Efficient Travel Quotes

I want a moon canoe, because have you ever tried paddling through dirt? Love is a journey, and I try to travel as efficiently as I can.

For scientific discovery, give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel, give me Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when you are seeing no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton

For scientific leadership give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

a human on a bicycle is the most efficient traveler among all machines and animals.

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between…Too, the rhetoric of efficiency around these technologies suggests that what cannot be quantified cannot be valued-that that vast array of pleasures which fall into the category of doing nothing in particular, of woolgathering, cloud-gazing, wandering, window-shopping, are nothing but voids to be filled by something more definite, more production, or faster-paced…I like walking because it is slow, and I suspect that the mind, like the feet, works at about three miles an hour. If this is so, then modern life is moving faster than the speed of thought or thoughtfulness.

We're giving up free range, getting organized, feathering our emotions. Efficiency an effectiveness and all those other pieces of intellectual artifice. And with the loss of free range, the cowboy disappears, along with the mountain lion and gray wolf. There's not much room left for travelers.

Travel by canoe is not a necessity, and will nevermore be the most efficient way to get from one region to another, or even from one lake to another anywhere. A canoe trip has become simply a rite of oneness with certain terrain, a diversion off the field, an art performed not because it is a necessity but because there is value in the art itself.

Habits are undeniably useful tools, relieving us of the need to run a complex mental operation every time we’re confronted with a new task or situation. Yet they also relieve us of the need to stay awake to the world: to attend, feel, think, and then act in a deliberate manner. (That is, from freedom rather than compulsion.) If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt. The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future. One of the things that commends travel, art, nature, work, and certain drugs to us is the way these experiences, at their best, block every mental path forward and back, immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!) Alas, most of the time I inhabit a near-future tense, my psychic thermostat set to a low simmer of anticipation and, too often, worry. The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised.

The Netherlands, for all its faults, was happier than Britain, more efficient than France, more tolerant than America, more worldly than Norway, more modern than Belgium and more fun than Germany.

It’s pretty hard to get to another star system. Alpha Centauri is four light years away, so if you go at 10 per cent of the speed of light, it’s going to take you 40 years, and that’s assuming you can instantly reach that speed, which isn’t going to be the case. You have to accelerate. You have to build up to 20 or 30 per cent and then slow down, assuming you want to stay at Alpha Centauri and not go zipping past. It’s just hard. With current life spans, you need generational ships. You need antimatter drives, because that’s the most mass-efficient. It’s doable, but it’s super slow.

Efficiency involves attentiveness to those things that must be dealt with before they become such overwhelming problems that they cause far more damage than necessary.

What name do I have for you? Certainly there is no name for you In the sense that the stars have names That somehow fit them. Just walking around, An object of curiosity to some, But you are too preoccupied By the secret smudge in the back of your soul To say much and wander around, Smiling to yourself and others. It gets to be kind of lonely But at the same time off-putting. Counterproductive, as you realize once again That the longest way is the most efficient way, The one that looped among islands, and You always seemed to be traveling in a circle. And now that the end is near The segments of the trip swing open like an orange. There is light in there and mystery and food. Come see it. Come not for me but it. But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

For first-time vagabonders, this can be one of the hardest travel lessons to grasp, since it will seem that there are so many amazing sights and experiences to squeeze in. You must keep in mind, however, that the whole point of long-term travel is having the time to move deliberately through the world. Vagabonding is about not merely reallotting a portion of your life for travel but rediscovering the entire concept of time. At home, you’re conditioned to get to the point and get things done, to favor goals and efficiency over moment-by-moment distinction. On the road, you learn to improvise your days, take a second look at everything you see, and not obsess over your schedule.

For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

I can hear all I want about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll on the playground, but only the Girl Scouts know the step-by-steps for limbering up a a new book without injuring the binding and the how-tos of packing a suitcase to be a more efficient traveler. The only thing harder to come by around here than a suitcase is a brand-new book, but I keep the Girl Scout motto as close to my heart as the promise anyway: Be Prepared.

As a physician, I was trained to deal with uncertainty as aggressively as I dealt with disease itself. The unknown was the enemy. Within this worldview, having a question feels like an emergency; it means that something is out of control and needs to be made known as rapidly, efficiently, and cost-effectively as possible. But death has taken me to the edge of certainty, to the place of questions. After years of trading mystery for mastery, it was hard and even frightening to stop offering myself reasonable explanations for some of the things that I observed and that others told me, and simply take them as they are. "I don't know" had long been a statement of shame, of personal and professional failing. In all of my training I do not recall hearing it said aloud even once. But as I listened to more and more people with life-threatening illnesses tell their stories, not knowing simply became a matter of integrity. Things happened. And the explanations I offered myself became increasingly hollow, like a child whistling in the dark. The truth was that very often I didn't know and couldn't explain, and finally, weighed down by the many, many instances of the mysterious which are such an integral part of illness and healing, I surrendered. It was a moment of awakening. For the first time, I became curious about the things I had been unwilling to see before, more sensitive to inconsistencies I had glibly explained or successfully ignored, more willing to ask people questions and draw them out about stories I would have otherwise dismissed. What I have found in the end was that the life I had defended as a doctor as precious was also Holy. I no longer feel that life is ordinary. Everyday life is filled with mystery. The things we know are only a small part of the things we cannot know but can only glimpse. Yet even the smallest of glimpses can sustain us. Mystery seems to have the power to comfort, to offer hope, and to lend meaning in times of loss and pain. In surprising ways it is the mysterious that strengthens us at such times. I used to try to offer people certainty in times that were not at all certain and could not be made certain. I now just offer my companionship and share my sense of mystery, of the possible, of wonder. After twenty years of working with people with cancer, I find it possible to neither doubt nor accept the unprovable but simply to remain open and wait. I accept that I may never know where truth lies in such matters. The most important questions don't seem to have ready answers. But the questions themselves have a healing power when they are shared. An answer is an invitation to stop thinking about something, to stop wondering. Life has no such stopping places, life is a process whose every event is connected to the moment that just went by. An unanswered question is a fine traveling companion. It sharpens your eye for the road.

Still, not even a cynic could deny Shackleton’s gifts as a commander. As one polar explorer put it, “For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get on your knees and pray for Shackleton.

There are countries in which the communal provision of housing, transport, education and health care is so inferior that inhabitants will naturally seek to escape involvement with the masses by barricading themselves behind solid walls. The desire for high status is never stronger than in situations where 'ordinary' life fails to answer a median need for dignity or comfort. Then there are communities—far fewer in number and typically imbued with a strong (often Protestant) Christian heritage—whose public realms exude respect in their principles and architecture, and whose citizens are therefore under less compulsion to retreat into a private domain. Indeed, we may find that some of our ambitions for personal glory fade when the public spaces and facilities to which we enjoy access are themselves glorious to behold; in such a context, ordinary citizenship may come to seem an adequate goal. In Switzerland's largest city, for instance, the need to own a car in order to avoid sharing a bus or train with strangers loses some of the urgency it has in Los Angeles or London, thanks to Zurich's superlative train network, which is clean, safe, warm and edifying in its punctuality and technical prowess. There is little reason to travel in an automotive cocoon when, for a fare of only a few francs, an efficient, stately tramway will provide transport from point A to point B at a level of comfort an emperor might have envied. One insight to be drawn from Christianity and applied to communal ethics is that, insofar as we can recover a sense of the preciousness of every human being and, even more important, legislate for spaces and manner that embody such a reverence in their makeup, then the notion of the ordinary will shed its darker associations, and, correspondingly, the desires to triumph and to be insulated will weaken, to the psychological benefit of all.

Efficiency is a capitalist term that assumes one has the goal of achieving a certain level of productivity.

Our arrival there and not at a busier, more crowded airport on the other side of town was yet another example of the magical efficiency and convenience of vampire travel.

Travel by water was often faster, smoother, more efficient, and in many circumstances safer and more convenient than overland travel, which presents obstacles and threats from animals, people, terrain, and even the conventions and institutions of shoreside society.

The rise of Autism has coincided with: 1. Color televisions. 2. Double glazing & window coatings. 3. Insulated homes that are abnormally quiet. 4. Cell phones. 5. Satellites. 6. Affordable Jet Travel. 7. Home computers & video games. 8. Energy efficient light bulbs. 9. Immunizations. 10. Global Pollution. 11. Processed foods. 12. Adoption of cars by the masses. 13. Radioactive smoke detectors in the home. 14. Increasing television screen sizes. 15. WiFi. 16. Energy Star homes that are sealed up and lacking external fresh air ventilation. 17. FM stereo radio.

Singapore is what your city could become if everyone obeyed the rules, did their jobs diligently, and just shut up. When your city gets to be this paragon of efficiency and discipline, would you still want to live there? Singapore is a model city, which is terrific if you happen to be a model human.

Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads.

With this exponential growth of robots, we could soon have a fleet large enough to do the work of altering the desert landscape. They would mine the soil, construct new factories, and make unlimited copies of themselves cheaply and efficiently. They could create a vast agricultural industry and propel the rise of modern civilization not just on Mars, but throughout space, conducting mining operations in the asteroid belt, building laser batteries on the moon, assembling gigantic starships in orbit, and laying the foundations for colonies on distant exoplanets. It would be a stunning achievement to successfully design and deploy self-replicating machines. But beyond that milestone remains

Fans of mainframe computers boasted of the benefits of handling many jobs in large batches. But the mainframe was as efficient as mass transit—wonderful as long as everyone wanted to travel to the same place at the same time. The PC was like an automobile; it would go anywhere its driver wanted. Instead of organizing work around the mainframe’s schedule, a person with a PC could do computing anytime. The

Report by the Railway Board on Indian Railways for 1938-39. It contained, among other things, photographs to show how efficient Indian Railways was. A set of two pictures, reproduced side by side, caught my eye: both pictures were of the Lucknow railway station—one showed the Mohammedan Refreshment Room and the other, the Hindu Refreshment Room. Patrons in both the refreshment rooms could be seen dining happily, served by liveried waiters.

For example, typhus was initially transmitted between rats by rat fleas, which sufficed for a while to transfer typhus from rats to humans. Eventually, typhus microbes discovered that human body lice offered a much more efficient method of traveling directly between humans. Now that Americans have mostly deloused themselves, typhus has discovered a new route into us: by infecting eastern North American flying squirrels and then transferring to people whose attics harbor flying squirrels.

But the greatest human problems are not social problems, but decisions that the individual has to make alone. The most important feelings of which man is capable emphasise his separateness from other people, not his kinship with them. The feelings of a mountaineer towards a mountain emphasise his kinship with the mountain rather than with the rest of mankind. The same goes for the leap of the heart experienced by a sailor when he smells the sea, or for the astronomer’s feeling about the stars, or for the archaeologist’s love of the past. My feeling of love for my fellowmen makes me aware of my humanness; but my feeling about a mountain gives me an oddly nonhuman sensation. It would be incorrect, perhaps, to call it ‘superhuman’; but it nevertheless gives me a sense of transcending my everyday humanity. Maslow’s importance is that he has placed these experiences of ‘transcendence’ at the centre of his psychology. He sees them as the compass by which man gains a sense of the magnetic north of his existence. They bring a glimpse of ‘the source of power, meaning and purpose’ inside himself. This can be seen with great clarity in the matter of the cure of alcoholics. Alcoholism arises from what I have called ‘generalised hypertension’, a feeling of strain or anxiety about practically everything. It might be described as a ‘passively negative’ attitude towards existence. The negativity prevents proper relaxation; there is a perpetual excess of adrenalin in the bloodstream. Alcohol may produce the necessary relaxation, switch off the anxiety, allow one to feel like a real human being instead of a bundle of over-tense nerves. Recurrence of the hypertension makes the alcoholic remedy a habit, but the disadvantages soon begin to outweigh the advantage: hangovers, headaches, fatigue, guilt, general inefficiency. And, above all, passivity. The alcoholics are given mescalin or LSD, and then peak experiences are induced by means of music or poetry or colours blending on a screen. They are suddenly gripped and shaken by a sense of meaning, of just how incredibly interesting life can be for the undefeated. They also become aware of the vicious circle involved in alcoholism: misery and passivity leading to a general running-down of the vital powers, and to the lower levels of perception that are the outcome of fatigue. ‘The spirit world shuts not its gates, Your heart is dead, your senses sleep,’ says the Earth Spirit to Faust. And the senses sleep when there is not enough energy to run them efficiently. On the other hand, when the level of will and determination is high, the senses wake up. (Maslow was not particularly literary, or he might have been amused to think that Faust is suffering from exactly the same problem as the girl in the chewing gum factory (described earlier), and that he had, incidentally, solved a problem that had troubled European culture for nearly two centuries). Peak experiences are a by-product of this higher energy-drive. The alcoholic drinks because he is seeking peak experiences; (the same, of course, goes for all addicts, whether of drugs or tobacco.) In fact, he is moving away from them, like a lost traveller walking away from the inn in which he hopes to spend the night. The moment he sees with clarity what he needs to do to regain the peak experience, he does an about-face and ceases to be an alcoholic.

People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

As one travels up any one of the large rivers [of Borneo] ,one meets with tribes that are successively more warlike. In the coast regions are peaceful communities which never fight save in self-defense, and then with but poor success, whereas in the central regions, where the rivers take their rise, are a number of extremely warlike tribes whose raids have been a constant source of terror to the communities settled in the lower reaches of the rivers.... It might be supposed that the peaceful coast people would be found to be superior in moral qualities to their more warlike neighbors, but the contrary is the case. In almost all respects the advantage lies with the warlike tribes. Their houses are better built, larger, and cleaner; their domestic morality is superior; they are physically stronger, are braver, and physically and mentally more active and in general are more trustworthy. But, above all, their social organization is firmer and more efficient because their respect for and obedience to their chiefs and their loyalty to their community are much greater; each man identifies himself with the whole community and accepts and loyally performs the social duties laid upon him.

After all, a kiss between real lovers is not some type of contract, a neatly defined moment of pleasure, something obtained by greedy conquest, or any kind of clear saying of how it is. It is a grief-drenched hatching of two hearts into some ecstatic never-before-seen bird whose new uncategorizable form, unrecognized by the status quo, gives the slip to Death's sure rational deal. For love is a delicious and always messy extension of life that unfrantically outgrows mortality's rigid insistence on precise and efficient definition. Having all the answers means you haven't really ecstatically kissed or lived, thereby declaring the world defined and already finished. Loving all the questions on the other hand is a vitality that makes any length of life worth living. Loving doesn't mean you know all the notes and that you have to play all the notes, it just means you have to play the few notes you have long and beautifully. Like the sight of a truly beautiful young woman, smooth and gliding, melting hearts at even a distant glimpse, that no words, no matter how capable, can truly describe; a woman whose beauty is only really known by those who take a perch on the vista of time to watch the years of life speak out their long ornate sentences of grooves as they slowly stretch into her smoothness, wrinkling her as she glides struggling, decade by decade, her gait mitigated by a long trail of heavy loads, joys, losses, and suffering whose joint-aching years of traveling into a mastery of her own artistry of living, becomes even more than beauty something about which though we are even now no more capable of addressing than before, our admiration as original Earth-loving human beings should nonetheless never remain silent. And for that beauty we should never sing about, but only sing directly to it. Straightforward, cold, and inornate description in the presence of such living evidence of the flowering speech of the Holy in the Seed would be death of both the beauty and the speaker. Even if we always fail when we speak, we must be willing to fail magnificently, for even an eloquent failure, if in the service of life, feeds the Divine. Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path? If we can find the hearts, tongues, and brightness of our original souls, broken or not, then no matter from what mess we might have sprung today, we would be like those old-time speakers of life; every one of us would have it in our nature to feel obligated by such true living beauty as to know we have to say something in its presence if only for our utter feeling of awe. For, finally learning to approach something respectfully with love, slowly with the courtesy of an ornate indirectness, not describing what we see but praising the magnificence of her half-smiles of grief and persistent radiance rolling up from the weight-bearing thumping of her fine, well-oiled dusty old feet shuffling toward the dawn reeds at the edge of her part of the lake to fetch a head-balanced little clay jar of water to cook the family breakfast, we would know why the powerful Father Sun himself hurries to get his daily glimpse of her, only rising early because she does.

5. Move toward resistance and pain A. Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. What created this trust was a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Why do I believe in the cowry shell or gold coin or dollar bill? Because my neighbours believe in them. And my neighbours believe in them because I believe in them. And we all believe in them because our king believes in them and demands them in taxes, and because our priest believes in them and demands them in tithes. Take a dollar bill and look at it carefully. You will see that it is simply a colourful piece of paper with the signature of the US secretary of the treasury on one side, and the slogan ‘In God We Trust’ on the other. We accept the dollar in payment, because we trust in God and the US secretary of the treasury. The crucial role of trust explains why our financial systems are so tightly bound up with our political, social and ideological systems, why financial crises are often triggered by political developments, and why the stock market can rise or fall depending on the way traders feel on a particular morning.

Evolution optimizes strongly for energy efficiency because of limited food supply, not for ease of construction or understanding by human engineers. My wife, Meia, likes to point out that the aviation industry didn’t start with mechanical birds. Indeed, when we finally figured out how to build mechanical birds in 2011,1 more than a century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the aviation industry showed no interest in switching to wing-flapping mechanical-bird travel, even though it’s more energy efficient—because our simpler earlier solution is better suited to our travel needs. In the same way, I suspect that there are simpler ways to build human-level thinking machines than the solution evolution came up with, and even if we one day manage to replicate or upload brains, we’ll end up discovering one of those simpler solutions first. It will probably draw more than the twelve watts of power that your brain uses, but its engineers won’t be as obsessed about energy efficiency as evolution was—and soon enough, they’ll be able to use their intelligent machines to design more energy-efficient ones.

Cowry shells and dollars have value only in our common imagination. Their worth is not inherent in the chemical structure of the shells and paper, or their colour, or their shape. In other words, money isn’t a material reality – it is a psychological construct. It works by converting matter into mind. But why does it succeed? Why should anyone be willing to exchange a fertile rice paddy for a handful of useless cowry shells? Why are you willing to flip hamburgers, sell health insurance or babysit three obnoxious brats when all you get for your exertions is a few pieces of coloured paper? People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.

Dr. Freud said he would like to see me again,” she said, finally. “I just bet he would!” Irene laughed. “He collects beetles of all sorts, and you resemble a gray beetle that seems ordinary, but shine a light on it and it begins to shimmer like an opal—blue and green, all cool colors for you, I think. You know, when all of you had just arrived here, I admired your self-control. Here you were in a strange country, determined to rescue a woman you didn’t know from a danger you didn’t understand, all because a friend had asked you to. You were tired from a long journey, yet there you were, coolly making plans. Then later I realized it wasn’t self-control at all—it’s simply the way you are, like Sherlock. He can’t help it either. When there’s a problem to be solved, he sits down and solves it: rationally, efficiently.” Mary opened her mouth to protest. “I don’t mean that you’re emotionless, my dear. I just mean that your emotions are, themselves, efficient, rational. Please don’t misunderstand me—I admire you very much and I would like to be your friend. But you remind me of Sherlock more than anyone I’ve ever met.” “I think that’s a compliment?” said Mary. “I mean, I find him dreadfully aggravating, sometimes. . . .” “Don’t we all!

It is of more than historical interest to reflect that Henry Ford modeled his assembly line car production after visiting a Chicago slaughterhouse in the early 1900s. He watched the suspended animals, legs shackled and heads downward, on a moving conveyor as they traveled from worker to worker, each of whom performed a step in the slaughtering process. Ford immediately saw that it was a perfect model for the automobile industry, creating an assembly method of building cars. More than efficient, the slaughtering assembly line offered workers a newly found detachment in the whole messy business of killing animals. Animals were reduced to factory products and the emotionally deadened workers could see themselves as line workers rather than animal killers. Later, the Nazis used the same slaughterhouse model for their mass murders in the concentration camps. The factory-style assembly line became a way for Nazi soldiers to detach from the killing--seeing the victims as "animals," and themselves as workers. Henry Ford, a rampant anti-Semite, not only developed the assembly line method later used in the Holocaust, he openly admired the Nazis' efficiency. Hitler returned the admiration. The German leader considered "Heinrich Ford" a comrade-in-arms and kept a life-sized portrait of the automobile mogul in his office at the Nazi Party headquarters.

Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will prepare ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Breakfasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a specified hour the next morning. Communications will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone. The screen can be used not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books. Synchronous satellites, hovering in space will make it possible for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, including the weather stations in Antarctica. [M]en will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better. By 2014, electroluminescent panels will be in common use. Ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button. Robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence. The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords, of course, for they will be powered by long- lived batteries running on radioisotopes. “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sections of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increasing emphasis on transportation that makes the least possible contact with the surface. There will be aircraft, of course, but even ground travel will increasingly take to the air a foot or two off the ground. [V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for particular destinations … that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver. [W]all screens will have replaced the ordinary set; but transparent cubes will be making their appearance in which three-dimensional viewing will be possible. [T]he world population will be 6,500,000,000 and the population of the United States will be 350,000,000. All earth will be a single choked Manhattan by A.D. 2450 and society will collapse long before that! There will, therefore, be a worldwide propaganda drive in favor of birth control by rational and humane methods and, by 2014, it will undoubtedly have taken serious effect. Ordinary agriculture will keep up with great difficulty and there will be ‘farms’ turning to the more efficient micro-organisms. Processed yeast and algae products will be available in a variety of flavors. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders. Schools will have to be oriented in this direction…. All the high-school students will be taught the fundamentals of computer technology will become proficient in binary arithmetic and will be trained to perfection in the use of the computer languages that will have developed out of those like the contemporary “Fortran". [M]ankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity. This will have serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences, and I dare say that psychiatry will be far and away the most important medical specialty in 2014. [T]he most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work! in our a society of enforced leisure.

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

Singaporebus.org provides you all the latest information on the express buses from Singapore to its neighboring country – Malaysia and Thailand even. Singaporebus.org constantly updates all the latest happenings revolving around the bus industry and provides all the efficient information that is needed for travelers or passengers traveling via coaches. This website will offer you with all the famous express bus companies that you can reach to travel to your destination in Malaysia.

It may interest for you to know that most Canadians in 2036 are some of the most efficient, ruthless and dangerous people I know. God help Quebec.

Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads. Here’s

But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28 percent heard about the job from a weak tie. Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads. Here’s the wrinkle: it’s tough to ask weak ties for help. Although they’re the faster route to new leads, we don’t always feel comfortable reaching out to them. The lack of mutual trust between acquaintances creates a psychological barrier. But givers like Adam Rifkin have discovered a loophole. It’s possible to get the best of both worlds: the trust of strong ties coupled with the novel information of weak ties. The key is reconnecting, and it’s a major reason why givers succeed in the long run. After Rifkin created the punk rock links on the Green Day site for Spencer in 1994, Excite took off, and Rifkin went back to graduate school. They lost touch for five years. When Rifkin was moving to Silicon Valley, he dug up the old e-mail chain and drafted a note to Spencer. “You may not remember me from five years ago; I’m the guy who made the change to the Green Day website,” Rifkin wrote. “I’m starting a company and moving to Silicon Valley, and I don’t know a lot of people. Would you be willing to meet with me and offer advice?” Rifkin wasn’t being a matcher. When he originally helped Spencer, he did it with no strings attached, never intending to call in a favor. But five years later, when he needed help, he reached out with a genuine request. Spencer was glad to help, and they met up for coffee. “I still pictured him as this huge guy with a Mohawk,” Rifkin says. “When I met him in person, he hardly said any words at all. He was even more introverted than I am.” By the second meeting, Spencer was introducing Rifkin to a venture capitalist. “A completely random set of events that happened in 1994 led to reengaging with him over e-mail in 1999, which led to my company getting founded in 2000,” Rifkin recalls. “Givers get lucky.

In a section titled “Performance Factors,” Clint had been asked to indicate areas in which I’d exhibited significant strengths, as well as any areas needing development. There were only two areas in which he felt I needed development—organization (probably because he’d ridden in my car) and working more closely with third parties—but he had indicated six major strengths. The first three were creativity, achievement of objectives, and quality of work. No surprises there. The next three strengths—adaptability, communication, and autonomy—seemed a bit ironic. I scrolled down and saw my overall score: Very Good. By definition, this score meant that I had “exceeded objectives in several areas and required only occasional supervision.” I didn’t appreciate the real irony of Clint’s assessment until I looked at my stakeholder map and considered how I might have scored had Kristen conducted a similar evaluation at home. What score would I have received for adaptability? The review form defined this as “being open to change with new circumstances.” Going with the flow. We had just begun to work on my openness to change at home, and I was still learning how to adjust to this new mind-set. Meanwhile, at work, I presented myself as nothing if not adaptable. “Sure, I’ll take a new position on the marketing team.” “Of course I can stay until midnight tonight. Whatever it takes.” “Certainly, Clint, I’ll travel to customers every week. Anything else?” At home, Kristen asked me to help fold laundry and my head almost exploded. I guessed that I would receive Needs Development for that one. How about autonomy and initiative? Clint seemed to think that I was bursting with it, but Kristen would have offered a different opinion. “Initiative? Please. How is me having to remind you to turn off the television and play with the kids initiative? I’ll put you down for a Needs Development,” I imagined her saying. Achievement of objectives would have gotten me a high mark with Kristen, until I scrolled down farther and read the definition, which included the phrase “gets things done efficiently and in a timely manner.” I thought of the Christmas decorations drooping from our eaves. I thought of the countless times Kristen and I had been late for an engagement and she’d found me standing in my boxers in front of the mirror making faces.

Like everything else humans built for space travel, it was designed to be efficient, not pretty.

In these days of visas and identification cards it is impossible to travel without leaving a trail that can, with patience, bribery, and access to public records, be picked up. In the happy years between 1925 and 1930 you could talk yourself over any western European frontier, so long as you looked respectable and explained your movements and business with a few details that could be checked; you could treat frontier police as men of decency and common sense: two virtues that they could then afford to indulge. But now unless a traveller has some organization – subversive or benevolent – to help him, frontiers are an efficient bar to those who find it inconvenient or impossible to show their papers; and even if a frontier be crossed without record, there isn’t the remotest village where a man can live without justifying himself and his reasons for being himself. Thus Europe, for me, was a mere trap with a delayed action.

The constant needle and edge in their working relationship is matched by a cloak of secrecy the warring offices throw around their rival operations. Diana had to use all her guile to tease out information from her husband’s office before she flew to Pakistan on her first major solo overseas tour last year. She was due to stopover in Oman where Prince Charles was trying to woo the Sultan to win funding for an architectural college. Curious by nature, Diana wanted to know more but realized that a direct approach to Prince Charles or his senior advisers would receive a dusty response. Instead she penned a short memo to the Prince’s private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard and asking innocently if there was anything in the way of briefing notes she needed for the short stopover in Oman. The result was that, as she was travelling on official Foreign Office business, the Prince was forced to reveal his hand. In this milieu of sullen suspicion, secrecy is a necessary and constant companion. Caution is her watchword. There are plenty of eyes and ears as well as police video cameras to catch the sound of a voice raised in anger or the sight of an unfamiliar visitor. Tongues wag and stories circulate with electrifying efficiency. It is why, when she was learning about her bulimic condition, she hid books on the subject from prying eyes. She dare not bring home tapes from her astrology readings nor read the satirical magazine Private Eye with its wickedly accurate portrayal of her husband in case it attracts unfavourable comment. The telephone is her lifeline, spending hours chatting to friends: “Sorry about the noise, I was trying to get my tiara on,” she told one disconcerted friend.

that the B 2 charges both its wing leading edge and jet exhaust stream to a high voltage. Positive ions emitted from its wing leading edge would produce a positively charged parabolic ion sheath ahead of the craft while negative ions injected into its exhaust stream would set up a trailing negative space charge with a potential difference in excess of 15 million volts. According to electrogravitic research carried out by Tesla and T. Townsend Brown, such a differential space charge would set up an artificial gravity field that would induce a reactionless force on the aircraft in the direction of the positive pole. An electrogravitic drive of this sort could allow the B 2 to function with over unity propulsion efficiency when cruising at supersonic velocities. On March 9, 1992, Aviation Week And Space Technology magazine made a surprising disclosure that the B 2 electrostatically charges its exhaust stream and the leading edges of its wing like body.

disk-turbine motor principle in reverse becomes a very efficient pump. (Tesla's Patent No. 1,061,142) The disk turbine principle is employed in the speedometer, which presents the problem of having to turn the rotary motion of a vehicle’s wheels to

The global fleet of civilian airliners, while more efficient, was expected to double by 2040. That may now be pushed out a few years by the slower growth in passenger travel. Nevertheless, demand will return; over 80 percent of the world’s people have never been in an airplane.

As I travel around the financial services industry today, the most interesting trend I see is the one toward relationship consolidation. Now that Glass-Steagall has been repealed, and all financial services providers can provide just about all financial services, there's a tendency - particularly as people get older - to want to tie everything up... to develop a plan, which implies having a planner. A planner, not a whole bunch of 'em... You've got basically two options. One is that you can sit here and wait for a major investment firm, which handles your client's investment portfolio while you handle the insurance, to bring their developing financial and estate planning capabilities to your client's door. And to take over the whole relationship. In this case, you have chosen to be the Consolidatee. A better option is for you to be the Consolidator. That is, you go out and consolidate the clients' financial lives pursuant to a really great plan - the kind you pride yourselves on. And of course that would involve your taking over management of the investment portfolio. Let's start with the classic Ibbotson data [Stocks, Bonds, Bills and Inflation Yearbook, Ibbotson Associates]. In the only terms that matter to the long-term investor - the real rate of return - he [the stockholder] got paid more like three times what the bondholder did. Why would an efficient market, over more than three quarters of a centry, pay the holders of one asset class anything like three times what it paid the holders of the other major asset class? Most people would say: risk. Is it really risk that's driving the premium returns, or is it volatility? It's volatility.... I invite you to look carefully at these dirty dozen disasters: the twelve bear markets of roughly 20% or more in the S&P 500 since the end of WWII. For the record, the average decline took about thirteen months from peak to trough, and carried the index down just about 30%. And since there've been twelve of these "disasters" in the roughly sixty years since war's end, we can fairly say that, on average, the stock market in this country has gone down about 30% about one year in five.... So while the market was going up nearly forty times - not counting dividends, remember - what do we feel was the major risk to the long-term investor? Panic. 'The secret to making money in stocks is not getting scared out of them' Peter Lynch.

much childbearing becomes an evil rather than a blessing to the State; where violence comes but rarely and offspring are secure, there is less necessity — indeed there is no necessity — for an efficient family, and the specialization of the sexes with reference to their children’s needs disappears. We see some beginnings of this even in our own time, and in this future age it was complete.

Because each of us carries around inside ourselves a mental picture of the kind of person we are. “I’m an efficient secretary,” we may say. Or, “I’m an outdoorsman who loves to hunt.” Or, “I’m a hometown boy not interested in travel far from home.” This self-concept is at the heart of our opinion of ourselves – how much we like ourselves, how much confidence we feel, etc. – and we live our lives in large measure to be in consonance with this self-concept, and to enhance it. Our self-concept is our most precious mental and emotional possession.

packed in steamer trunks.” “Good. How many trunks?” She glanced at the nearby tables, which were empty. “A typical steamer trunk filled with hundred-dollar bills will hold about fifteen million dollars, and weigh about four hundred pounds.” “Okay . . . one in each hand, two people, that’s sixty million.” She ignored my math and said, “But there are also fifty-dollar bills, and twenties, so there are more than four trunks.” “How many?” “My grandfather said ten.” “Each weighing four hundred pounds?” “Yes. A twenty-dollar bill weighs the same as a hundred-dollar bill.” “Right. That’s four thousand pounds of steamer trunks.” “Give or take.” If I’d known this in Key West I would have gone to the gym. “How about the gold and jewels?” “The gold may be too heavy to take. But there are four valises of jewelry which we’ll take.” “Always room for jewelry. And how about the property deeds that you mentioned?” “That’s another steamer trunk.” I pointed out, “This could be a bit of a logistical problem. You know, getting the trunks out of the cave, onto a truck, then to the boat.” “Carlos has a plan.” “Well, thank God. Would you like another cup of coffee?” She stared at me. “We wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t think we could do it.” “Right.” A pretty waitress cleared our plates and smiled at me. It was almost 8 A.M. and people from various tour groups were making their way toward the lobby. We stood and I left two CUCs on the table, and Sara said, “That’s three days’ pay.” “She worked hard.” “And she had a nice butt.” “Really?” The Yale group was already boarding and Sara and I got on the bus together, said good morning to José, Tad, Alison, Professor Nalebuff, and our travel mates as we made our way toward the rear and found a seat together. The efficient Tad did a head count and announced, “We’re all here.” Antonio hopped aboard and called out, “Buenos días!” Everyone returned the greeting so we could get moving. “We will have a beautiful day!” said Antonio. Sí, camarada. CHAPTER 20 The bus wound its way out of Havana and again I had the impression of a once vibrant city that was suffocating under the weight of a rotting corpse. Hemingway’s house, Finca Vigía, was a handsome Spanish Colonial located about fifteen kilometers from Havana,

Edison knew he had a problem: direct current didn’t travel well. It had to be used at low voltage. It wasn’t easily transformed. The standard method of transforming direct current from one voltage to another involved (a) using DC to run a DC motor that (b) turned a generator to generate AC, which (c) a transformer then raised to a higher voltage, after which (d) a device called a rectifier converted the AC back to DC. At the other end of the line, converting higher-voltage direct current back to low voltage required another pass through a motor-generator system. Such a complicated process was inefficient, with losses of efficiency at each stage and correspondingly increased expense.

After the Second and Third Avenue Els were torn down, East Side property owners had prospered as brownstones, loft buildings, and tenements were replaced by high-rise offices and apartment buildings. The area east of Central Park between 59th and 96th Streets, known as the Upper East Side, became home to fashionable boutiques, luxury restaurants, and expensive furniture houses. With thousands of well-educated young professionals moving there, the neighborhood contained the greatest concentration of single people in the entire country.3 Even though the number of cars registered in the United States grew by 47 percent in the 1950s, New York City’s economy still relied on the subway in the early 1960s. During the 8:00 to 9:00 a.m. rush hour, 72 percent of the people entering the CBD traveled by subway, which could move people far more efficiently than automobiles. Each subway car could carry approximately one hundred people, and a ten-car train could accommodate a thousand. Since trains could operate every two minutes, each track could carry thirty thousand people per hour. By comparison, one lane of a highway could carry only about two thousand cars in an hour.4 Although Manhattan and the region were dependent on the rail transit system, 750,000 cars and trucks were entering the CBD on a typical weekday, three times more than had been the case thirty years earlier. Many New Yorkers expected the city to accommodate the growing number of cars. For example, the Greater New York Safety Council’s transportation division claimed that Americans had a fundamental freedom to drive, and that it was the city’s obligation to accommodate drivers by building more parking spaces in Manhattan. The members argued that without more parking, Manhattan would not be able to continue its role as the region’s CBD because a growing number of suburbanites were so highly conditioned to using their cars.5 In

Everything we make will have predictive maintenance, improved efficiency, better safety, better usability. And everything will be made to order. We won’t be cranking out millions of identical widgets and stacking them up in pallets in overseas factories in order to be shipped around the world anymore. We’ll be customizing objects much closer to home. As Olivier Scalabre points out, we’ll be replacing the classic “East to West” trade flows with regional trade flows—East for East, West for West. “When you think about it, the old model was pretty much insane,” Scalabre says. “Piling up stock. Making products travel around the world. The new model—producing right next to the consumer market—will be much better for our environment. In mature economies, productivity will be back home, creating more employment, more productivity, and more growth.

Indeed, we have much less need of imagination than we did before. Once, people could make whole careers conjuring up outlandish things that were not happening. No longer! Now, we need simply watch. Caricaturists are out of business, joining the ranks of travel agents and most (but not all) of the people who scan and bag purchases at the drugstore. We have become our own parodies, eliminating waste and redundancy. This kind of efficiency is what has allowed us to thrive at home, and drop jaws abroad. We have killed off satire once and for all. It is dead. Long live reality!

Nagori Travels offers all travel related services to groups and individuals travelling to and within India under one roof, that are known for our excellence and efficient travel services in Jaipur, Rajasthan.

You need to build a workout plan that can be done anywhere, at any time that efficiently trains your body so you are prepared for any situation. For example, although I rarely go rock climbing, I’ve built my body in such a way that if you sent me climbing today, or whitewater rafting tomorrow, I could do pretty darn well. If I had to run a 5K tomorrow I could do so, even though I haven’t necessarily trained for it. When I traveled around the world with a backpack for a year, I never once set foot in a gym and still managed to get myself in the best shape of my life because I learned to train with antifragility in mind. You need a workout plan that is as antifragile as you hope to become: It can be completed nearly anywhere (no gym required) and helps you build functional strength and power. Want to know the best way to do that? Progressive bodyweight strength training, and varied short-distance running. Combine those two things with a sensible nutrition strategy and you’ll have yourself an antifragile body just like your favorite secret agent.

Joanne’s federal government employment history had been hidden very efficiently, of course. DuBois hadn’t found anything specific about what the woman or her coworkers did. But you could deduce their mission from what my protégée did uncover: the group’s funding (lavish and murkily channeled through nonexistent government agencies) and jurisdiction—in the U.S. only (office leasing and travel authorizations). Its history was enlightening too. The organization was created two weeks after the first Trade Towers bombing in New York in the 1990s, and their budget and personnel were doubled after the African embassy bombings and tripled after the attack on the Cole. After

We encourage our coached athletes to write out a chronological list of activities, with exactly what they plan to do and when they plan to do it, over the final forty-eight to seventy-two hours before their big race. Actually write out a detailed schedule of when you will be traveling, when and where you will eat, when you will sleep, when you plan to visit registration, when you plan to organize your race equipment, when you plan to do your last couple of training sessions, and all of the other little activities you need to efficiently complete, right up until the time you enter the water on the morning of your race.

In the same way that Firestone’s embrace of scientific and technological progress as manifest destiny tips its hat to Marx and Engels, so also it resembles (perhaps even more closely) the Marxist-inspired biofuturism of the interwar period, particularly in Britain, in the work of writers such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, J. D. Bernal, Julian Huxley, Conrad Waddington, and their contemporaries (including Gregory Bateson and Joseph Needham, the latter of whose embryological interests led to his enduring fascination with the history of technology in China). Interestingly, it is also in these early twentieth century writings that ideas about artificial reproduction, cybernation, space travel, genetic modification, and ectogenesis abound. As cultural theorist Susan Squier has demonstrated, debates about ectogenesis were crucial to both the scientific ambitions and futuristic narratives of many of the United Kingdom’s most eminent biologists from the 1920s and the 1930s onward. As John Burdon Sanderson (“Jack”) Haldane speculated in his famous 1923 paper “Daedalus, or Science and the Future” (originally read to the Heretics society in Cambridge) ectogenesis could provide a more efficient and rational basis for human reproduction in the future: [W]e can take an ovary from a woman, and keep it growing in a suitable fluid for as long as twenty years, producing a fresh ovum each month, of which 90 per cent can be fertilized, and the embryos grown successfully for nine months, and then brought out into the air.

In a search space like that of the traveling salesman problem, where nearby points are likely to have similar scores, it is usually better to use a procedure that searches a path through the space by traveling from point to nearby point. Just as the best method for finding a peak in a hilly landscape is to walk uphill, the equivalent heuristic is to choose the best of nearby solutions found in the search space. In the traveling salesman problem, for example, the computer might vary the best-known solution by exchanging the order of two of the cities in the itinerary. If this variation leads to a more efficient tour, then it is accepted as a superior solution (a step uphill); otherwise, it is rejected and a new variation is tried. This method of search will wander through the space, always traveling in an uphill direction, until it reaches the top of a hill. At this point, the solution cannot be improved by exchanging any pair of cities. The weakness of this method, which is called hill climbing, is that although you thereby reach the top of a hill, it is not necessarily the highest hill in the landscape. Hill climbing is a heuristic, not an algorithm.

They were as good and as strong as Rome. Historical fluke the Spanish ever managed to get the better of them.’ ‘How did they?’ I said, wanting suddenly and badly to know. ‘Smallpox,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t strategy or anything like that. The Spanish brought smallpox with them when they landed in Mexico. It arrived in Peru before they did. And the Inca had built a wonderful, efficient road system for it to travel on. The royal family was obliterated in five years, the administration of the empire collapsed, and Pizarro took the whole thing with five thousand men. One of the most ridiculous confluences of bad luck in history.

Without spice, efficient space travel would be impossible … and without space travel, the Imperium itself would fall. Spice prolonged life, protected health, and added a vigor to existence. The Baron, a moderate user himself, greatly appreciated the way it made him feel. Of course, the spice melange was also ferociously addictive, which kept the price high.…

If you can find a better path along the way, once you have started moving forward, then switch course. Be careful, though; it is not easy to discriminate between changing paths and simply giving up. (One hint: if the new path you see forward, after learning what you needed to learn along your current way, appears more challenging, then you can be reasonably sure that you are not deluding or betraying yourself when you change your mind.) In this manner, you will zigzag forward. It is not the most efficient way to travel, but there is no real alternative, given that your goals will inevitably change while you pursue them, as you learn what you need to learn while you are disciplining yourself.

Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original

Spirit Airlines Phone Number-+1-855-653-0615 Spirit Airlines Phone Number Travel makes a significant impact on one’s life and senses. Besides letting one explore various cultures and natural diversity, it helps in enhancing empathy, self-love and makes one’s life more enjoyable. Few things can be more exciting than spending quality time with loved ones in a remote leisure vacation spot or forgetting oneself completely in any adventurous activity at one’s preferred destination. Let Spirit Airlines take your travel expectations to a new height and provide a memorable and transformative experience. We are committed to provide pleasant & hassle free travel experiences to all travelers. You can score Spirit Airlines Flights ticket and get decent in-flight amenities, letting you enjoy your trip without hurting your pockets. Our expert crew takes all the pains to help passengers get smooth and relaxed air travel. Hence, you can Book Spirit Airlines Tickets without any care or concern. With fuel-efficient aircraft, we facilitate customers to gain maximum savings. Travelers can fly freely to 103 destinations in 40 states, without breaking their banks and thus realize their travel goals. Whether looking for Spirit Plane Tickets Bookings to visit Chicago, Houston, or New York City for business travel or Atlantic City, Las Vegas, Mexico, or Costa Rica for a splendid leisure tour, you should book your tickets from Spirit Airlines official site. It will provide you with the best flight shopping and flight management experience. Every dollar saved on your flight tickets is an added advantage that can help you spend more on accommodations, dining options, or making your tour more fun-filled. Hence, knowing more about our policies, terms and conditions makes sense to get satisfactory flight booking services. Our experienced customer support team will ensure that you get freedom from any difficulty in Spirit Airlines flight booking or managing your flight. You will get complete satisfaction from our excellent crew services and that too at a low cost, without any trouble.

Rudolf Diesel deliberately set out to design a new, more efficient, prime mover, and by 1897 his first (heavy and stationary) engine had reached an efficiency of 30 percent, double the performance of the best steam engines.[40] But the first marine engine was installed only in 1912 on Christian X, a Danish freighter. Diesel-powered ships carried much less fuel than coal-fired steamers, but could travel further without refueling because the new engines were nearly twice as efficient—and because, per unit of mass, diesel oil contains nearly twice as much energy. An

Twenty-six months ago, Lunar Industries had fired Spencer. He had discovered a new principle of physics that could lead to a new type of communicator. It didn’t have many of the limitations of using radio waves at long distances, such as for space travel, and could make it much more efficient to remain in touch with spacecraft in deep space. But the communicator’s usefulness had made no difference to Lunar Industries. Spencer had been fired nonetheless. He had had the nerve to go against Mr. Andrei Lunar’s expressed wishes.

The recently arrived Normans were a people very different from the subjects of the Capetian kings. They had quickly shown themselves to be anything but the Viking savages that the French had originally supposed. On the contrary, they had absorbed the Latin culture, language, and religion of their hosts with astonishing speed. They had moreover demonstrated qualities not normally associated with early Medieval France, an extraordinary degree of energy and vigor, combined with a characteristic love of travel and adventure, without which they would have never of left their homes. They administered their lands with great efficiency, they showed a deep knowledge and respect for the law, and they'd already begun to build cathedrals and churches far more beautiful and more technically advanced than those of their French hosts.

When it comes to finding a reliable and efficient taxi service in Dharamshala, Inder Travel is the name you can trust.

Time traveller He calls himself a time traveller, He travels anywhere and anytime, He is a very adept traveller, Who knows how to bypass time, We once met suddenly, When the traveller was travelling the highway of life, He was pacing very efficiently, And that day I happened to be on the same highway of life, As I was about to cross a junction, He stopped there too, And enquired if I knew how this highway of life did function? “I may not know that better than you,” Was my polite and slow answer, “Ah haa, you appear to be a stranger on this highway, Come let me introduce you to few tricks old and quite a few newer, So, come let us go this way.” Said the traveller as we both stepped on the highway, And paced towards a destination of his choosing, It was a beautiful experience anyway, Though his few ways were very amusing, Then we stopped at a far away corner, And he pulled something from his bag, He was smart but this thing seemed smarter, He opened it and removed the safety tag, Now he turned to me and said, “Look at the sky, what do you see?” And I without being reticent said, “The sky, the Sun, that is all I see,” Looking at me he replied, “I thought so, and here is the fact, You see the sky and just the Sun, But you miss the real act, Time invested cannot be undone, You see I am a time traveller and I travel with it, Today on this highway, tomorrow on another, But I never miss the destination even by a bit, And as we were walking together, I asked you what you see when you look at the sky, You should have said, nothing, I have no time for it, Because the Sun will be there, so will be the sky, Being the time travellers we are not allowed to sit, We have to keep on moving and always seeking, Until we reach our destiny, Now this for you is my lesson worth heeding, If you are to find your final destiny, So let the Sun be, let the stars shine, and let the sky spread its magical blue, You keep travelling, moving, from one destination to another, Then you shall be a time traveller too, Like none other, like none other, So we switched lanes on the highway, He rode in a direction new, And now I was a lone rider on my life’s highway, Having realised what is known to just a few, That to be the time traveller, We should not wander but travel with a fixed aim, Because a true traveller is like a true lover, Who knows love and destiny are not a game, So for the real time traveller, it is always one destiny and one love, Though crossing many destinations is a part of it all, But the passion for love and to love, Supercedes the lure of destinations all! Now I often see the time traveller on the highways that I cross, We just bow our heads and move ahead, Because we have a destination to cross, To reach the final destiny of love, and in this pursuit we shall always stay ahead!

The multiplication of technologies in the name of efficiency is actually eradicating free time by making it possible to maximize the time and place for production and minimize the unstructured travel time in between. New timesaving technologies make most workers more productive, not more free, in a world which seems to be accelerating around them.

In his popular political essay “In Praise of Idleness,” the twentieth-century British philosopher Bertrand Russell chides us for failing to use our free time for, of all things, fun: “It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency. The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” The contemporary wit Steven Wright makes a comparable point more succinctly: “Hard work pays off in the future. Laziness pays off now.

The qualifications of a good reporter applies very largely to the qualifications of a good public relations counsel. "There is undoubtedly a good deal of truth," says Mr. Given, "in the saying that good reporters are born and not made. A man may learn how to gather some kinds of news, and he may learn how to write it correctly, but if he cannot see the picturesque or vital point of an incident and express what he sees so that others will see as through his eyes, his productions, even if no particular fault can be found with them, will not bear the mark of true excellence; and there is, if one stops to think, a great difference between something that is devoid of faults and something that is full of good Thc quality which makes a good newspaper man must, in the opinion of many editors, exist in the beginning. But when it does exist, it can usually be developed, no matter how many obstacles are in the way." The public relations counsel can try to bring about this identification by utilizing the appeals to and instincts discussed in the preceding chapter, and by making use of the characteristics of the group formation of society. His utilization of these basic principles will be a continual and efficient aid to him. He must make it easy for the public to pick his issue out of the great mass of material. He must be able to overcome what has been called "the tendency on the part of public attention to 'flicker' and 'relax.'" He must do for the public mind what the newspaper, with its headlines, accomplishes for its readers. Abstract discussions and heavy fact are the groundwork of his involved theory, or analysis, but they cannot be given to the public until they are simplified and dramatized. The refinements of reason and the shadings of emotion cannot reach a considerable public. When an appeal to the instincts can be made so powerful as to secure acceptance in the medium of dissemination in spite of competitive interests, it can be aptly termed news. The public relations counsel, therefore, is a creator of news for whatever medium he chooses to transmit his ideas. It is his duty to create news no matter what the medium which broadcasts this news. It is news interest which gives him an opportunity to make his idea travel and get the favorable reaction from the instincts to which he happens to appeal. News in itself we shall define later on when we discuss "relations with the press." But the word news is sufficiently understood for me to talk of it here. In order to appeal to the instincts and fundamental emotions of the public, discussed in previous chapters, the public relations counsel must create news around his ideas. News will, by its superior inherent interest, receive attention in the competitive markets for news, which are themselves continually trying to claim the public attention. The pubic relations counsel must lift startling facts from his whole subject and present them as news. He must isolate ideas and develop them into events so that they can be more readily understood and so that they may claim attention as news.

The TransMilenio is not carbon neutral. To keep costs down, its caterpillar buses run on diesel rather than on cleaner fuels that are more expensive and less suited to the high altitude of Bogotá, which sits 8,500 feet above sea level. Nevertheless, a TransMilenio engine is so efficient that it emits less than half the pollution of an old-fashioned minibus. By embracing BRT, Bogotá has taken more than 9,000 small private buses off the roads, slashing the overall consumption of bus fuel since the first line opened in 2001. Some private cars vanished too. Last year Ortega sold his Audi sedan and now travels around Bogotá either by TransMilenio or taxi—a big step in a society where having your own wheels is the ultimate status symbol. “I just don’t feel like I need a car anymore,” he says. “You can live differently in this city now.

needs. Riding too far to the right is dangerous because you’re in the danger zone of poor sightlines and opening car doors; it invites motorists to pass too closely, and it takes away your escape route to the right. The correct lane positions described in this booklet are the safest and most efficient. Do not be intimidated. Take responsibility for your own safety, even if other traffic must occasionally slow and follow you. An understanding of road positioning makes the difference between stress-ful, dangerous surprises and smooth, uneventful travels.

For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton

Corvallis and most of the other techies hated this idea because of its sheer bogosity, which was screamingly obvious to any person of technical acumen who thought about it for more than a few seconds. If their pattern-recognition software could identify the moving travelers and vectorize their body positions well enough to translate their movements into T’Rain, then it could just as easily notice, automatically, with no human intervention, when one of those figures was walking the wrong way and sound the alarm. There was no need at all to have human players in the loop. They should just spin out the pattern-recognition part of it as a separate business. Richard understood and acknowledged all of this—and did not care. “Did you, or did you not, tell me that this was all marketing? What part of your own statement did you not understand?” The purpose of the exercise was not really to build a rational, efficient airport security system. It was, rather (to use yet another of those portentous phrases cribbed from the math world), an existence proof. Once it was up and running, they could point to it and to its 100 percent success rate as vindicating the premise of APPIS, which was that real-world problems—especially problems that were difficult to solve because of hard-wired deficiencies of the human neurological system, such as the tendency to become bored when given a terrible job—could be tackled by metaphrasing them into Medieval Armed Combat scenarios, and then (here brandishing two searingly hip terms from high tech) putting them out on the cloud so that they could be crowdsourced.

There was a big difference between liberty and leave. “Liberty” was short-term, an authorized absence from duty for less than forty-eight hours. Generally, when ships were in port, no sailor could be deprived of liberty on shore for more than twelve days unless—in the words of the venerable Bluejackets’ Manual—“the exigencies of the service or the unhealthfulness of the port prevent.” Liberty could also be denied to those whose prior conduct on shore had proven “discreditable to the service.” “Leave” was the authorized absence from duty for more than forty-eight hours. At the discretion of their commanding officer, enlisted men whose services could be spared were granted up to thirty days leave in any one calendar year, exclusive of travel time. A month’s paid vacation per year was a major perk. Because leaves had to be distributed throughout the year to maintain the efficiency of the ship, it behooved one to make requests early.

Smokey James McClain, a hardworking and family-oriented business professional from Houma. As a lead deckhand, he creates a safe and efficient work environment. With a passion for adventure, Smokey enjoys traveling, swimming, kayaking, and extreme sports.

But surprisingly, people were significantly more likely to benefit from weak ties. Almost 28 percent heard about the job from a weak tie. Strong ties provide bonds, but weak ties serve as bridges: they provide more efficient access to new information. Our strong ties tend to travel in the same social circles and know about the same opportunities as we do. Weak ties are more likely to open up access to a different network, facilitating the discovery of original leads.

Certain activities—sleeping, eating, reading, socializing, wandering—will become a fixture of each day. This is good and well (routines make your day more efficient, after all), but you should be careful not to let your days or destinations blur together. Once this begins to happen—once you feel yourself getting jaded to the long haul—it’s time to mix your travels up a bit.

We know a very successful executive who, upon retirement, put all his investments into high-quality, diversified, municipal bonds. The income from the bonds is more than sufficient for his family’s lifestyle. This executive wants to spend his time traveling and on the golf course—not managing a complex portfolio of assorted securities. His simple portfolio may be unusual, but we think it’s probably a very suitable portfolio for him. However, most of us want a return greater than is available from savings, CDs, and bonds. This is why we use stocks to provide the growth and additional income needed to meet our goals. DESIGNING OUR PERSONAL ASSET ALLOCATION PLAN We have discussed the Efficient Market Theory and Modern Portfolio Theory.

If you spend a day driving, you travel a long way and see nothing. If you spend a day walking, you travel a short distance but, in compensation, you see every small detail along the way. The efficiency of the bicycle gives you the best of both modes. On a bike, you can travel a long way and see a huge amount. The cyclist experiences both breadth and depth.

As they flew, Holden looked back up at the Knight: a blocky gray wedge with a drive cone stuck on the wider end. Like everything else humans built for space travel, it was designed to be efficient, not pretty. That always made Holden a little sad. There should be room for aesthetics, even out here.

Let's imagine we're standing together on the launch pad at NASA's Cape Canaveral facility near Orlando, and staring up at the stars together. As I write this, the last constellation above the horizon is Centaurus. The centaur's front head is a bright star. In fact, it's three stars—a pair called Alpha Centauri A and B, and, dimmest of the trio, Proxima Centauri. Here, look through this telescope. See? You can tell them apart. But what we can't see is that there is, in fact, a planet circling the faint light of Proxima Centauri. Man, I wish we could see it. Because that planet, Proxima Centauri b, is the nearest known exoplanet to Earth. [...] If we were to board a spacecraft and ride it from the outer edge of our atmosphere all the way to Proxima Centauri b, you and I, who boarded the ship fit and trim, chosen as we were from billions of applicants, would die before the voyage reached even 1/100th of the intervening distance. [...] At a speed of 20,000 miles per hour—the speed of our top-performing modern rockets—4.2 light years translates to more than 130,000 years of space travel. [...] So how will we ever get there? A generation ship. [...] the general notion is this: get enough human beings onto a ship, with adequate genetic diversity among us, that we and our fellow passengers cohabitate as a village, reproducing and raising families who go on to mourn you and me and raise new of their own, until, thousands of years after our ship leaves Earth's gravity, the distant descendants of the crew that left Earth finally break through the atmosphere of our new home. [...] A generation ship is every sociological and psychological challenge of modern life squashed into a microcosmic tube of survival and amplified—generation after generation. [...] The idea of a generation ship felt like a pointless fantasy when I first encountered it. But as I've spent the last few years speaking with technologists, academics, and policy makers about the hidden dangers of building systems that could reprogram our behavior now and for generations to come, I realized that the generation ship is real. We're on board it right now. On this planet, our own generation ship, we were once passengers. But now, without any training, we're at the helm. We have built lives for ourselves on this planet that extend far beyond our natural place in this world. And now we are on the verge of reprogramming not only the planet, but one another, for efficiency and profit. We are turning systems loose on the decks of the ship that will fundamentally reshape the behavior of everyone on board, such that they will pass those behaviors on to their progeny, and they might not even realize what they've done. This pattern will repeat itself, and play out over generations in a behavioral and technological cycle.

I’ve learned that healthy, clever risk-taking doesn’t have to be complicated—it can be as simple as taking a new route to work, trying the new sushi place that opened up downtown, taking up a new hobby, traveling (even in your own backyard), or meeting new people. What risk-taking is really about is challenging yourself a bit so you can accrue wisdom and help your brain become a better, more efficient prediction machine. It’s about gathering enough knowledge and experience so you understand the potential ins and outs of any situation you encounter. It’s about keeping your brain sharp—and being prepared to deal with whatever life throws at you.

The crucial consideration, however, is where reliable solutions to the world’s problems will come from if it is not further development of chemistry. Chemistry holds the key to the enhancement of almost every aspect of our daily lives, from the cradle to the grave and all points in between. It has provided the material foundation of all our comforts, not only in health but in illness too, and there is no reason to suppose that it has reached its zenith. It contributes to our communications, both virtual and physical, for it provides the materials along which our electrons and photons travel in the complex network of patterns and interactions that result in computation. Moreover, it develops our fuels, rendering them more efficiently combustible and through catalysis minimizing their noxious products, and helps in the migration from fossil fuels to renewable sources, such as in the development of photovoltaic substances. Chemistry is the only solution to the problems it causes in the environment, be it in earth, air, or water.

Bill Bradley (b. 1943) fell in love with the sport of basketball somewhere around the age of ten. He had one advantage over his peers—he was tall for his age. But beyond that, he had no real natural gift for the game. He was slow and gawky, and could not jump very high. None of the aspects of the game came easily to him. He would have to compensate for all of his inadequacies through sheer practice. And so he proceeded to devise one of the most rigorous and efficient training routines in the history of sports. Managing to get his hands on the keys to the high school gym, he created for himself a schedule—three and a half hours of practice after school and on Sundays, eight hours every Saturday, and three hours a day during the summer. Over the years, he would keep rigidly to this schedule. In the gym, he would put ten-pound weights in his shoes to strengthen his legs and give him more spring to his jump. His greatest weaknesses, he decided, were his dribbling and his overall slowness. He would have to work on these and also transform himself into a superior passer to make up for his lack of speed. For this purpose, he devised various exercises. He wore eyeglass frames with pieces of cardboard taped to the bottom, so he could not see the basketball while he practiced dribbling. This would train him to always look around him rather than at the ball—a key skill in passing. He set up chairs on the court to act as opponents. He would dribble around them, back and forth, for hours, until he could glide past them, quickly changing direction. He spent hours at both of these exercises, well past any feelings of boredom or pain. Walking down the main street of his hometown in Missouri, he would keep his eyes focused straight ahead and try to notice the goods in the store windows, on either side, without turning his head. He worked on this endlessly, developing his peripheral vision so he could see more of the court. In his room at home, he practiced pivot moves and fakes well into the night—such skills that would also help him compensate for his lack of speed. Bradley put all of his creative energy into coming up with novel and effective ways of practicing. One time his family traveled to Europe via transatlantic ship. Finally, they thought, he would give his training regimen a break—there was really no place to practice on board. But below deck and running the length of the ship were two corridors, 900 feet long and quite narrow—just enough room for two passengers. This was the perfect location to practice dribbling at top speed while maintaining perfect ball control. To make it even harder, he decided to wear special eyeglasses that narrowed his vision. For hours every day he dribbled up one side and down the other, until the voyage was done. Working this way over the years, Bradley slowly transformed himself into one of the biggest stars in basketball—first as an All-American at Princeton University and then as a professional with the New York Knicks. Fans were in awe of his ability to make the most astounding passes, as if he had eyes on the back and sides of his head—not to mention his dribbling prowess, his incredible arsenal of fakes and pivots, and his complete gracefulness on the court. Little did they know that such apparent ease was the result of so many hours of intense practice over so many years.

got off the barges. They rode their caravan the rest of the four hundred miles up to Haran. This cut their travel time in half, to about ten days. Terah needed to get back to Babylon in time for the Akitu Festival. Harran was a small city of only about ten thousand people, noted by trade merchants for its tapestries and carpet weaving. Because of its location, it had a significant population of settled Amorites, a nomadic people from the northwestern hill country of Amurru. The Amorites engaged in animal husbandry, selling their herds across the land. As they became more settled, they also became efficient in agricultural produce. They were an adaptive culture that worshipped Martu, the storm god, another name for Marduk. They had established trade routes from Haran all the way into the Jordan Valley of Canaan.

I apologize. I feel I’ve let you down somehow with my tales of reasonable and efficient travel. I’m sure if I’d been Bill Bryson my taxi driver would have told me a funny story, or something. I’m afraid mine simply listened to the BBC London and was outraged by everything the presenter was saying. He did spit when he talked, though, if that’s any use to you.

Traveling with us did have its advantages. Before Barack’s presidency was over, our girls would enjoy a baseball game in Havana, walk along the Great Wall of China, and visit the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio one evening in magical, misty darkness. But it could also be a pain in the neck, especially when we were trying to tend to things unrelated to the presidency. Earlier in Malia’s junior year, the two of us had gone to spend a day visiting colleges in New York City, for instance, setting up tours at New York University and Columbia. It had worked fine for a while. We’d moved through NYU’s campus at a brisk pace, our efficiency aided by the fact that it was still early and many students were not yet up for the day. We’d checked out classrooms, poked our heads into a dorm room, and chatted with a dean before heading uptown to grab an early lunch and move on to the next tour. The problem is that there’s no hiding a First Lady–sized motorcade, especially on the island of Manhattan in the middle of a weekday. By the time we finished eating, about a hundred people had gathered on the sidewalk outside the restaurant, the commotion only breeding more commotion. We stepped out to find dozens of cell phones hoisted in our direction as we were engulfed by a chorus of cheers. It was beneficent, this attention—“Come to Columbia, Malia!” people were shouting—but it was not especially useful for a girl who was trying quietly to imagine her own future. I knew immediately what I needed to do, and that was to bench myself—to let Malia go see the next campus without me, sending Kristin Jones, my personal assistant, as her escort instead. Without me there, Malia’s odds of being recognized went down. She could move faster and with a lot fewer agents. Without me, she could maybe, possibly, look like just another kid walking the quad. I at least owed her a shot at that. Kristin, in her late twenties and a California native, was like a big sister to both my girls anyway. She’d come to my office as a young intern, and along with Kristen Jarvis, who until recently had been my trip director, was instrumental in our family’s life, filling some of these strange gaps caused by the intensity of our schedules and the hindering nature of our fame. “The Kristins,” as we called them, stood in for us often. They served as liaisons between our family and Sidwell, setting up meetings and interacting with teachers, coaches, and other parents when Barack and I weren’t able. With the girls, they were protective, loving, and far hipper than I’d ever be in the eyes of my kids. Malia and Sasha trusted them implicitly, seeking their counsel on everything from wardrobe and social media to the increasing proximity of boys. While Malia toured Columbia that afternoon, I was put into a secure holding area designated by the Secret Service—what turned out to be the basement of an academic building on campus—where I sat alone and unnoticed until it was time to leave, wishing I’d at least brought a book to read.

But as Airbnb became huge, with lots of hosts and travelers, it became increasingly common to have to make multiple attempts to nail down a reservation. Meanwhile, Airbnb’s main competitors were no longer other small Internet businesses, but giant hotel corporations such as Hilton, Marriott, and Best Western. And one huge advantage these huge hotel chains offer to travelers is speedy confirmation. Their transactions are fast: by phone or on the Web, you can quickly find out whether rooms are still available and book one for the night you want. That’s because all the rooms in, say, a Hilton are managed by a central computer system, so one call lets you check all the rooms at the same time. Imagine instead if you had to call Hilton to inquire about each room individually. On any given call, the only thing the reservation clerk could tell you was whether, say, room 1226 at the San Francisco Hilton was available for the night you wanted. If not, you had to make another call to find out about room 1227, then another for room 1228. Booking a room with an Airbnb host was a little like that. So Airbnb had to figure out how a market with many hosts offering one room at a time could compete more effectively with hotels. Price was obviously important. But it was the spread of smartphones that helped Airbnb close the speed gap, and that may have mattered even more than price. Today, as hosts manage their reservations on their smartphones, they don’t have to wait until they return home to confirm a booking—they just check their phones. They can also, as soon as the room is booked, immediately update their Airbnb listing to remove its availability. That in turn makes it easier for a traveler searching for a room to find one that’s available, even though he or she still has to query one room at a time. Thus smartphones make the home hosting market work better not just because hosts can respond faster but also because they can update their bookings, which makes them more informative. This, too, reduces congestion (fewer rooms appear to be available, and a room that looks available is more likely to actually be so), and as a result helps travelers search more efficiently, with fewer time-wasting false leads.

In fact, there is much crossover between these categories of research. If we can learn how to counteract the devastating impact of bone loss in microgravity, the solutions may well be applied to osteoporosis and other bone diseases. If we can learn how to keep our hearts healthy in space, that knowledge will be useful for heart health on Earth. The effects of living in space look a lot like those of aging, which affect us all. The lettuce we will grow later in the year is a study for future space travel—astronauts on their way to Mars will have no fresh food but what they can grow—but it is also teaching us more about growing food efficiently on Earth. The closed water system developed for the ISS, where we process our urine into clean water, is crucial for getting to Mars, but it also has promising implications for treating water on Earth, especially in places where clean water is scarce. This overlapping of scientific goals isn’t new—when Captain Cook traveled the Pacific it was for the purpose of exploration, but the scientists traveling with him picked up plants along the way and revolutionized the field of botany. Was the purpose of Cook’s expedition scientific or exploratory? Does it matter, ultimately? It will be remembered for both, and I hope the same is true of my time on the space station.

In any modern hotel, having a centralized system is critical in order to increase efficiency, avoid time waste and reduce human error, therefore PMS must eventually connect to nearly all the software the hotel is using.

The extreme competitiveness in travel is slowly bringing search engines, OTAs and metasearch engines to converge towards an increasingly homogeneous model. The reason is simple, almost Darwinian: the model that will prove to be the most efficient in terms of scalability and efficiency for the end user is going to prevail.