Convention Double Quotes

Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at … something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible.

As he was speaking, he kept reminding himself that he was going to a rendezvous and that not a living soul knew about it, or, probably, ever would. He led a double life--one in public, in the sight of all whom it concerned, full of conventional truth and conventional deception, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances, and another which flowed in secret. And, owing to some strange, possibly quite accidental chain of circumstances, everything that was important, interesting, essential, everything about which he was sincere and never deceived himself, everything that composed the kernel of his life, went on in secret, while everything that was false in him, everything that composed the husk in which he hid himself and the truth which was in him--his work at the bank, discussions at the club, his 'lower race,' his attendance at anniversary celebrations with his wife--was on the surface. He began to judge others by himself, no longer believing what he saw, and always assuming that the real, the only interesting life of every individual goes on as under cover of night, secretly. Every individual existence revolves around mystery, and perhaps that is the chief reason that all cultivated individuals insisted so strongly on the respect due to personal secrets.

In a useful conversation... there is a double coincidence of wants. You have to be interested in what I have to say; I have to be interested in what you have to say. This is an important reason why people with conventional interests seem more socially intelligent. Even if they don't check whether their audience cares, it probably does.

...any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.

Santa Teresa is a convent that doubles as an orphanage for girls. I’m now the oldest out of thirty-seven, a distinction I’ve held for six months, after the last girl who turned eighteen left. At eighteen we must all make the choice to strike out on our own or to forge a life within the Church.

If in the revealing light of some moment of cataclysm you were to meet your double, not dressed in its worldly glad-rags, not armed with that buckler of excuses which conventional hypocrisy uses to cover our secret wishes, but in all its moral nakedness, showing its tendencies and urges, its pitiless cunning and its cowardice, are you certain that you would recognize it?

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society's double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier -- and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

The RBMK forgoes a conventional pressure vessel and instead only uses reinforced concrete around the sides of the reactor, with a heavy metal plate called a biological shield at the top and bottom. Adding a proper pressure vessel, built to the standards and complexity required by the RBMK design, was estimated to double the cost of each reactor. The fourth and final barrier is an airtight containment building. It is well known that nuclear containment buildings are very, very heavily reinforced, with concrete and/or steel walls often several meters thick. They are built to withstand the external impact of an airliner crashing into them at hundreds of miles-per-hour, but their other purpose is to contain the unthinkable breach of a pressure vessel. Unbelievably, the RBMK’s accompanying reactor building is insufficient to be labelled as a true containment building, presumably as part of further cost saving measures.

She didn’t have the slightest idea what Mrs. Darling wanted to see her about. But then, she seldom did. The etiquette in this place was so mysterious! Or the customs, or the conventions, or whatever…Like not showing strangers the soles of your feet or something. She tried to cast her mind back over anything she might have done wrong, but how much could she have done wrong between yesterday afternoon and noon today? She had made a point of keeping her interactions with parents to a minimum, and she didn’t think Mrs. Darling could have heard about her little tantrum this morning when she couldn’t get Antwan’s jacket unzipped. “Stupid goddamn-to-hell frigging modern life,” she had muttered. But it was life she was cursing, not Antwan, and surely he’d understood that. Besides, he didn’t seem like the kind of kid who’d go running off to tattle on people, even if he’d had the opportunity. It had been one of those double-type zippers that could be opened from the bottom while the top stayed closed, and she’d ended up having to take the jacket off by yanking it over his head. She detested that kind of zipper. It was a presumptuous zipper; it wanted to figure out your every possible need without your say-so.

This doubling of the proportion of obese Americans is consistent through all segments of American society, although obesity remains more common among African Americans and Hispanics than among whites and other ethnic groups, and most common among those in the lowest income brackets and poorly educated. Children were not exempt from this trend. The prevalence of overweight in children six to eleven years old more than doubled between 1980 and 2000; it tripled in children aged eleven to nineteen.

Diablos: the name given to the igniting of, and ignited, farts. Trevor Hickey is the undisputed master of this arcane and perilous art. The stakes could not be higher. Get the timing even slightly wrong and there will be consequences far more serious than singed trousers; the word backdraught clamours unspoken at the back of every spectator’s mind. Total silence now as, with an almost imperceptible tremble (entirely artificial, ‘just part of the show’ as Trevor puts it) his hand brings the match between his legs and – foom! a sound like the fabric of the universe being ripped in two, counterpointed by its opposite, a collective intake of breath, as from Trevor’s bottom proceeds a magnificent plume of flame – jetting out it’s got to be nearly three feet, they tell each other afterwards, a cold and beautiful purple-blue enchantment that for an instant bathes the locker room in unearthly light. No one knows quite what Trevor Hickey’s diet is, or his exercise regime; if you ask him about it, he will simply say that he has a gift, and having witnessed it, you would be hard-pressed to argue, although why God should have given him this gift in particular is less easy to say. But then, strange talents abound in the fourteen-year-old confraternity. As well as Trevor Hickey, ‘The Duke of Diablos’, you have people like Rory ‘Pins’ Moran, who on one occasion had fifty-eight pins piercing the epidermis of his left hand; GP O’Sullivan, able to simulate the noises of cans opening, mobile phones bleeping, pneumatic doors, etc., at least as well as the guy in Police Academy; Henry Lafayette, who is double-jointed and famously escaped from a box of jockstraps after being locked inside it by Lionel. These boys’ abilities are regarded quite as highly by their peers as the more conventional athletic and sporting kinds, as is any claim to physical freakishness, such as waggling ears (Mitchell Gogan), unusually high mucous production (Hector ‘Hectoplasm’ O’Looney), notable ugliness (Damien Lawlor) and inexplicably slimy, greenish hair (Vince Bailey). Fame in the second year is a surprisingly broad church; among the two-hundred-plus boys, there is scarcely anyone who does not have some ability or idiosyncrasy or weird body condition for which he is celebrated. As with so many things at this particular point in their lives, though, that situation is changing by the day. School, with its endless emphasis on conformity, careers, the Future, may be partly to blame, but the key to the shift in attitudes is, without a doubt, girls. Until recently the opinion of girls was of little consequence; now – overnight, almost – it is paramount; and girls have quite different, some would go so far as to say deeply conservative, criteria with regard to what constitutes a gift. They do not care how many golf balls you can fit in your mouth; they are unmoved by third nipples; they do not, most of them, consider mastery of Diablos to be a feather in your cap – even when you explain to them how dangerous it is, even when you offer to teach them how to do it themselves, an offer you have never extended to any of your classmates, who would actually pay big money for this expertise, or you could even call it lore – wait, come back!

Tesla applied for a patent on an electrical coil that is the most likely candidate for a non mechanical successor of his energy extractor. This is his “Coil for Electro magnets,” patent #512,340. It is a curious design, unlike an ordinary coil made by turning wire on a tube form, this one uses two wires laid next to each other on a form but with the end of the first one connected to the beginning of the second one. In the patent Tesla explains that this double coil will store many times the energy of a conventional coil.   The patent, however, gives no hint of what might have been its more unusual capability. In an article for Century Magazine, Tesla compares extracting energy from the environment to the work of other scientists who were, at that time, learning to condense atmospheric gases into liquids. In particular, he cited the work of a Dr. Karl Linde who had discovered what Tesla described as a self-cooling method for liquefying air. As Tesla said, “This was the only experimental proof which I was still wanting that energy was obtainable from the medium in the manner contemplated by me.” What ties the Linde work with Tesla's electromagnet coil is that both of them used a double path for the material they were working with. Linde had a compressor to pump the air to a high pressure, let the pressure fall as it traveled through a tube, and then used that cooled air to reduce the temperature of the incoming air by having it travel back up the first tube through a second tube enclosing the first. The already cooled air added to the cooling process of the machine and quickly condensed the gases to a liquid. Tesla's intent was to condense the energy trapped between the earth and its upper atmosphere and to turn it into an electric current. He pictured the sun as an immense ball of electricity, positively charged with a potential of some 200 billion volts. The Earth, on the other hand, is charged with negative electricity. The tremendous electrical force between these two bodies constituted, at least in part, what he called cosmic-energy. It varied from night to day and from season to season but it is always present. Tesla's patents for electrical generators and motors were granted in the late 1880's. During the 1890's the large electric power industry, in the form of Westinghouse and General Electric, came into being. With tens of millions of dollars invested in plants and equipment, the industry was not about to abandon a very profitable ten-year-old technology for yet another new one. Tesla saw that profits could be made from the self-acting generator, but somewhere along the line, it was pointed out to him, the negative impact the device would have on the newly emerging technological revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. At the end of his article in Century he wrote: “I worked for a long time fully convinced that the practical realization of the method of obtaining energy from the sun would be of incalculable industrial value, but the continued study of the subject revealed the fact that while it will be commercially profitable if my expectations are well founded, it will not be so to an extraordinary degree.

In 1977, when McGovern’s committee held a hearing on obesity, Oklahoma Senator Henry Bellmon captured this dilemma perfectly. The committee had spent the day listening to leading authorities discuss the cause and prevention of obesity, and the experience had left Bellmon confused. “I want to be sure we don’t oversimplify…,” Bellmon said. “We make it sound like there is no problem for those of us who are overweight except to push back from the table sooner. But I watched Senator [Robert] Dole in the Senate dining room, a double dip of ice cream, a piece of blueberry pie, meat and potatoes, yet he stays as lean as a west Kansas coyote. Some of the rest of us who live on lettuce, cottage cheese and Ry-Krisp don’t do nearly as well. Is there a difference in individuals as to how they

Indeed, an objective observer coming to view the existing social order, catching a glimpse of the paradoxes of conventional life, would be stunned by these observations. He or she would become aware that the things that one was expected to believe about oneself and about society were frequently the opposite of the way things really were. From an outside point of view, this observer would perceive that most members of the social community were unwittingly working together to maintain a dishonest way of living. He or she would note the lies, the double messages, the delusions that most people in society accept as self-evident truths.

The theoretical concepts of Freudianism are corrected and affirmed once they are understood, as suggested in the work of Melanie Klein, in terms of corporeality taken as itself the search of the external in the internal and of the internal in the external, that is, as a global and universal power of incorporation... A philosophy of the flesh finds itself in opposition to any interpretation of the unconscious in terms of "unconscious representations," a tribute paid by Freud to the psychology of bis day. The unconscious is feeling itself, since feeling is not the intellectual possession of "what" is felt, but a dispossession of ourselves in favor of it, an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize it...The double formula of the unconscious ( "I did not know" and "I have not always known it'') corresponds to two aspects of the flesh, its poetic and its oneiric powers. When Freud presents the concept of repression in all its operational richness, it comprises a double movement of progress and regression, of openness toward the adult universe and of a relapse to the pregenital life, but henceforth called by its name, having become unconscious "homosexuality." Thus the repressed unconsciousness would be a secondary formation, contemporary with the formation of a system of perception-consciousness -- and the primordial unconsciousness would be a permissive being, the initial yes, the undividedness of feeling. The preceding leads to the idea of the human body as a natural symbolism...We may ask what could be the relation between this tacit symbolism, or undividedness, and the artificial or conventional symbolism, which seems to be privileged, to open us toward ideal being and to truth.

They claim that the mass infusion of nonwhite populations into Europe and the United States—which has never been democratically approved of by any of the host populations and has instead been foisted upon them—violate this passage in 1948’s United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. The howling double standard—i.e., the fact that no one is forcing Africa, Asia, or Israel to “diversify” while cramming diversity into every majority-white nation on earth—has led to Robert Whitaker’s famous phrase “Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.

The women were growing weary when Sojourner Truth, who had kept her head bowed almost the whole time, raised her head up. She lifted her body slowly and started walking to the front. “Don’t let her speak!” some women shouted. Before the audience now, she laid her eyes on the convention organizer. Gage announced her and begged the audience for silence. Quiet came in an instant as all the eyes on White faces became transfixed on the single dark face. Truth straightened her back and raised herself to her full height—all six feet. She towered over nearby men. “Ain’t I a Woman? Look at me! Look at my arm!” Truth showed off her bulging muscles. “Ain’t I a Woman? I can outwork, outeat, outlast any man! Ain’t I a Woman!” Sojourner Truth had shut down and shut up the male hecklers. As she returned to her seat, Truth could not help but see the “streaming eyes, and hearts beating with gratitude” from the women, the muddled daze from the men. Truth imparted a double blow in “Ain’t I a Woman”: an attack on the sexist ideas of the male disrupters, and an attack on the racist ideas of females trying to banish her. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my strength and power and tenderness and intelligence. “Ain’t I a Woman” in all of my dark skin. Never again would anyone enfold more seamlessly the dual challenge of antiracist feminism

Like Miles Davis, Graham often used to turn his back on his audiences. This was primarily between songs, while he was retuning his guitars. For Graham, in the early 1960s, was privy to a secret alternative tuning system known as DADGAD, which he was reluctant to share with any rival guitarists in the crowd. He began using it around 1962–3, on a trip to the bohemian Beat capital Tangier, where he spent six months and earned his keep by working in a snack booth selling hash cakes to locals. The raw Gnaoua trance music preserved in Morocco’s town squares and remote Rif mountain villages stretched back thousands of years, and Graham was hypnotised by the oud, a large Arabic lute which resembles a bisected pear (the word ‘lute’ itself derives from the Arabic ‘al-ud’) and has been identified in Mesopotamian wall paintings 5,000 years old. The paradigm of Eastern music, defining its difference from the West, is the maqam, which uses a microtonal system that blasts open the Western eight-note octave into fifty-three separate intervals. DADGAD is not one of the tunings commonly used on the eleven-string oud, but Graham found that tuning a Western guitar that way made it easier to slip into jam sessions with Moroccan players. The configuration allows scales and chords to be created without too much complicated fingering; its doubled Ds and As and open strings often lead to more of a harp-like, droning sonority than the conventional EADGBE.

Metaphor metaphorized—the double jump outside the convention—breaks the hold of the convention and enables us to become aware of the subjectivity of objects and the objectivity of subjective processes.

I am bubbled, I’m bubbled, O how I am troubled! Bamboozled and bit, my distresses are doubled!” John Gay

Harcombe explained in detail why CICO is an inadequate model, not least because it contradicts one of the laws of thermodynamics. Tongue-in-cheek, she quoted US science writer Gary Taubes: ‘We woke up somewhere around this point and decided to become greedy and lazy. We had managed to stay slim for three and a half million years, but suddenly 30 per cent of us became obese and almost 70 per cent of us overweight or obese.’ The reality, Harcombe said, is that since the guidelines were introduced, obesity has more than doubled and diabetes has increased sevenfold in the US. In the UK, obesity has increased almost tenfold, and diabetes four- to fivefold. Referring to South Africa’s sky-rocketing obesity rates in the wake of the official dietary guidelines, Harcombe wrote at the end of her thesis that this ‘at least deserves examination’.

Novel reading begins in a paradoxical double action of escape and engagement; reading conventional novels takes readers from where they are to realms that are shaped, with beginnings, middles, and ends.

The ledger’s double-entry pages and the neat grid of the invoice gave purposeful shape to the story they told. Through their graphic simplicity and economy, invoices and ledgers effaced the personal histories that fueled the slaving economy. Containing only what could fit within the clean lines of their columns and rows, they reduced an enormous system of traffic in human commodities to a concise chronicle of quantitative ‘facts.’ Thus, Mary Poove writes, ‘like the closet, the conventions of double-entry bookkeeping were intended to manage or contain excess.’ Instruments such as these did their work, then, while concealing the messiness of history, erasing from view the politics that underlay the neat account keeping. The slave traders (and much of the modern economic literature on the slave trade) regarded the slave ship’s need for volume as a self-evident ‘fact’ of economic rationalization: the Board of Trade’s reports, the balance pursued in the Royal African Company’s double-entry ledgers, the calculations that determined how many captive bodies a ship could ‘conveniently stow,’ the simple equation by which an agent at the company’s factory at Whydah promised ‘to Complie with delivering in every ten days 100 Negroes.’ But the perceptions of the African captives themselves differed from the slave trader’s economies of scale and rationalized efficiency of production. What appears in the European quantitative account as a seamless expansion in the volume of slave exports—evidence of the natural workings of the market—took the form of violent rifts in the political geography of the Gold Coast. People for whom the Atlantic market had been a distant and hazy presence with little direct consequence for their lives now found themselves swept up in wars and siphoned into a type of captivity without precedent.

As a second way to pump investment into the Pronto stores, to support our high wage costs, we began to add hard liquor, instead of just beer and wine, to the stores. (We did this well before 7-Eleven’s arrival.) The cost of a liquor license in those days was so great that the addition of a liquor license, and its added high-value-per-cubic-inch inventory, doubled our investment in a store without expanding beyond the 2,400 square foot conventional convenience store module.

Do you have gorgeous, lustrous curly hair? Well, you may wonder about different hairstyles or even complain about the magnificent curls. However, opting for a French braid on the curly mane can change your whole outlook. French braid, also known as French plait, is undoubtedly a timeless classic. It has the ability to give an air of sophistication and grace. The conventional French braid doesn’t strain the hair and causes few breakages, leading to healthy hair. How to French Braid Curly Hair Steps to French braid the curly hair? Follow these steps to French braid the curly hair. • Part the hair from the middle. • Now start a regular braid on the side. • Before crossing, get a little bit of the main hair and add it to the small section that is now taken to the middle area. • Repeat this addition till all the main hair gets used. • After that, proceed with the traditional braiding style and finish it off with a hairband. How to French Braid Curly Hair Can the right hairbrush aid in making the perfect French braid? Do you desire the perfect French braid on your curly tresses? Well, with the best styling brush, attaining that illustrious French braid is easy and manageable. If you are looking for the best brush for your hair, stop! Check out NuWay DoubleC Brush! It is a patented brush that comes with a multitude of features. Here, you will find a speedy dry, ergonomic shape to circular venting scheme. Why choosing NuWay DoubleC Brush is the best choice for a French braid? NuWay DoubleC Brush offers different features that inevitably make it the best scalp brush. • DoubleC Curve The Double C shape brush aids in offering depth and helps in lifting added volumes. • Carries hair care products With a broad curve, the NuWay DoubleC Brush can carry hair products with ease. It is indeed the best brush for applying hair care products. • Circular venting scheme The circular venting scheme decreases the drying time, thus offering speed dry. Moreover, it also protects against heat. • Ergonomic shape With an ergonomic shape, the brush assists in scalp care. Now, you can get the perfect braid with ease! • Non-slip grip The NuWay DoubleC Brush comes with a TPR handle. It indicates a non-slip grip and aids in detangling hairs. No wonder it is credited as the best brush for detangling tresses. • Easy to clean The brush is exceptionally easy to clean. You only need some detergent and water to wash off the dirt. Then, air dries it in a cool place for further use. • Tips diffused with argan oil The tips of the bristles are smeared with argan oil, maintaining the softness and shine of the hair. These also promote blood circulation and stimulate the hair follicles. These spectacular features definitely make the NuWay DoubleC Brush even more appealing. Magnificent, right? Get this impressive hairbrush on Amazon here!

Of course, television is not alone in being confronted with this destiny - this vicious circle: the destiny of all those things which , no longer having an objective purpose, take themselves for their own ends. In so doing, they escape all responsibility, but also become bogged down in their own insoluble contradictions. This is, however, more particularly the critical situation of all the current media. Opinion polls themselves are a good example. They have had their moment of truth (as, indeed, did television), when they were the representative mirror of an opinion, in the days when such a thing still existed, before it became merely a conditioned reflex. But perpetual harassment by opinion polls has resulted in their being no longer a mirror at all; they have, rather, become a screen. A perverse exchange has been established between polls which no longer really ask questions and masses who no longer reply. Or rather they become cunning partners, like rats in laboratories or the viruses pursued in experiments. They toy with the polls at least as much as the polls toy with them. They play a double game. It is not, then, that the polls are bogus or deceitful, but rather that their very success and automatic operation have made them random. There is the same double game, the same perverse social relationship between an all-powerful, but wholly self-absorbed, television and the mass of TV viewers, who are vaguely scandalized by this misappropriation, not just of public money, but of the whole value system of news and information. You don't need to be politically aware to realize that, after the famous dustbins of history, we are now seeing the dustbins of information. Now , information may well be a myth, but this alternative myth, the modern substitute for all other values, has been rammed down our throats incessantly. And there is a glaring contrast between this universal myth and the actual state of affairs. The real catastrophe of television has been how deeply it has failed to live up to its promise of providing information- its supposed modern function. We dreamed first of giving power - political power- to the imagination, but we dream less and less of this, if indeed at all. The fantasy then shifted on to the media and information. At times we dreamed (at least collectively, even if individually we continued to have no illusions) of finding some freedom there — an openness, a new public space. Such dreams were soon dashed: the media turned out to be much more conformist and servile than expected, at times more servile than the professional politicians. The latest displacement of the imagination has been on to the judiciary. Again this has been an illusion, since, apart from th e pleasing whiff of scandal produced, this is also dependent on the media operation. We are going to end up looking for imagination in places further and further removed from power - from any form of power whatever (and definitely far removed from cultural power, which has become the most conventional and professional form ther e is). Among the excluded, the immigrants, the homeless. But that will really take a lot of imagination because they, who no longer even have an image, are themselves the by-products of a whole society's loss of imagination, of the loss of any social imagination. And this is indeed the point. We shall soon see it is no use trying to locate the imagination somewhere. Quite simply, because there no longer is any. The day this becomes patently obvious, the vague collective disappointment hanging over us today will become a massive sickening feeling.

False flag theories are the refuge of the most weak-minded and uncreative conspiracy theorists. They’re the lowest-hanging fruit. False flags, unlike so much else of what’s in the fever swamps, actually have some basis in reality. Historically, the term “false flag” refers to a ship or armed force misrepresenting themselves by flying the flag of their enemy. This subterfuge can have political purposes, such as drumming up support for a cause or creating a pretext for a more justifiable military strike. False flag attacks are illegal under the commonly adopted conventions of international law. They’re also fairly rare. I could point to a few international examples of such operations since World War II, but the fact is, the handful of authentic false flags are far outnumbered by the countless double-agent scenarios that conspiracy theorists incessantly dream up. False flags are one of the most common tropes of the misinformation and disinformation space. They’re easy and politically expedient. Does something look bad for your side, an event that went sideways into violence or illegality? It must have been the work of the enemy; surely things must be the exact opposite of what they seem. Even if your false flag claim gets debunked, you can still hold your ground because of the shadow of doubt you’ve cast. Deflect. Delay. Deny.

Delilah, she’s not a child, she’s a wolf.” The deputy slid his gun back into its holster, but the fact that he didn’t snap it closed made me nervous. “An animal.” “Then why was she wearing underwear?” I demanded, and the sheriff and his deputy looked at me as if I’d lapsed into Latin. “Okay, just think about it. When we put wolves on display in a zoo—a regular zoo—we don’t put underwear on them because they aren’t self-aware enough to feel modesty or adapt to social conventions and restrictions. But Geneviève was wearing underwear, which means the menagerie understands that she’s thoroughly self-aware. And if she’s self-aware, why is it okay to put a child on display in skimpy undergarments, then shock her with a cattle prod when she doesn’t want to be seen in nothing but her underwear? You can’t have it both ways.

property, they said. If the budget had to be doubled, so be it. Let’s go forward, trusting that the money will come in. We notified the architect of the council’s decision. Within a month or so, he called to say that he had some tentative designs to show us. The designs turned out to be conventional, uninspired. So we offered suggestions. A month or so later, we received a call saying that a new set of designs was ready; but these, too, were uninspired. It was evident what was going on: though our budget had been doubled, it was still low, and the low budget, rather than challenging him to

It would have been easier to defy convention if she was aristocratic, bohemian, insouciant — more like George Sand, in other words — and not a lower-middle-class woman from a conservative Anglican family, who harboured ‘a desire insatiable for the esteem of my fellow creatures’.

Quantum computing is not only faster than conventional computing, but its workload obeys a different scaling law—rendering Moore’s Law little more than a quaint memory. Formulated by Intel founder Gordon Moore, Moore’s Law observes that the number of transistors in a device’s integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Some early supercomputers ran on around 13,000 transistors; the Xbox One in your living room contains 5 billion. But Intel in recent years has reported that the pace of advancement has slowed, creating tremendous demand for alternative ways to provide faster and faster processing to fuel the growth of AI. The short-term results are innovative accelerators like graphics-processing unit (GPU) farms, tensor-processing unit (TPU) chips, and field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in the cloud. But the dream is a quantum computer. Today we have an urgent need to solve problems that would tie up classical computers for centuries, but that could be solved by a quantum computer in a few minutes or hours. For example, the speed and accuracy with which quantum computing could break today’s highest levels of encryption is mind-boggling. It would take a classical computer 1 billion years to break today’s RSA-2048 encryption, but a quantum computer could crack it in about a hundred seconds, or less than two minutes. Fortunately, quantum computing will also revolutionize classical computing encryption, leading to ever more secure computing. To get there we need three scientific and engineering breakthroughs. The math breakthrough we’re working on is a topological qubit. The superconducting breakthrough we need is a fabrication process to yield thousands of topological qubits that are both highly reliable and stable. The computer science breakthrough we need is new computational methods for programming the quantum computer.

The world now consumes about 80 billion new pieces of clothing every year. Ninety-five percent of discarded clothing can be recycled or upcycled. The amount of water used in apparel production each year is enough to fill 32 million Olympic-size swimming pools. Meanwhile, 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water. A $25 T-shirt would be only $1.35 more expensive if the wages of the worker who made it were doubled. By extending the life of your clothing by an additional nine months, you can reduce your carbon, water, and waste footprints by 20 to 30 percent each. Clothing made from conventional polyester can take up to two hundred years to decompose in a landfill. Making a pair of jeans uses the same amount of water as flushing your toilet for three years. The average American woman wears just 20 percent of her wardrobe. The average annual clothing consumption per person in the US is sixty-five garments, according to the American Apparel & Footwear Association.

EXPERIMENT 4. In our fourth experiment, we tested a “nonlocal” aspect of the consciousness collapse interpretation. This is a bit tricky to grasp at first, because it invokes the timeless nature of the quantum world. I’ll go through this slowly. The idea that the quantum wave function collapses due to observation implies that the collapse occurs only when observation occurs, and not when the data are generated.295 That is, unlike events in the everyday world, where actions occur in particular locations and unfold in ordinary clock time, events in the quantum domain do not occur in time as we normally experience it. This is what is meant by the spooky “nonlocal” nature of quantum mechanics—events are connected across the usual limitations of space and time. When an elementary quantum object is not being observed, it remains in what’s called an “indeterminate state.” In that unobserved condition, the object has no definite properties yet—no size, shape, location, polarization, spin, or any other property that we ascribe to ordinary real objects. The consciousness collapse idea further proposes that when, and only when, an object is consciously observed does it take on real properties. To repeat—because this concept may make your brain hurt the first time you encounter it—if you take measurements of a quantum system using an inanimate recording device, like a camera, then that system will remain in an indeterminate state until it is observed. This ridiculous-sounding idea has been tested in conventional physics labs and it has definitely been shown to exist. That type of study is called the delayed-choice experiment.154, 324 We tested this idea in the present context by using a time-reversed version of our double-slit experiment, somewhat like the studies that Daryl Bem conducted, as discussed earlier in the chapter on precognition. This test also provided a more rigorous way for us to test the effect of participants being located within a few meters of the optical system, because all the data in this study were generated and recorded with the apparatus located by itself inside the shielded chamber, and with no one else present in the laboratory.

Jebsen, former international playboy turned dodgy businessman; a young man of cynicism, black humor, deep intellect, and physical frailty; the chain-smoking Anglophile dandy who took up spying in order not to fight, but who defied the Nazis because he believed, above all, in friendship. He was unable to resist worldly temptations, but he resisted his Gestapo torturers to the end. Like many ordinary, flawed people, he did not know his own courage until war revealed it. Jebsen might easily have turned history in a disastrous direction to save his own skin, and he chose not to. Agent Artist was not a conventional D-Day hero, but he was a hero nonetheless.

This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It’s too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there’s not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks—the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants—have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.

The facial stills that Mario lap-dissolves between are of Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, founding standard-bearer of the seminal new ‘Clean U.S. Party,’ the strange-seeming but politically prescient annular agnation of ultra-right jingoist hunt-deer-with-automatic-weapons types and far-left macrobiotic Save-the-Ozone, -Rain-Forests, -Whales, -Spotted-Owl-and-High-pH-Waterways ponytailed granola-crunchers, a surreal union of both Rush L.– and Hillary R.C.–disillusioned fringes that drew mainstream-media guffaws at their first Convention (held in sterile venue), the seemingly LaRoucheishly marginal party whose first platform’s plank had been Let’s Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, 150 C.U.S.P. a kind of post-Perot national joke for three years, until—white-gloved finger on the pulse of an increasingly asthmatic and sunscreen-slathered and pissed-off American electorate—the C.U.S.P. suddenly swept to quadrennial victory in an angry reactionary voter-spasm that made the U.W.S.A. and LaRouchers and Libertarians chew their hands in envy as the Dems and G.O.P.s stood on either side watching dumbly, like doubles partners who each think the other’s surely got it, the two established mainstream parties split open along tired philosophical lines in a dark time when all landfills got full and all grapes were raisins and sometimes in some places the falling rain clunked instead of splatted, and also, recall, a post-Soviet and -Jihad era when—somehow even worse—there was no real Foreign Menace of any real unified potency to hate and fear, and the U.S. sort of turned on itself and its own philosophical fatigue and hideous redolent wastes with a spasm of panicked rage that in retrospect seems possible only in a time of geopolitical supremacy and consequent silence, the loss of any external Menace to hate and fear.