Diameter Quotes

He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension.

While an elderly man in his mid-eighties looks curiously at a porno site, his grandson asks him from afar, “‘What are you reading, grandpa?’” “‘It’s history, my boy.’” “The grandson comes nearer and exclaims, “‘But this is a porno site, grandpa, naked chicks, sex . . . a lot of sex!’” “‘Well, it’s sex for you, my son, but for me it’s history,’ the old man says with a sigh.” All of people in the cabin burst into laughter. “A stale joke, but a cool one,” added William More, the man who just told the joke. The navigator skillfully guided the flying disc among the dense orange-yellow blanket of clouds in the upper atmosphere that they had just entered. Some of the clouds were touched with a brownish hue at the edges. The rest of the pilots gazed curiously and intently outwards while taking their seats. The flying saucer descended slowly, the navigator’s actions exhibiting confidence. He glanced over at the readings on the monitors below the transparent console: Atmosphere: Dense, 370 miles thick, 98.4% nitrogen, 1.4% methane Temperature on the surface: ‒179°C / ‒290°F Density: 1.88 g/cm³ Gravity: 86% of Earth’s Diameter of the cosmic body: 3200 miles / 5150 km.

Dangerous as a lightning strike, as lethal as a pair of crisscrossing short swords, William whispered, “You’re about to find out how your liver tastes, my friend.” “I have tasted it already,” Zacharel said, his voice its usual monotone. The snowflakes began to fall in earnest, tiny at first, but growing in diameter. An arctic wind blustered around him. “It was a bit salty.” How the hell was a guy supposed to respond to that? Apparently William didn’t know, either, because he gaped at the angel. Then, “Maybe if you added a little pepper?” O-kay. It was official. William had an answer for everything.

On a scale of 1 to extroverted, I’m a 3.14159. So is pi. I network like “the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter.” Thanks, Wikipedia!

She's Prim's size in diameter.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/ 400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/ 400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.

Roger stooped, picked up a stone, aimed and threw it at Henry-threw it to miss. The stone, that token of preposterous time, bounced five yards to Henry's right and fell in the water. Roger gathered a handful of stones and began to throw them. Yet there was a space round Henry, perhaps six yards in diameter, into which he dare not throw. Here, invisible yet strong, was the taboo of the old life. Round the squatting child was the protection of parents and school and policemen and the law. Roger was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

So, go on rising, sun, you don't frighten us. We don't care about your many miles, your diameter, your volume. Warm sun, just rise, bright light, arise. You are not big, you are not small, you are happiness.

But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.

A historian who would convey the truth must lie. Often he must enlarge the truth by diameters, otherwise his reader would not be able to see it.

William whispered, "You're about to find out how your liver tastes, my friend." "I have tasted it already," Zacharel said, his voice its usual monotone. The snowflakes began to fall in earnest, tiny at first, but growing in diameter. An arctic wind blustered around. "It was a bit salty." How the hell was a guy supposed to respond to that?

On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.

...Just be advised, boys,' she said, 'you'll want to watch your step, 'cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism-- lowlifes of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it'll be them who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol' pearl herself just goes a-rollin' on.

The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.

Marie clasped her hands together and looked vulnerable. Payne flinched. “The only time you don’t tell me something is when you think it’s dangerous, because being a fragile, sheltered noblewoman, I might faint at the thought of experiencing physical harm like a common person.” She sighed, and seemingly from nowhere, produced an enormous cast-iron frying pan easily one hundred centimeters in diameter. “And then,” she said sadly, “I have to damage one of the good pans by smacking it against your thick, common skull until you tell me—

Astronomy was full of such intriguing but meaningless coincidences. The most famous was the fact that, from the Earth, both Sun and Moon have the same apparent diameter.

Well, I'm a bacteriologist, you know. I live in a nine-hundred-diameter microscope. I can hardly claim to take serious notice of anything that I can see with my naked eye.

In Trout's novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn't like it, and he says to her, 'I already know about human beings.

A physicist, an engineer and a psychologist are called in as consultants to a dairy farm whose production has been below par. Each is given time to inspect the details of the operation before making a report. The first to be called is the engineer, who states: "The size of the stalls for the cattle should be decreased. Efficiency could be improved if the cows were more closely packed, with a net allotment of 275 cubic feet per cow. Also, the diameter of the milking tubes should be increased by 4 percent to allow for a greater average flow rate during the milking periods." The next to report is the psychologist, who proposes: "The inside of the barn should be painted green. This is a more mellow color than brown and should help induce greater milk flow. Also, more trees should be planted in the fields to add diversity to the scenery for the cattle during grazing, to reduce boredom." Finally, the physicist is called upon. He asks for a blackboard and then draws a circle. He begins: "Assume the cow is a sphere....

To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.

If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.

the universe expanded by a factor of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 in .00000000000000000000000000000000001 second. It was as if a coin 1 centimeter in diameter suddenly blew up to ten million times the width of the Milky Way.

I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge. I shrunk the Universe to a ball exactly one light-year in diameter. I had it explode. I had it disperse itself again. Ask me a question, any question. How old is the Universe? It is one half-second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far. Who created it? Nobody created it. It has always been here.

The convex surface of any segment of a sphere is, to the entire surface of the sphere itself, as the versed sine of the segment to the diameter of the sphere.

back pocket Richie took a flattened can which had once held Del Monte pineapple chunks. There was a ragged hole about two inches in diameter through

whoever prescribes the diameter of your knowledge controls the circumference of your activity.

On January 18, 1897, Indiana state representative Taylor I. Record argued in favor of changing the value of pi. Pi, which can be rounded to 3.14159, is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Tyler believed that the number was inconveniently long; in House Bill 246, he asked that it be rounded up to 3.2. The bill passed the House but was defeated in the Senate when the chairman of Purdue University’s math department successfully pleaded that it would make Indiana a national laughingstock. The value of pi in Indiana remains the same as in every other state.

This general flattening of objects that rotate is why Earth’s pole-to-pole diameter is smaller than its diameter at the equator. Not by much: three-tenths of one percent—about twenty-six miles.

Our planet Earth has a diameter of 0.04 light-seconds. Neptune’s orbit spans 8 light-hours. The stars of the Milky Way galaxy delineate a broad, flat disk about 100,000 light-years across. And the Virgo supercluster of galaxies, to which the Milky Way belongs, extends some 60 million light-years.

Old Euclid drew a circle On a sand-beach long ago. He bounded and enclosed it With angles thus and so. His set of solemn greybeards Nodded and argued much Of arc and circumference, Diameter and such. A silent child stood by them From morning until noon Because they drew such charming Round pictures of the moon.

There is a tree. At the downhill edge of a long, narrow field in the western foothills of the La Sal Mountains -- southeastern Utah. A particular tree. A juniper. Large for its species -- maybe twenty feet tall and two feet in diameter. For perhaps three hundred years this tree has stood its ground. Flourishing in good seasons, and holding on in bad times. "Beautiful" is not a word that comes to mind when one first sees it. No naturalist would photograph it as exemplary of its kind. Twisted by wind, split and charred by lightning, scarred by brushfires, chewed on by insects, and pecked by birds. Human beings have stripped long strings of bark from its trunk, stapled barbed wire to it in using it as a corner post for a fence line, and nailed signs on it on three sides: NO HUNTING; NO TRESPASSING; PLEASE CLOSE THE GATE. In commandeering this tree as a corner stake for claims of rights and property, miners and ranchers have hacked signs and symbols in its bark, and left Day-Glo orange survey tape tied to its branches. Now it serves as one side of a gate between an alfalfa field and open range. No matter what, in drought, flood heat and cold, it has continued. There is rot and death in it near the ground. But at the greening tips of its upper branches and in its berrylike seed cones, there is yet the outreach of life. I respect this old juniper tree. For its age, yes. And for its steadfastness in taking whatever is thrown at it. That it has been useful in a practical way beyond itself counts for much, as well. Most of all, I admire its capacity for self-healing beyond all accidents and assaults. There is a will in it -- toward continuing to be, come what may.

De Morgan was explaining to an actuary what was the chance that a certain proportion of some group of people would at the end of a given time be alive; and quoted the actuarial formula, involving p [pi], which, in answer to a question, he explained stood for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. His acquaintance, who had so far listened to the explanation with interest, interrupted him and exclaimed, 'My dear friend, that must be a delusion, what can a circle have to do with the number of people alive at a given time?

Why the number three? Probably because there are three stages to be completed: the death, the pregnancy, and childbirth. Just as the moon, which must have three days to reappear. Historically and symbolically, it is always three for something to come back: the disappearance, the construction, the birth. This is the cycle, the circle, the formula to calculate the perimeter (the life), is, let us remember, the diameter multiplied by 3.14 (Pi)

Like a great poet, nature knows how to produce the greatest effects with the utmost economy of means: nothing but sun, trees, flowers, water, and love. Of course, if the latter is absent from the beholder’s heart, the whole landscape will be an unpleasing sight; then the sun is merely so many miles in diameter, and the trees provide good firewood, and the flowers are classified according to the number of their stamens, and the water is wet.

It appears, according to the reported facts, that the electric conflict is not restricted to the conducting wire, but that it has a rather extended sphere of activity around it .. the nature of the circular action is such that movements that it produces take place in directions precisely contrary to the two extremities of a given diameter. Furthermore, it seems that the circular movement, combined with the progressive movement in the direction of the length of the conjunctive wire, should form a mode of action which is exerted as a helix around this wire as an axis.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size in the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system,

The guy at the cash register is a redhead in his thirties with freckles and a two-inch-diameter birthmark, as pink as uncooked salmon, on his pale forehead. The mark is uncannily like the image of a fetus curled in a womb, as if a gestating twin had died early in the mother’s pregnancy and left its fossilized image on the surviving brother’s brow.

A giant Pacific octopus—the largest of the world’s 250 or so octopus species—can easily overpower a person. Just one of a big male’s three-inch-diameter suckers can lift 30 pounds, and a giant Pacific octopus has 1,600 of them. An octopus bite can inject a neurotoxic venom as well as saliva that has the ability to dissolve flesh. Worst of all, an octopus can take the opportunity to escape from an open tank, and an escaped octopus is a big problem for both the octopus and the aquarium.

The stars of the Milky Way galaxy trace a big, flat circle. With a diameter-to-thickness ratio of one hundred to one, our galaxy is flatter than the flattest flapjacks ever made. In fact, its proportions are better represented by a crepé or a tortilla.

The distance between Earth and the sun is one hundred and eight times the sun’s diameter. The distance between Earth and the moon is one hundred and eight times the moon’s diameter. The diameter of the sun is one hundred and eight times Earth’s diameter.

He had a penis one inch in diameter and seven and a half inches long. During the past year, he had averaged twenty-two orgasms per month. This was far above the national average. His income and the value of his life insurance policies at maturity were also far above average.

Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home.

If you shrank the solar system to the size of a dinner plate, the diameter of a correspondingly shrunken Milky Way would still be one hundred thousand kilometers.

I've been coming to this circle for about five years, and measuring it. The diameter and the circumference are constantly changing, but the radius stays the same. Which brings me to the number 5. There are five letters in the word Blaine. Now, if you mix up the letters in the word Blaine, mix 'em around, eventually, you'll come up with Nebali. Nebali. The name of a planet in a galaxy way, way, way... way far away. And another thing. Once you go into that circle, the weather never changes. It is always 67 degrees with a 40% chance of rain.

Never mind. Just be advised, boys,” she said, “you’ll want to watch your step, ’cause what I am is, is like a small-diameter pearl of the Orient rolling around on the floor of late capitalism—lowlifes of all income levels may step on me now and then but if they do it’ll be them who slip and fall and on a good day break their ass, while the ol’ pearl herself just goes a-rollin on.

the statement “All uranium-235 spheres are less than a mile in diameter” could be thought of as a law of nature because, according to what we know about nuclear physics, once a sphere of uranium-235 grew to a diameter greater than about six inches, it would demolish itself in a nuclear explosion. Hence we can be sure that such spheres do not exist. (Nor would it be a good idea to try to make one!)

Halley was brilliant. Here’s just one example of his use of lateral thinking, as discussed in John and Mary Gribbin’s book Out of the Shadow of a Giant: When asked to work out the acreage of land in every English county, Halley “took a large map of England, and cut out the largest complete circle he could from the map.” That circle equated to 69.33 miles in diameter. He then weighed both the circle and the complete map, concluding that since the map weighed four times more than the circle, the area of England was four times the area of the circle. His result was only 1 percent off from contemporary calculations.

the distance between the Earth and the sun—ninety-three million miles—was no more than the thickness of a sheet of paper, then the distance from the Earth to the nearest star would be a stack of papers seventy feet high; the diameter of the Milky Way would be a stack of paper over three hundred miles high. Keep in mind that there are more galaxies in the universe than we can number. There are more, it seems, than dust specks in the air or grains of sand on the seashores. Now, if Jesus Christ holds all this together with just a word of his power (Hebrews 1:3)—is he the kind of person you ask into your life to be your assistant?

There was no need to read the rings. You just estimated the circumference of one of the trees, divided by pi to get the diameter, then multiplied by the average growth factor for North American pines, which was 4.5.

At rest, we know that its circumference is equal to p times the diameter. Once the merry-go-round is set into motion, however, the outer rim travels faster than the interior and hence, according to relativity, should shrink more than the interior, distorting the shape of the merry-go-round. This means that the circumference has shrunk and is now less than p times the diameter; that is, the surface is no longer flat. Space is curved.

The Greek mathematician Archimedes drew a shape with ninety-six sides around a circle and used the geometry he knew to measure the perimeter of the ninety-six sides shape. Then he divided that by the diameter of the circle.

Dwayne Hoover, incidentally, had an unusually large penis, and didn’t even know it. The few women he had had anything to do with weren’t sufficiently experienced to know whether he was average or not. The world average was five and seven-eighths inches long, and one and one-half inches in diameter when engorged with blood. Dwayne’s was seven inches long and two and one-eighth inches in diameter when engorged with blood. Dwayne’s son Bunny had a penis that was exactly average. Kilgore Trout had a penis seven inches long, but only one and one-quarter inches in diameter... Harry LeSabre, Dwayne’s sales manager, had a penis five inches long and two and one-eighth inches in diameter. Cyprian Ukwende, the black physician from Nigeria, had a penis six and seven-eighths inches long and one and three-quarters inches in diameter. Don Breedlove, the gas-conversion unit installer who raped Patty Keene, had a penis five and seven-eighths inches long and one and seven-eighths inches in diameter. Patty Keene had thirty-four-inch hips, a twenty-six-inch waist, and a thirty-four-inch bosom. Dwayne’s late wife had thirty-six-inch hips, a twenty-eight-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom when he married her. She had thirty- nine-inch hips, a thirty-one-inch waist, and a thirty-eight-inch bosom when she ate Dr‚no. His mistress and secretary, Francine Pefko, had thirty-seven-inch hips, a thirty-inch waist, and a thirty-nine-inch bosom. His stepmother at the time of her death had thirty-four-inch hips, a twenty-four-inch waist, and a thirty-three-inch bosom.

This afternoon, being on Fair Haven Hill, I heard the sound of a saw, and soon after from the Cliff saw two men sawing down a noble pine beneath, about forty rods off. I resolved to watch it till it fell, the last of a dozen or more which were left when the forest was cut and for fifteen years have waved in solitary majesty over the sprout-land. I saw them like beavers or insects gnawing at the trunk of this noble tree, the diminutive manikins with their cross-cut saw which could scarcely span it. It towered up a hundred feet as I afterward found by measurement, one of the tallest probably in the township and straight as an arrow, but slanting a little toward the hillside, its top seen against the frozen river and the hills of Conantum. I watch closely to see when it begins to move. Now the sawers stop, and with an axe open it a little on the side toward which it leans, that it may break the faster. And now their saw goes again. Now surely it is going; it is inclined one quarter of the quadrant, and, breathless, I expect its crashing fall. But no, I was mistaken; it has not moved an inch; it stands at the same angle as at first. It is fifteen minutes yet to its fall. Still its branches wave in the wind, as it were destined to stand for a century, and the wind soughs through its needles as of yore; it is still a forest tree, the most majestic tree that waves over Musketaquid. The silvery sheen of the sunlight is reflected from its needles; it still affords an inaccessible crotch for the squirrel’s nest; not a lichen has forsaken its mast-like stem, its raking mast,—the hill is the hulk. Now, now’s the moment! The manikins at its base are fleeing from their crime. They have dropped the guilty saw and axe. How slowly and majestic it starts! as it were only swayed by a summer breeze, and would return without a sigh to its location in the air. And now it fans the hillside with its fall, and it lies down to its bed in the valley, from which it is never to rise, as softly as a feather, folding its green mantle about it like a warrior, as if, tired of standing, it embraced the earth with silent joy, returning its elements to the dust again. But hark! there you only saw, but did not hear. There now comes up a deafening crash to these rocks , advertising you that even trees do not die without a groan. It rushes to embrace the earth, and mingle its elements with the dust. And now all is still once more and forever, both to eye and ear. I went down and measured it. It was about four feet in diameter where it was sawed, about one hundred feet long. Before I had reached it the axemen had already divested it of its branches. Its gracefully spreading top was a perfect wreck on the hillside as if it had been made of glass, and the tender cones of one year’s growth upon its summit appealed in vain and too late to the mercy of the chopper. Already he has measured it with his axe, and marked off the mill-logs it will make. And the space it occupied in upper air is vacant for the next two centuries. It is lumber. He has laid waste the air. When the fish hawk in the spring revisits the banks of the Musketaquid, he will circle in vain to find his accustomed perch, and the hen-hawk will mourn for the pines lofty enough to protect her brood. A plant which it has taken two centuries to perfect, rising by slow stages into the heavens, has this afternoon ceased to exist. Its sapling top had expanded to this January thaw as the forerunner of summers to come. Why does not the village bell sound a knell? I hear no knell tolled. I see no procession of mourners in the streets, or the woodland aisles. The squirrel has leaped to another tree; the hawk has circled further off, and has now settled upon a new eyrie, but the woodman is preparing [to] lay his axe at the root of that also.

men are mistaken in thinking themselves free; their opinion is made up of consciousness of their own actions, and ignorance of the causes by which they are conditioned. Their idea of freedom, therefore, is simply their ignorance of any cause for their actions. As for their saying that human actions depend on the will, this is a mere phrase without any idea to correspond thereto. What the will is, and how it moves the body, they none of them know; those who boast of such knowledge, and feign dwellings and habitations for the soul, are wont to provoke either laughter or disgust. So, again, when we look at the sun, we imagine that it is distant from us about two hundred feet; this error does not lie solely in this fancy, but in the fact that, while we thus imagine, we do not know the sun's true distance or the cause of the fancy. For although we afterwards learn, that the sun is distant from us more than six hundred of the earth's diameters, we none the less shall fancy it to be near; for we do not imagine the sun as near us, because we are ignorant of its true distance, but because the modification of our body involves the essence of the sun, in so far as our said body is affected thereby.

Each candidate was to deliver two stool specimens to the Lovelace laboratory in Dixie cups, and days were going by and Conrad had been unable to egest even one, and the staff kept getting after him about it. Finally he managed to produce a single bolus, a mean hard little ball no more than an inch in diameter and shot through with some kind of seeds, whole seeds, undigested. Then he remembered. The first night in Albuquerque he had gone to a Mexican restaurant and eaten a lot of jalapeño peppers. They were jalapeño seeds. Even in the turd world this was a pretty miserable-looking objet. So Conrad tied a red ribbon around the goddamned thing, with a bow and all, and put it in the Dixie cup and delivered it to the lab.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses. Earth has also tidally locked the Moon, leaving it with identical periods of rotation on its axis and revolution around Earth. Wherever and whenever this happens, the locked moon shows only one face to its host planet.

a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway).

The diameter of the sun was a hundred and eight times the diameter of the earth. The average distance from the sun to the earth was a hundred and eight times the diameter of the sun. The average distance of the moon from the earth was a hundred and eight times the diameter of the moon. There were several other examples of this number appearing almost magically in the universe. Over time, it had been incorporated into many rituals. For instance, it was recommended that a mantra be chanted a hundred and eight times.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over a thousand feet away and Pluto would be a mile and a half distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway).

Let’s walk to the beach Let’s cast the net in the water And catch freshness from water Let’s pick up a pebble from the ground Feel the weight of existence Let’s not abuse moonshine if we suffer from fever (Occasionally I have observed the moon descending during fever And reaching the hand of the roof of heaven I have noticed the goldfinch singing better Sometimes the wound beneath my foot Has taught the ups and downs of earth Sometimes in my sickbed the dimension of the rose has multiplied And the diameter of orange has increased, the radius of lantern too)

Mason prefers to switch over to Tea, when it is Dixon’s turn to begin shaking his head. “Can’t understand how anyone abides that stuff.” “How so?” Mason unable not to react. “Well, it’s disgusting, isn’t it? Half-rotted Leaves, scalded with boiling Water and then left to lie, and soak, and bloat?” “Disgusting? this is Tea, Friend, Cha,— what all tasteful London drinks,— that,” pollicating the Coffee-Pot, “is what’s disgusting.” “Au contraire,” Dixon replies, “Coffee is an art, where precision is all,— Water-Temperature, mean particle diameter, ratio of Coffee to Water or as we say, CTW, and dozens more Variables I’d mention, were they not so clearly out of thy technical Grasp,— ” “How is it,” Mason pretending amiable curiosity, “that of each Pot of Coffee, only the first Cup is ever worth drinking,— and that, by the time I get to it, someone else has already drunk it?” Dixon shrugs. “You must improve your Speed . . . ? As to the other, why aye, only the first Cup’s any good, owing to Coffee’s Sacramental nature, the Sacrament being Penance, entirely absent from thy sunlit World of Tay,— whereby the remainder of the Pot, often dozens of cups deep, represents the Price for enjoying that first perfect Cup.” “Folly,” gapes Mason. “Why, ev’ry cup of Tea is perfect . . . ?” “For what? curing hides?

Returning from a hunting trip, Orde-Lees, traveling on skis across the rotting surface of the ice, had just about reached camp when an evil, knoblike head burst out of the water just in front of him. He turned and fled, pushing as hard as he could with his ski poles and shouting for Wild to bring his rifle. The animal—a sea leopard—sprang out of the water and came after him, bounding across the ice with the peculiar rocking-horse gait of a seal on land. The beast looked like a small dinosaur, with a long, serpentine neck. After a half-dozen leaps, the sea leopard had almost caught up with Orde-Lees when it unaccountably wheeled and plunged again into the water. By then, Orde-Lees had nearly reached the opposite side of the floe; he was about to cross to safe ice when the sea leopard’s head exploded out of the water directly ahead of him. The animal had tracked his shadow across the ice. It made a savage lunge for Orde-Lees with its mouth open, revealing an enormous array of sawlike teeth. Orde-Lees’ shouts for help rose to screams and he turned and raced away from his attacker. The animal leaped out of the water again in pursuit just as Wild arrived with his rifle. The sea leopard spotted Wild, and turned to attack him. Wild dropped to one knee and fired again and again at the onrushing beast. It was less than 30 feet away when it finally dropped. Two dog teams were required to bring the carcass into camp. It measured 12 feet long, and they estimated its weight at about 1,100 pounds. It was a predatory species of seal, and resembled a leopard only in its spotted coat—and its disposition. When it was butchered, balls of hair 2 and 3 inches in diameter were found in its stomach—the remains of crabeater seals it had eaten. The sea leopard’s jawbone, which measured nearly 9 inches across, was given to Orde-Lees as a souvenir of his encounter. In his diary that night, Worsley observed: “A man on foot in soft, deep snow and unarmed would not have a chance against such an animal as they almost bound along with a rearing, undulating motion at least five miles an hour. They attack without provocation, looking on man as a penguin or seal.

The Himalayas grew against the force of Earth’s gravity because of the resilience of crustal rock. But before you get excited about Earth’s mighty mountains, you should know that the spread in height from the deepest undersea trenches to the tallest mountains is about a dozen miles, yet Earth’s diameter is nearly eight thousand miles. So, contrary to what it looks like to teeny humans crawling on its surface, Earth, as a cosmic object, is remarkably smooth. If you had a super-duper, jumbo-gigantic finger, and you dragged it across Earth’s surface (oceans and all), Earth would feel as smooth as a cue ball. Expensive globes that portray raised portions of Earth’s landmasses to indicate mountain ranges are gross exaggerations of reality.

Could you measure the diameter of the globe?" "No, that I couldn't, sir," answered Schweik, "but now I'll ask you a riddle, gentlemen. There's a three-storied house with eight windows on each story. On the roof there are two gables and two chimneys. There are two tenants on each story. And now, gentlemen, I want you to tell me in what year the house porter's grandmother died?

For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls. A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.

Is Vermillion damaged?’ ‘No.’ He gave her an anxious grin. ‘Not exactly. Just lost.’ ‘Lost?’ It was possibly an even more worrying answer. How could you get lost flying to a star cluster that measured twenty thousand lightyears in diameter? It wasn’t as if you could lose sight of something of that magnitude. ‘That’s ridiculous.’ ‘The captain will explain. Let’s get you to the bridge.

The human mind is grown inside a 0.0013 cubic meters crystalline calcium phosphate box on the 149 million km2 rocky surface of a 510 million km2 planet that is falling in a straight line over curved space at 108,000 kilometres per hour inside the gravity well of a 6 trillion km2 star on a 250 million year sojourn around the centre of a galaxy containing some 400 billion stars and trillions of planets and moons. The immediate solar system appears to end at the Kuiper Belt, its outer edge a mind-stunning 7 billion kilometres away, yet the outermost reach of the Heliosphere is still another 5 billion kilometres further out. The furthest object, however, within the Sun’s gravity well, Sedna, marks the solar system’s diameter to in fact be a sense-jarring 287 billion kilometres in length.

Such are the distances, in fact, that it isn’t possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn’t come close. On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away. So

Tabula Rasa can make you feel like you’ve taken a train to Bizarro world. I remember my very first night here—and this is goin’ on fifteen years ago—I was takin’ a walk downtown, tryin’ to get a feel for the place. And I’m walkin’ through a construction site—and it was all construction sites back then, you understand—and I come across this hole in the ground, ’bout ten feet in diameter. I look down and I can’t see a bottom, so I pull a quarter out of my pocket and toss it down, and listen for a clink or a splash. Nothin’. Coin just tumbles into the darkness and disappears. So now I’m real curious, and I look around for somethin’ else to throw down there. And teeterin’ right on the edge of the hole is an old refrigerator. So, I circle around and I give it a good kick and it tumbles down into the hole. I hear it bang off the side a few times but once again, there’s no crash, no splash, like it just kept fallin’ forever. It was the strangest thing. So I figure this is the first of this city’s many unknowable mysteries and I start to go on about my way. But then I see the second strange thing—this goat, it goes flying past me, in midair. Like it was fired from a cannon. And now I think I’m losin’ my mind, like maybe it’s not just tobacco in my cigar, if you know what I’m sayin’. So I walk along and I come across a guy sittin’ on the curb and I say, ‘Holy cow, partner, did you see that goat?’ And the fella says, ‘Well, that’s my goat.’ And I say, ‘Well, I hate to tell ya, but I think it’s gone. It took off flyin’.’ And the fella says, ‘That’s impossible. I had him chained to a refrigerator.’” Zoey stared for a moment, then snorted a laugh that almost caused her to choke on her sandwich.

Mathematics enjoys the greatest reputation as a diversion from sexuality. This had been the very advice to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau was obliged to listen from a lady who was dissatisfied with him: 'Lascia le donne e studia la matematica!' So too our fugitive threw himself with special eagerness into the mathematics and geometry which he was taught at school, till suddenly one day his powers of comprehension were paralysed in the face of some apparently innocent problems. It was possible to establish two of these problems; 'Two bodies come together, one with a speed of ... etc' and 'On a cylinder, the diameter of whose surface is m, describe a cone ... etc' Other people would certainly not have regarded these as very striking allusions to sexual events; but he felt that he had been betrayed by mathematics as well, and took flight from it too.

Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home. “As the cost of the tower and its slides is of secondary importance,” McComber noted, “I do not mention it here, but will furnish figures upon application.” A third proposal demanded even more courage from visitors. This inventor, who gave his initials as R. T. E., envisioned a tower four thousand feet tall from which he proposed to hang a two-thousand-foot cable of “best rubber.” Attached at the bottom end of this cable would be a car seating two hundred people. The car and its passengers would be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable, where the car would snap back upward and continue bouncing until it came to a stop. The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground “be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.

She stepped onto the Devil’s Bridge arching over the deadly crater lake—a round pool of water beaming with bioluminescent light; the light of the dead. Like many other namesakes, the semi-circular metal structure connected the diameter of the small lake, reflecting in the water beneath it. Together, the bridge and its mirror became an immense sphere of sky and water. Blue and green combining into turquoise—always turquoise, the bane of her life.

I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.

When asked to work out the acreage of land in every English county, Halley “took a large map of England, and cut out the largest complete circle he could from the map.” That circle equated to 69.33 miles in diameter. He then weighed both the circle and the complete map, concluding that since the map weighed four times more than the circle, the area of England was four times the area of the circle. His result was only 1 percent off from contemporary calculations.

Dark gray, flexible, and infinitely tough. Seven-foot membranous wings of same color, found folded, spread out of furrows between ridges. Wing framework tubular or glandular, of lighter gray, with orifices at wing tips. Spread wings have serrated edge. Around equator, one at central apex of each of the five vertical, stave-like ridges are five systems of light gray flexible arms or tentacles found tightly folded to torso but expansible to maximum length of over three feet. Like arms of primitive crinoid. Single stalks three inches diameter branch after six inches into five substalks, each of which branches after eight inches into small, tapering tentacles or tendrils, giving each stalk a total of twenty-five tentacles. At top of torso blunt, bulbous neck of lighter gray, with gill-like suggestions, holds yellowish five-pointed starfish-shaped apparent head covered with three-inch wiry cilia of various prismatic colors. Head thick and puffy, about two feet point to point, with three-inch flexible yellowish tubes projecting from each point. Slit in exact center of top probably breathing aperture. At end of each tube is spherical expansion where yellowish membrane rolls back on handling to reveal glassy, red-irised globe, evidently an eye. Five slightly longer reddish tubes start from inner angles of starfish-shaped head and end in saclike swellings of same color which, upon pressure, open to bell-shaped orifices two inches maximum diameter and lined with sharp, white tooth like projections - probably mouths. All these tubes, cilia, and points of starfish head, found folded tightly down; tubes and points clinging to bulbous neck and torso. Flexibility surprising despite vast toughness. At bottom of torso, rough but dissimilarly functioning counterparts of head arrangements exist. Bulbous light-gray pseudo-neck, without gill suggestions, holds greenish five-pointed starfish arrangement. Tough, muscular arms four feet long and tapering from seven inches diameter at base to about two and five-tenths at point. To each point is attached small end of a greenish five-veined membranous triangle eight inches long and six wide at farther end. This is the paddle, fin, or pseudofoot which has made prints in rocks from a thousand million to fifty or sixty million years old. From inner angles of starfish-arrangement project two-foot reddish tubes tapering from three inches diameter at base to one at tip. Orifices at tips. All these parts infinitely tough and leathery, but extremely flexible. Four-foot arms with paddles undoubtedly used for locomotion of some sort, marine or otherwise. When moved, display suggestions of exaggerated muscularity. As found, all these projections tightly folded over pseudoneck and end of torso, corresponding to projections at other end.

Hard-nosed physicists say that the six knobs were never free to vary in the first place. When we finally reach the long-hoped-for Theory of Everything, we shall see that the six key numbers depend upon each other, or on something else as yet unknown, in ways that we today cannot imagine. The six numbers may turn out to be no freer to vary than is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. It will turn out that there is only one way for a universe to be.

Let us discuss these problems in some detail. One problem is to amass enough energy to rip the fabric of space and time. The simplest way to do this is to compress an object until it becomes smaller than its "event horizon." For the sun, this means compressing it down to about 2 miles in diameter, whereupon it will collapse into a black hole. (The Sun's gravity is too weak to compress it naturally down to 2 miles, so our sun will never become a black hole, In principle, this means that anything, even you, can become a black hole if you were sufficiently compressed. This would mean compressing all the atoms of your body to smaller than subatomic distances-a feat that is beyond the capabilities of modern science.) A more practical approach would be to assemble a batter of laser beams to fire an intense beam at a specific spot. Or to build a huge atom smasher to create two beams, which would then collide with each other at fantastic energies, sufficient to create a small tear in the fabric of space-time.

the philosopher John W. Carroll compared the statement “All gold spheres are less than a mile in diameter” to a statement like “All uranium-235 spheres are less than a mile in diameter.” Our observations of the world tell us that there are no gold spheres larger than a mile wide, and we can be pretty confident there never will be. Still, we have no reason to believe that there couldn’t be one, and so the statement is not considered a law. On the other hand, the statement “All uranium-235 spheres are less than a mile in diameter” could be thought of as a law of nature because, according to what we know about nuclear physics, once a sphere of uranium-235 grew to a diameter greater than about six inches, it would demolish itself in a nuclear explosion. Hence we can be sure that such spheres do not exist. (Nor would it be a good idea to try to make one!) This distinction matters because it illustrates that not all generalizations we observe can be thought of as laws of nature, and that most laws of nature exist as part of a larger, interconnected system of laws.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300 metres away and Pluto would be two and a half kilometres distant (and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn’t be able to see it anyway). On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000 kilometres away. Even if you shrank down everything so that Jupiter was as small as the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 metres away.

When they were about a hundred meters from the death lines, Yifan waved Cheng Xin to a stop. Each death line was about twenty or thirty meters in diameter, and from here, they resembled death columns. “These are probably the darkest things in the universe,” Cheng Xin said. The death lines showed no details except an exceptional blackness showing the boundaries of the zero-lightspeed region, with no real surface. Looking up, the lines showed up clearly even against the dark backdrop of space. “These are the deadest things in the universe as well,” said Guan Yifan. “Zero-lightspeed means absolute, one hundred percent death. Inside it, every fundamental particle, every quark is dead. There is no vibration. Even without a source of gravity inside, each death line is a black hole. A zero-gravity black hole. Anything that falls in cannot reemerge.” Yifan picked up a rock and tossed it toward one of the death lines. The rock disappeared inside the absolute darkness. “Can your lightspeed ships produce death lines?” Cheng Xin asked. “Far from it.” “So you’ve seen these before, then?” “Yes, but only rarely.” Cheng

It wasn’t through the mind, through thinking, that the miracle that is life on earth or your body was created and is being sustained. There is clearly an intelligence at work that is far greater than the mind. How can a single human cell measuring 1/1,000 of an inch in diameter contain instructions within its DNA that would fill 1,000 books of 600 pages each? The more we learn about the workings of the body, the more we realize just how vast is the intelligence at work within it and how little we know. When the mind reconnects with that, it becomes a most wonderful tool. It then serves something greater than itself.

When you visit Gindaco, spend some time watching the cooks make takoyaki before ordering, because it's an amazing free show. The shop has an industrial-sized takoyaki griddle with dozens of hot cast iron wells, each one about an inch and a half in diameter. The cook squirts the grill with plenty of vegetable oil. She dunks a pitcher into a barrel of pancake batter and sloshes it over the grill, then strews the whole area with negi, ginger, and huge, tender octopus chunks. Some of Gindaco's purple tentacles are two inches long. This cooks for a little while, then the cook tops off the grill with more batter until it's nearly full. Up to this point, the process looks haphazard, but then she whips out the skewers. Using only the same slender bamboo skewers you'd use for making kebabs, she begins slicing through the batter in a grid pattern and forming a ball in each well. Somehow she herds this ocean of batter into a grid of takoyaki in a minute or two. The takoyaki cost all of 500 yen, and the price includes a wooden serving boat that you can take home and reuse as a bath toy if you haven't gotten too much sauce on it. A Gindaco takoyaki is a brilliant morsel: full of flavor from the negi and ginger, crispy on the outside and juicy within. Takoyaki also stay mouth-searingly hot inside for longer than you can stand to wait, so be careful.

In a sky swarming with uncountable stars, clouds endlessly flowing, and planets wandering, always and forever there has been just one moon and one sun. To our ancestors, these two mysterious bodies reflected the female and the male essences. From Iceland to Tierra del Fuego, people attributed the Sun’s constancy and power to his masculinity; the Moon’s changeability, unspeakable beauty, and monthly cycles were signs of her femininity. To human eyes turned toward the sky 100,000 years ago, they appeared identical in size, as they do to our eyes today. In a total solar eclipse, the disc of the moon fits so precisely over that of the sun that the naked eye can see solar flares leaping into space from behind. But while they appear precisely the same size to terrestrial observers, scientists long ago determined that the true diameter of the sun is about four hundred times that of the moon. Yet incredibly, the sun’s distance from Earth is roughly four hundred times that of the moon’s, thus bringing them into unlikely balance when viewed from the only planet with anyone around to notice.22 Some will say, “Interesting coincidence.” Others will wonder whether there isn’t an extraordinary message contained in this celestial convergence of difference and similarity, intimacy and distance, rhythmic constancy and cyclical change. Like our distant ancestors, we watch the eternal dance of our sun and our moon, looking for clues to the nature of man and woman, masculine and feminine here at home.

There was a risk that Morrison might slip away, and before releasing him, Agent Burger made sure that he’d gone through a rigorous process known as Bertillonage. Devised by the French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in 1879, it was the first scientific method for identifying repeat criminals. Using a caliper and other special tools, Agent Burger, with the help of the Dallas police, took eleven of Morrison’s body measurements. Among them were the length of his left foot, the width and length of his head, and the diameter of his right ear. After Agent Burger informed Morrison of the purpose of these measurements, he also commissioned a mug shot, another of Bertillon’s innovations. In 1894, Ida Tarbell, the muckraking journalist, wrote that any prisoner who passed through Bertillon’s system would be forever “spotted”: “He may efface his tattooing, compress his chest, dye his hair, extract his teeth, scar his body, dissimulate his height. It is useless.” But Bertillonage was already being displaced by a more efficient method of identification that was revolutionizing the world of scientific detection: fingerprinting. In some cases, a suspect could now be placed at the scene of a crime even without a witness present. When Hoover became the bureau’s acting director, he created the Identification Division, a central repository for the fingerprints of arrested criminals from around the country. Such scientific methods, Hoover proclaimed, would assist “the guardians of civilization in the face of the common danger.

I had been wondering about the “slaters,” spelt variously as “slatters,” “sclaters,” and “slatears,” which seemed to be an important ingredient in a number of medicines, so I was pleased to see a clear cork-stoppered vial with this name on the label. The vial was about half-full of what appeared to be small grey pills. These were no more than a quarter-inch in diameter, and so perfectly round that I marveled at Beaton’s dispensing skill. I brought the vial up close to my face, wondering at its lightness. Then I saw the fine striations across each “pill” and the microscopic legs, folded into the central crease. I hastily set the vial down, wiping my hand on my apron, and made another entry in the mental list I had been compiling. For “slaters,” read “woodlice.

The stars of the Milky Way galaxy trace a big, flat circle. With a diameter-to-thickness ratio of one thousand to one, our galaxy is flatter than the flattest flapjacks ever made. In fact, its proportions are better represented by a crépe or a tortilla. No, the Milky Way’s disk is not a sphere, but it probably began as one. We can understand the flatness by assuming the galaxy was once a big, spherical, slowly rotating ball of collapsing gas. During the collapse, the ball spun faster and faster, just as spinning figure skaters do when they draw their arms inward to increase their rotation rate. The galaxy naturally flattened pole-to-pole while the increasing centrifugal forces in the middle prevented collapse at midplane. Yes, if the Pillsbury Doughboy were a figure skater, then fast spins would be a high-risk activity. Any stars that happened to be formed within the Milky Way cloud before the collapse maintained large, plunging orbits. The remaining gas, which easily sticks to itself, like a mid-air collision of two hot marshmallows, got pinned at the mid-plane and is responsible for all subsequent generations of stars, including the Sun. The current Milky Way, which is neither collapsing nor expanding, is a gravitationally mature system where one can think of the orbiting stars above and below the disk as the skeletal remains of the original spherical gas cloud. This general flattening of objects that rotate is why Earth’s pole-to-pole diameter is smaller than its diameter at the equator. Not by much: three-tenths of one percent—about twenty-six miles. But Earth is small, mostly solid, and doesn’t rotate all that fast. At twenty-four hours per day, Earth carries anything on its equator at a mere 1,000 miles per hour. Consider the jumbo, fast-rotating, gaseous planet Saturn. Completing a day in just ten and a half hours, its equator revolves at 22,000 miles per hour and its pole-to-pole dimension is a full ten percent flatter than its middle, a difference noticeable even through a small amateur telescope. Flattened spheres are more generally called oblate spheroids, while spheres that are elongated pole-to-pole are called prolate. In everyday life, hamburgers and hot dogs make excellent (although somewhat extreme) examples of each shape. I don’t know about you, but the planet Saturn pops into my mind with every bite of a hamburger I take.

Imagine a rotating sphere that is 8,000 miles in diameter, with a bumpy surface, surrounded by a 25-mile-deep mixture of different gases whose concentrations vary both spatially and over time, and heated, along with its surrounding gases, by a nuclear reactor 93 million miles away. Imagine also that this sphere is revolving around the nuclear reactor and that some locations are heated more during parts of the revolution. And imagine that this mixture of gases receives continually inputs from the surface below, generally calmly but sometimes through violent and highly localized injections. Then, imagine that after watching the gaseous mixture you are expected to predict its state at one location on the sphere one, two, or more days into the future. This is essentially the task encountered day by day by a weather forecaster.

(...)"He said we all have this different idea of what love is and that's what makes our circle. The more ideas and misconceptions you throw in, the larger the diameter and the harder it is to connect with someone. We," he said, squeezing Hunter's hand and signaling Margie and everyone around them, "all sit around the edge looking at everyone else around the circle. Sometimes we just settle for the person next to us because it's easy or convenient and we skip our way around its circumference, never really knowing what love is all about." He took a sip of his Coke and kept his eyes on Margie. "But other times, you see that person across from you, staring back at you, and you fight like hell trying to get across while he does the same. If you're lucky, there's a rope you can toss over and help draw each other in, never looking away, never worrying about those still on the circumference; just you and him, pulling each other in, deeper and deeper."

I come here sometimes just to be in the presence of such ancient beings. The sides of the boulder are festooned with Umbilicaria americana in raggedy ruffles of brown and green, the most magnificent of northeastern lichens. Unlike those of its tiny crustose forebearers, the Umbilicaria’s thallus—its body—can span an outstretched hand. The largest one recorded was measured at just over two feet. Light streams through holes over the heads of young trees while their grandmothers loom in shadows, great buttressed trunks eight feet in diameter. You want to be quiet in instinctive deference to the cathedral hush and because nothing you could possibly say would add a thing. Here is where the fog drips. Here is where the moisture laden air from the Pacific rises against the mountains to produce upward of one hundred inches of rain a year, watering an ecosystem rivaled nowhere else on earth. The biggest trees in the world. Trees that were born before Columbus sailed.

Having perfected his arrangements, he would get my pipe, and, lighting it, would hand it to me. Often he was obliged to strike a light for the occasion, and as the mode he adopted was entirely different from what I had ever seen or heard of before I will describe it. A straight, dry, and partly decayed stick of the Hibiscus, about six feet in length, and half as many inches in diameter, with a small, bit of wood not more than a foot long, and scarcely an inch wide, is as invariably to be met with in every house in Typee as a box of lucifer matches in the corner of a kitchen cupboard at home. The islander, placing the larger stick obliquely against some object, with one end elevated at an angle of forty-five degrees, mounts astride of it like an urchin about to gallop off upon a cane, and then grasping the smaller one firmly in both hands, he rubs its pointed end slowly up and down the extent of a few inches on the principal stick, until at last he makes a narrow groove in the wood, with an abrupt termination at the point furthest from him, where all the dusty particles which the friction creates are accumulated in a little heap. At first Kory-Kory goes to work quite leisurely, but gradually quickens his pace, and waxing warm in the employment, drives the stick furiously along the smoking channel, plying his hands to and fro with amazing rapidity, the perspiration starting from every pore. As he approaches the climax of his effort, he pants and gasps for breath, and his eyes almost start from their sockets with the violence of his exertions. This is the critical stage of the operation; all his previous labours are vain if he cannot sustain the rapidity of the movement until the reluctant spark is produced. Suddenly he stops, becoming perfectly motionless. His hands still retain their hold of the smaller stick, which is pressed convulsively against the further end of the channel among the fine powder there accumulated, as if he had just pierced through and through some little viper that was wriggling and struggling to escape from his clutches. The next moment a delicate wreath of smoke curls spirally into the air, the heap of dusty particles glows with fire, and Kory-Kory, almost breathless, dismounts from his steed.

What I have observed of the pond is no less true in ethics. Such a rule of the two diameters not only guides us toward the sun in the system and the heart in man, but draws lines through the length and breadth of the aggregate of a man’s particular daily behaviors and waves of life into his coves and inlets, and where they intersect will be the height and depth of his character. Perhaps we only need to know how his shores trend, and his adjacent country or circumstances, to infer his depth and concealed bottom. If he is surrounded by mountainous circumstances, an Achillean shore, whose peaks overshadow and are reflected in his bosom, they suggest a corresponding depth to him. But a low and smooth shore proves him shallow on that side. Also there is a bar across the entrance of our every cove, or particular inclination; each is a harbor for a season, in which we are detained and partially landlocked. These inclinations are not whimsical usually, but their form, size, and direction are determined by the promontories of the shore, the ancient axes of elevation. When this bar is gradually increased by storms, tides, or currents, or there is a subsidence of waters…It becomes an individual lake, cut off from the ocean, wherein the thought secures its own conditions, changes, perhaps, from salt to fresh, becomes a sweet sea, dead sea, or a marsh.

The menu Kroc used to take McDonald’s national was similarly minimalist, with exactly three food items—Pure Beef Hamburger, fifteen cents; Tempting Cheeseburger, nineteen cents; Golden French Fries, ten cents. He aimed to make his burger construction line as standardized and closely measured as the Crystal Palace, decreeing, among other things, that McDonald’s burger patties must weigh 1.6 ounces and measure 3.875 inches in diameter. Don’t like a quarter ounce of onions on your burger? Too bad, just scrape ’em off—custom orders slow things down, and speed was the whole point. That’s why they call it fast food. Then Burger King countered with “Have it your way” in the ’80s, and to compete, McDonald’s started broadening its menu and allowing for special orders. Today, the average McDonald’s menu has more than a hundred items, and special orders are commonplace. But customers never changed their expectations of miraculously instantaneous service to match the vastly more complicated menu crew members are working with. So a lot of people who’ve experienced the magic of getting a Big Mac seconds after ordering it seem to believe there’s some Star Trek machine in the back that zaps food into existence from nothing. At least, that’s the only reason I can think of that customers like this lady get so mad when their special orders take an extra minute or two.

One solution might be to liken the path of the light beam through a changing gravitational field to that of a line drawn on a sphere or on a surface that is warped. In such cases, the shortest line between two points is curved, a geodesic like a great arc or a great circle route on our globe. Perhaps the bending of light meant that the fabric of space, through which the light beam traveled, was curved by gravity. The shortest path through a region of space that is curved by gravity might seem quite different from the straight lines of Euclidean geometry. There was another clue that a new form of geometry might be needed. It became apparent to Einstein when he considered the case of a rotating disk. As a disk whirled around, its circumference would be contracted in the direction of its motion when observed from the reference frame of a person not rotating with it. The diameter of the circle, however, would not undergo any contraction. Thus, the ratio of the disk’s circumference to its diameter would no longer be given by pi. Euclidean geometry wouldn’t apply to such cases. Rotating motion is a form of acceleration, because at every moment a point on the rim is undergoing a change in direction, which means that its velocity (a combination of speed and direction) is undergoing a change. Because non-Euclidean geometry would be necessary to describe this type of acceleration, according to the equivalence principle, it would be needed for gravitation as well.

A lineate is a Magnitude more then long. A New forme of doctrine hath forced our Authour to use oft times new words, especially in dividing, that the logicall lawes and rules of more perfect division by a dichotomy, that is into two kindes, might bee held and observed. Therefore a Magnitude was divided into two kindes, to witt into a Line and a Lineate: And a Lineate is made the genus of a surface and a Body. Hitherto a Line, which of all bignesses is the first and most simple, hath been described: Now followeth a Lineate, the other kinde of magnitude opposed as you see to a line, followeth next in order. Lineatum therefore a Lineate, or Lineamentum, a Lineament, (as by the authority of our Authour himselfe, the learned Bernhard Salignacus, who was his Scholler, hath corrected it) is that Magnitude in which there are lines: Or which is made of lines, or as our Authour here, which is more then long: Therefore lines may be drawne in a surface, which is the proper soile or plots of lines; They may also be drawne in a body, as the Diameter in a Prisma: the axis in a spheare; and generally all lines falling from aloft: And therfore Proclus maketh some plaine, other solid lines. So Conicall lines, as the Ellipsis, Hyperbole, and Parabole, are called solid lines because they do arise from the cutting of a body. 2. To a Lineate belongeth an Angle and a Figure. The common affections of a Magnitude were to be bounded, cutt, jointly measured, and adscribed: Then of a line to be right, crooked, touch'd,

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.

Cheng Xin stared at the death lines, her terror mixed with awe. “If these are trails, why don’t they spread?” Guan Yifan clutched Cheng Xin’s arm. “I was just getting to that. We’ve got to get out of here. Leave not just Planet Gray, but the entire system. This is a very dangerous place. Death lines are not like regular trails. Without disturbance, they’ll stay like this, with a diameter equal to the effective surface of the curvature engine. But if they’re disturbed, they’ll spread very rapidly. A death line of this size can expand to cover a region the size of a solar system. Scientists call this phenomenon a death line rupture.” “Does a rupture make the speed of light zero in the entire region?” “No, no. After rupture, it turns into a regular trail. The speed of light inside goes up as the trail dissipates over a wider region, but it will never be much more than a dozen meters per second. After these death lines expand, this entire system might turn into a reduced-lightspeed black hole, or a black domain.… Let’s go.” Cheng Xin and Guan Yifan turned toward the shuttle and began to run and leap. “What kind of disturbance makes them spread?” Cheng Xin asked. She turned to give the death lines another glance. Behind them, the five death lines cast long shadows that stretched across the plain to the horizon. “We’re not sure. Some theories suggest that the appearance of other curvature trails nearby would cause disturbance. We’ve confirmed that curvature trails within a short distance can influence each other.” “So, if Halo accelerates—” “That’s why we must get farther away using only the fusion engine before engaging the curvature engine. We’ve got to move … using your units of measurement … at least forty astronomical units away.” After

It was not difficult to find. One floor down, pandemonium reigned. Somebody (and Harry had a very shrewd idea who) had set off what seemed to be an enormous crate of enchanted fireworks. Dragons comprised entirely of green and gold sparks were soaring up and down the corridors, emitting loud fiery blasts and bangs as they went; shocking-pink Catherine wheels five feet in diameter were whizzing lethally through the air like so many flying saucers; rockets with long tails of brilliant silver stars were ricocheting off the walls; sparklers were writing swear words in midair of their own accord; firecrackers were exploding like mines everywhere Harry looked, and instead of burning themselves out, fading from sight or fizzling to a halt, these pyrotechnical miracles seemed to be gaining in energy and momentum the longer he watched. Filch and Umbridge were standing, apparently transfixed in horror, halfway down the stairs. As Harry watched, one of the larger Catherine wheels seemed to decide that what it needed was more room to manoeuvre; it whirled towards Umbridge and Filch with a sinister ‘wheeeeeeeeee’. They both yelled with fright and ducked, and it soared straight out of the window behind them and off across the grounds. Meanwhile, several of the dragons and a large purple bat that was smoking ominously took advantage of the open door at the end of the corridor to escape towards the second floor. ‘Hurry, Filch, hurry!’ shrieked Umbridge, ‘they’ll be all over the school unless we do something – Stupefy!’ A jet of red light shot out of the end of her wand and hit one of the rockets. Instead of freezing in midair, it exploded with such force that it blasted a hole in a painting of a soppy-looking witch in the middle of a meadow; she ran for it just in time, reappearing seconds

He is thinking if there is any way by which he can explain just how and what it is he suffers. He is wondering if there is anyone in the whole wide world with a heart big enough to comprehend what it is he wants to tell. There are so many little things to say first, and will anyone have the patience to listen to the end? Suffering is no one thing: it is composed of invisible atoms infinite in number, each one a universe in the great macrocosm of pain. He could begin anywhere, with anything, with a silly word even, a word such as flapdoodle, and he could erect a cathedral of staggering dimensions which would not occupy so much as a pocket in the crevice of the tiniest atom. To say nothing of the surrounding terrain, of the circumambient aura, of things like coast lines, volcanic craters, fathomless lagoons, pearl studs and tons of chicken feathers. The musician has an instrument to work with, the surgeon has his implements, the architect his plans, the general his pawns, the idiot his idiocy, but the one who is suffering has everything in the universe except relief. He can run out to the periphery a trillion times but the circle never straightens out. He knows every diameter but no egress. Every exit is closed, whether it be an inch away or a billion light years distant. You crash a gate made of arms and legs only to get a butt blow behind the ear. You pick up and run on bloody, sawed-off stumps, only to fall into an endless ravine. You sit in the very center of emptiness, whimpering inaudibly, and the stars blink at you. You fall into a coma, and just when you think you've found your way back to the womb they come after you with pick and shovel, with acetylene torches. Even if you found the place of death they would find a way to blow you out of it. You know time in all its curves and infidelities. You have lived longer than it takes to grow all the countless separate parts of a thousand new universes. You have watched them grow and fall apart again. And you are still intact, like a piece of music which goes on being played forever. The instruments wear out, and the players too, but the notes are eternal, and you are made of nothing but invisible notes which even the faintest zephyr can shake a tune out of.

BACON, EGG, AND CHEDDAR CHEESE TOAST CUPS Preheat oven to 400 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 6 slices bacon (regular sliced, not thick sliced) 4 Tablespoons (2 ounces, ½ stick) salted butter, softened 6 slices soft white bread ½ cup grated cheddar cheese 6 large eggs Salt and pepper to taste Cook the 6 slices of bacon in a frying pan over medium heat for 6 minutes or until the bacon is firmed up and the edges are slightly brown, but the strips are still pliable. They won’t be completely cooked, but that’s okay. They will finish cooking in the oven. Place the partially-cooked bacon on a plate lined with paper towels to drain it. Generously coat the inside of 6 muffin cups with half of the softened butter. Butter one side of the bread with the rest of the butter but stop slightly short of the crusts. Lay the bread out on a sheet of wax paper or a bread board butter side up. Hannah’s 1st Note: You will be wasting a bit of butter here, but it’s easier than cutting rounds of bread first and trying to butter them after they’re cut. Using a round cookie cutter that’s three and a half inches (3 and ½ inches) in diameter, cut circles out of each slice of bread.   Hannah’s 2nd Note: If you don’t have a 3.5 inch cookie cutter, you can use the top rim of a standard size drinking glass to do this. Place the bread rounds butter side down inside the muffin pans, pressing them down gently being careful not to tear them as they settle into the bottom of the cup. If one does tear, cut a patch from the buttered bread that is left and place it, buttered side down, over the tear. Curl a piece of bacon around the top of each piece of bread, positioning it between the bread and the muffin tin. This will help to keep the bacon in a ring shape. Sprinkle shredded cheese in the bottom of each muffin cup, dividing the cheese as equally as you can between the 6 muffin cups. Crack an egg into a small measuring cup (I use a half-cup measure) with a spout, making sure to keep the yolk intact. Hannah’s 3rd Note: If you break a yolk, don’t throw the whole egg away. Just slip it in a small covered container which you will refrigerate and use for scrambled eggs the next morning, or for that batch of cookies you’ll make in the next day or two. Pour the egg carefully into the bottom of one of the muffin cups. Repeat this procedure for all the eggs, cracking them one at a time and pouring them into the remaining muffin cups. When every muffin cup has bread, bacon, cheese and egg, season with a little salt and pepper. Bake the filled toast cups for 6 to 10 minutes, depending on how firm you want the yolks. (Naturally, a longer baking time yields a harder yolk.) Run the blade of a knife around the edge of each muffin cup, remove the Bacon, Egg, and Cheddar Cheese Toast Cups, and serve immediately. Hannah’s 4th Note: These are a bit tricky the first time you make them. That’s just “beginner nerves”. Once you’ve made them successfully, they’re really quite easy to do and extremely impressive to serve for a brunch. Yield: 6 servings (or 3 servings if you’re fixing them for Mike and Norman).