to overcome the bad beats that you can’t avoid and mentally position yourself to be prepared for the next time. People share things with you: if you’ve lost your job, your social network thinks of you when new jobs come up; if you’re recently divorced or separated or bereaved, and someone single who may be a good match pops up, you’re top of mind. This attitude is what I think of as a luck amplifier. … you will feel a whole lot happier … and your ready mindset will prepare you for the change in variance that will come … 134-135
W. H. Auden: “Choice of attention—to pay attention to this and ignore that—is to the inner life what choice of action is to the outer. In both cases man is responsible for his choice and must accept the consequences.” Pay attention, or accept the consequences of your failure. 142
Attention is a powerful mitigator to overconfidence: it forces you to constantly reevaluate your knowledge and your game plan, lest you become too tied to a certain course of action. And if you lose? Well, it allows you to admit when it’s actually your fault and not a bad beat. 147
Following up on Phil Galfond’s suggestion to be both a detective and a storyteller and figure out “what your opponent’s actions mean, and sometimes what they don’t mean.” [Like the dog that didn’t bark in the Sherlock Holmes “Silver Blaze” story.] 159
You don’t have to have studied the description-experience gap to understand, if you’re truly expert at something, that you need experience to balance out the descriptions. Otherwise, you’re left with the illusion of knowledge—knowledge without substance. You’re an armchair philosopher who thinks that just because she read an article about something she is a sudden expert. (David Dunning, a psychologist at the University of Michigan most famous for being one half of the Dunning-Kruger effect—the more incompetent you are, the less you’re aware of your incompetence—has found that people go quickly from being circumspect beginners, who are perfectly aware of their limitations, to “unconscious incompetents,” people who no longer realize how much they don’t know and instead fancy themselves quite proficient.) 161-162
Erik: Generally, the people who cash the most are actually losing players (Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan strategy, jp). You can’t be a winning player by min cashing. 190
The more you learn, the harder it gets; the better you get, the worse you are—because the flaws that you wouldn’t even think of looking at before are now visible and need to be addressed. 191
An edge, even a tiny one, is an edge worth pursuing if you have the time and energy. 208
Blake Eastman: “Before each action, stop, think about what you want to do, and execute.” … Streamlined decisions, no immediate actions, or reactions. A standard process. 217
John Boyd’s OODA: Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act. The way to outmaneuver your opponent is to get inside their OODA loop. 224
Here’s a free life lesson: seek out situations where you’re a favorite; avoid those where you’re an underdog. 237
[on folding] No matter how good your starting hand, you have to be willing to read the signs and let it go.
One thing Erik has stressed, over and over, is to never feel committed to playing an event, ever. “See how you feel in the morning.”
Tilt makes you revert to your worst self. 257
Jared Tindler, psychologist, “It all comes down to confidence, self-esteem, identity, what some people call ego.” 251
JT: “As far as hope in poker, f#¢k it. … You need to think in terms of preparation. Don’t worry about hoping. Just Do.” 252
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Maria Konnikova (The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win)
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Research tells us that brainstorming becomes more productive when it’s focused. As jazz great Charles Mingus famously said, “You can’t improvise on nothing, man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.
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Chip Heath (The Myth of the Garage: And Other Minor Surprises)
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another true Death Valley Days story is presented for your entertainment by the Pacific Coast Borax Company, producers of that famous family of products—20 Mule Team Borax, 20 Mule Team Borax Soap Chips, and Boraxo. Well, Old Ranger, what’s your story about tonight?” Through many changes of format, it remained a hardy perennial, eventually becoming a filmed TV series with Ronald Reagan as host.
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John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
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Time to wreck this little shit [A College Student]. The irony of his rant is that once we make his ass famous for this, he will never accomplish anything, his white male-ness notwithstanding...Columbia should expel him. His future should be bleak...Good luck Chip
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Tim Wise
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Making dinner for Wayne is either the easiest thing or the hardest thing on the planet, depending on how you look at it. After all, Wayne's famous Eleven are neither difficult to procure nor annoying to prepare.
They are just.
So.
Boring.
Roasted chicken
Plain hamburgers
Steak cooked medium
Pork chops
Eggs scrambled dry
Potatoes, preferably fries, chips, baked, or mashed, and not with anything fancy mixed in
Chili, preferably Hormel canned
Green beans
Carrots
Corn
Iceberg lettuce with ranch dressing
That's it. The sum total of what Wayne will put into his maw. He doesn't even eat fricking PIZZA for chrissakes. Not including condiments, limited to ketchup and yellow mustard and Miracle Whip, and any and all forms of baked goods... when it comes to breads and pastries and desserts he has the palate of a gourmand, no loaf goes untouched, no sweet unexplored. It saves him, only slightly, from being a complete food wasteland. And he has no idea that it is strange to everyone that he will eat apple pie and apple cake and apple charlotte and apple brown Betty and apple dumplings and fritters and muffins and doughnuts and crisp and crumble and buckle, but will not eat AN APPLE.
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Stacey Ballis (Out to Lunch)
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Jason’s Famous Muesli Serves many For the oat mixture: 4 cups jumbo rolled oats 1 cup flax seeds 1 cup coconut (chips or desiccated) For the seed mixture: ½ cup pumpkin seeds ½ cup sunflower seeds ½ cup almonds ½ cup sesame seeds ½ cup raisins (optional) ½ cup diced apricots (optional) 1. Combine the oat mixture into one jar and the seed mixture into another. Shake to achieve an even distribution. 2. Each morning after eating breakfast,
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susan kitson (In Search of Health - 21 Steps to Glowing health)
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Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. “You’ve heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?” he says. “Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience.” By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation.
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Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck)
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One would expect to find a comparatively high proportion of carbon 13 [the carbon from corn] in the flesh of people whose staple food of choice is corn - Mexicans, most famously. Americans eat much more wheat than corn - 114 pounds of wheat flour per person per year, compared to 11 pounds of corn flour. The Europeans who colonized America regarded themselves as wheat people, in contrast to the native corn people they encountered; wheat in the West has always been considered the most refined, or civilized, grain. If asked to choose, most of us would probably still consider ourselves wheat people, though by now the whole idea of identifying with a plant at all strikes us as a little old-fashioned. Beef people sounds more like it, though nowadays chicken people, which sounds not nearly so good, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. But carbon 13 doesn't lie, and researchers who compared the carbon isotopes in the flesh or hair of Americans to those in the same tissues of Mexicans report that it is now we in the North who are the true people of corn. 'When you look at the isotope ratios,' Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who's done this sort of research, told me, 'we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.' Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar.
So that's us: processed corn, walking.
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Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
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In many respects, the skill set of an artist is similar to that of a programmer. Michelangelo was the archetypal renaissance man: a painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer. Perhaps he would have made an incredible programmer. When asked about how he created one of his most famous works, the statue of David, he said: I looked into the stone and saw him there, and just chipped away everything else. Is that what you do? Do you reduce and remove the complexities of the problem space, chipping them all away until you reach the beautiful code you were aiming for?
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Anonymous
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Elvis Pie Named for the famous crooner’s love of peanut butter and bananas, this decadent dessert is as filling as it is delicious. Serve in small slices, and top with shredded coconut for even more fun. Difficulty Level: 1 Preparation Time: 30 minutes Yields: 12 servings Ingredients 8 oz. chocolate cookies 4 Tblsp butter, melted 4 oz. semisweet chocolate chips 2 bananas, sliced thinly 1 cup heavy cream 8 oz. cream cheese 1 cup creamy peanut butter 1 cup powdered sugar 14 oz. sweetened condensed milk 1 tsp vanilla extract 1 tsp lemon juice 1. In a food processor, grind cookies into fine crumbs. 2. Combine melted butter and cookie crumbs in a small bowl, and stir with a fork to mix well. 3. Press mixture into the bottom and 1” up the sides of 9” pie tin. 4. In a small saucepan over low heat, melt the chocolate chips, stirring often to prevent burning. 5. Pour melted chocolate over bottom of cookie crust and spread to the edges using a spatula. 6. Layer banana slices over the melted chocolate. 7. Place pan in the refrigerator to chill. 8. Meanwhile, beat heavy cream until stiff peaks form. 9. Chill in refrigerator until ready to use. 10. Beat together the cream cheese and peanut butter until light and fluffy. 11. Stir in powdered sugar until fully incorporated. 12. Mix in the sweetened condensed milk, vanilla extract, and lemon juice until filling is smooth. 13. Fold the whipped cream into the filling mixture. 14. Pour the filling into the prepared pie pan, smoothing top. 15. Refrigerate for at least 3 hours, preferably overnight. 16. Serve chilled.
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Anna Wade (200 Chocolate Recipes)
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In 1925, John Caples was assigned to write a headline for an advertisement promoting the correspondence music course offered by the U.S. School of Music. Caples had no advertising experience, but he was a natural. He sat at his typewriter and pecked out the most famous headline in print-advertising history: “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano. . .But When I Started to Play!
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Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
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Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan famously posed
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Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
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Contrast the “maximize shareholder value” idea with John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.” Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature. Had John F. Kennedy been a CEO, he would have said, “Our mission is to become the international leader in the space industry through maximum team-centered innovation and strategically targeted aerospace initiatives.
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Chip Heath (Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die)
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...by the late 2000s, it seemed like a sucker's bet to try to make a living as an inventor in the classic sense, by creating useful and original things... the country's most famous inventors were inventing things of dubious merit, generating enormous wealth for a few by hawking gadgets to the many. In the San Francisco Bay Area, as America's coal-fired power plants continued to soak the atmosphere with gunk, as dysfunction snarled Congress and the roads and bridges chipped and cracked, as twelve million searched in vain for jobs and the economies of entire towns ran on food stamps, the best and brightest trilled about the awesomeness of their smartphone apps. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Angry Birds, Summly, Wavii: software to entertain, encapsulate, package, distract. Silicon Valley: a place that has made many useful things and created enormous wealth and transformed the way we live and where many are now working to build a virtual social layer atop the real corroding world.
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Jason Fagone (Ingenious: A True Story of Invention, Automotive Daring, and the Race to Revive America)
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It bears mentioning that in Russia there is no respect for the individual and his or her rights. People can be sacrificed for the needs of the state, used as shields, trading chips, or even simple fodder. If necessary, anyone can disappear. A famous expression of Stalin’s drives right to the point: “If there is no man, there is no problem.
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Bill Browder (Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice)
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Before he could start writing Kilby’s application, though, Mosher had to resolve a fundamental tactical question. Anyone who applies for a patent has to decide whether he needs it for offensive or for defensive purposes—whether, to use lawyers’ favorite metaphor, he wants his patent to be a sword or a shield. The decision usually turns on the novelty of the invention. If somebody has a genuinely revolutionary idea, a breakthrough that his competitors are almost sure to copy, his lawyers will write a patent application they can use as a sword; they will describe the invention in such broad and encompassing terms that they can take it into court for an injunction against any competitor who tries to sell a product that is even remotely related. In contrast, an inventor whose idea is basically an extension of or an improvement on an earlier idea needs a patent application that will work as a shield—a defense against legal action by the sword wielders. Such a defensive patent is usually written in much narrower terms, emphasizing a specific improvement or a particular application of the idea that is not covered clearly in earlier patents. Probably the most famous sword in the history of the patent system was the sweeping application filed on February 14, 1876, by a teacher and part-time inventor named Alexander Graham Bell. That first telephone patent (No. 174,465) was so broad and inclusive that it became the cornerstone—after Bell and his partners had fought some 600 lawsuits against scores of competitors—of the largest corporate family in the world. In the nature of things, though, few inventions are so completely new that they don’t build on something from the past. The majority of patent applications, therefore, are written as shields—as improvements on some earlier invention. Some of the most important patents in American history fall into this category, including No. 586,193, “New and Useful Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses,” granted to Guglielmo Marconi in 1898; No. 621,195, “Improvements in and Relating to Navigable Balloons,” granted to Ferdinand Zeppelin in 1899; No. 686,046, “New and Useful Improvements in Motor Carriages,” granted to Henry Ford in 1901; and No. 821,393, “New and Useful Improvements in Flying Machines,” granted to Orville and Wilbur Wright in 1906.
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T.R. Reid (The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution)
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Many believe the process of creativity is one of assembling thoughts and concepts but highly creative people will tell you the song, the image was "in" them and they're task was to get it out, a process of discovery, not design. This said most artfully by Michael Angelo on how he created his most famous statue of David, he said, "It's easy. You just chip away the stone that doesn't look like David.
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Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
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Storyton’s pub, the Cheshire Cat, had an enormous sculpture of a smiling feline in its garden. The cat’s famous toothy grin was made out of chipped dinner plates, which glimmered eerily in the dark.
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Ellery Adams (Murder in the Mystery Suite (Book Retreat Mysteries, #1))
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This was said most artfully by Michelangelo when asked how he created his famous statue of David. He said “it is easy—you just chip away the stone that doesn’t look like David.
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Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)