Elapsed Time Quotes

Watching the wonder of a dewdrop clinging on a tree leaf in the early morning sunlight can give us an ethereal thrill and at one time awaken the elapsed compass of our inner child. ("Why step out of nature") .

A remarkable thing about me is that the time that elapses between a sad thought and a flood of tears is three or four seconds.

Again time elapsed.

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.

We walked for some time, and grew to know each other, as best as we'd allow. These are some of the high points. They lack continuity. I don't apologize. I merely pointed it out, adding with some truth, I feel, that most liaisons lack continuity. We find ourselves in odd places at various times, and for a brief span we link our lives to others and then, our time elapsed, we move apart. Through a haze of pain occasionally, usually through a veil of memory that clings, then passes, sometimes as though we have never touched.

Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had elapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being initiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: "real things" which were unfrequent and priceless, simply "things" which formed the routine stuff of life; and "ghost things," also called "fogs," such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occurring at the same time formed a "tower," or, if they came in immediate succession, they made a "bridge." "Real towers" and "real bridges" were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme rapture; it almost never happened, though. In some circumstances, in a certain light, a neutral "thing" might look or even actually become "real" or else, conversely, it might coagulate into a fetid "fog." When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with "ruined towers" and "broken bridges.

If every minute of time elapsed on the screen equals in length of time every other minute, and obviously it does, and if time on the screen equals importance to the audience, that is, one minute of screen time gives equal weight to the emotional, dramatic, narrative, and every other aspect of experiencing a movie as every other minute, and it does, then we know something important we need to know about screenplays.

The longer the time that has elapsed, the more things fall into proportion. One sees them in their true relationship to one another.

I've learned that love outlives death. It holds steady through despair. It won't fade, even as time elapses and distance increases and your world shifts.

If only I had known how quickly the days would elapse, how small the window of time would be in which I could have told you how much you truly mean to me. Know it now— I love you, I love you, I love you.

But this I do know that since you have told me that ten years have elapsed since I departed from this earth I have lost all respect for time—I am commencing to doubt that such a thing exists other than in the weak, finite mind of man.

We are born and we die; and between these two most important events in our lives more or less time elapses which we have to waste somehow or other. In the end it does not seem to matter much whether we have done so in making money, or practicing law, or reading or playing, or in any other way, as long as we felt we were deriving a maximum of happiness out of our doings.

What’s crucial is the need to override what your instincts are telling you to do (slow down, back off, give up), and the sense of elapsed time. Taking a punch without flinching requires self-control, but endurance implies something more sustained: holding your finger in the flame long enough to feel the heat; filling the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run.

We imagine always when we speak that it is our own ears, our own mind, that are listening. The truth which one puts into one's words does not carve out a direct path for itself, it is not irresistibly self-evident. A considerable time must elapse before a truth of the same order can take shape in them.

The cause of anger is the belief that we are injured; this belief, therefore, should not be lightly entertained. We ought not to fly into a rage even when the injury appears to be open and distinct: for some false things bear the semblance of truth. We should always allow some time to elapse, for time discloses the truth.

Men will become more clever and more acute, but not better, happier, and stronger in action, or at least only at epochs. I foresee the time when God will have no more joy in them, but will break up everything for a renewed creation. I am certain that everything is planned to this end, and that the time and hour are already fixed in the distant future for the occurrence of this renovating epoch. But a long time will elapse first, and we may still for thousands and thousands of years amuse ourselves in all sorts of ways on this dear old surface.

Fellow man! Your whole life, like a sandglass, will always be reversed and will ever run out again, — a long minute of time will elapse until all those conditions out of which you were evolved return in the wheel of the cosmic process. And then you will find every pain and every pleasure, every friend and every enemy, every hope and every error, every blade of grass and every ray of sunshine once more, and the whole fabric of things which make up your life. This ring in which you are but a grain will glitter afresh forever. And in every one of these cycles of human life there will be one hour where, for the first time one man, and then many, will perceive the mighty thought of the eternal recurrence of all things: — and for mankind this is always the hour of Noon.

It (the talking, the telling) seemed (to him, to Quentin) to partake of that logic- and reason-flouting quality of a dream which the sleeper knows must have occurred, stillborn and complete, in a second, yet the very quality upon which it must depend to move the dreamer (verisimilitude) to credulity _horror or pleasure or amazement_ depends as completely upon a formal recognition of and acceptance of elapsed and yet-elapsing time as music or a printed tale.

In many ways the effect of the crash on embezzlement was more significant than on suicide. To the economist embezzlement is the most interesting of crimes. Alone among the various forms of larceny it has a time parameter. Weeks, months, or years may elapse between the commission of the crime and its discovery. (This is a period, incidentally, when the embezzler has his gain and the man who has been embezzled, oddly enough, feels no loss. There is a net increase in psychic wealth.) At any given time there exists an inventory of undiscovered embezzlement in — or more precisely not in — the country’s businesses and banks. This inventory — it should perhaps be called the bezzle — amounts at any moment to many millions of dollars. It also varies in size with the business cycle. In good times people are relaxed, trusting, and money is plentiful. But even though money is plentiful, there are always many people who need more. Under these circumstances the rate of embezzlement grows, the rate of discovery falls off, and the bezzle increases rapidly. In depression all this is reversed. Money is watched with a narrow, suspicious eye. The man who handles it is assumed to be dishonest until he proves himself otherwise. Audits are penetrating and meticulous. Commercial morality is enormously improved. The bezzle shrinks. … Just as the boom accelerated the rate of growth, so the crash enormously advanced the rate of discovery. Within a few days, something close to a universal trust turned into something akin to universal suspicion. Audits were ordered. Strained or preoccupied behavior was noticed. Most important, the collapse in stock values made irredeemable the position of the employee who had embezzled to play the market. He now confessed.

There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual substitution of species for species, in the vast interval of time which has elapsed between the deposition of the earliest fossiliferous strata and the present day.

Charles Lindbergh’s achievement in finding his way alone from Long Island to an airfield outside Paris deserves a moment’s consideration. Maintaining your bearings by means of dead reckoning means taking close note of compass headings, speed of travel, time elapsed since the last calculation, and any deviations from the prescribed route induced by drifting. Some measure of the difficulty is shown by the fact that the Byrd expedition the following month—despite having a dedicated navigator and radio operator, as well as pilot and copilot—missed their expected landfall by two hundred miles, were often only vaguely aware of where they were, and mistook a lighthouse on the Normandy coast for the lights of Paris. Lindbergh by contrast hit all his targets exactly—Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, the Dingle Peninsula in Ireland, Cap de la Hague in France, Le Bourget in Paris—and did so while making the calculations on his lap while flying an unstable plane.

In 1996, Britain banned handguns. Prior to that time, over 54,000 Britons owned handguns.70 The ban was so tight that even shooters training for the Olympics were forced to travel to Switzerland or other countries to practice. Four years have elapsed since the ban was introduced, and gun crimes have risen by an astounding 40 percent.

For a few moments, Liesel said nothing. It was one of those conversations that require some time to elapse between exchanges.

I've learned that love outlives death. It holds steady through despair. It won't fade, even as time elapses and distance increases and your world shifts.

Duchess was a Dreyfusard (the Dreyfus case had long been concluded, but twenty years later people were still talking about it, and so far only two years had elapsed),

The sad truth is, John and I and the kids only took Route 66 once on our trips to Disneyland. Our family, like the rest of America, succumbed to the lure of faster highways, more direct routes, higher speed limits. We forgot about taking the slow way. It makes you wonder if something inside us knows that our lives are going to pass faster than we could ever realize. So we run around like chickens about to lose our heads. Which makes our little two- or three-week vacations with our families more important than ever... As for the time that elapsed between those vacations, that’s another thing altogether. It seems to have all passed breathlessly, like some extended whisper of days, months, years, decades. (pp.39-40)

And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person requires—as I required in the matter of this sonata—to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new.

During all the months that had elapsed since Mrs Hamley’s death, Molly had wondered many a time about the secret she had so unwittingly become possessed of that last day in the Hall library.

Everything we hold will soon elapse, as we’ll sleep through one dreamless night; but rising again to this dream, whether we’ll be hiding behind our darkness or this borrowed light?- Thou little fool

I was determined to show him divers rugged points in my character before the ensuing four weeks elapsed: he should know fully what sort of a bargain he had made, while there was yet time to rescind it.

FUTURE--Unfulfilled Prophecy. The "Requirements" of a Genuine Prediction are five in number: 1. It must have been made known PRIOR to its fulfillment. 2. It must be beyond all HUMAN FORESIGHT. 3. It must give DETAILS. 4. A SUFFICIENT TIME MUST ELAPSE BETWEEN ITS PUBLICATION AND FULFILMENT TO EXCLUDE THE PROPHET, OR ANY INTERESTED PARTY, FROM FULFILLING IT. 5. There must be a CLEAR AND EVIDENT FULFILMENT OF THE PROPHECY.

It's that feeling you get somehow knowing that something great is about to happen... about to happen. While every passing day nothing great really does happen. You wake up, go to classes, study, sleep and wait for another monotonous day. You know the great day is not tomorrow, not even the day after, not even in a week or a month's time. But it says it will come soon, the way you live your life, one day at a time, only to realize 20 years have elapsed effortlessly. It will come soon, the way you meet someone without expecting or knowing that you are going to have so much fun together. It will come soon, the way dreams come true overnight- demanding years of perspiration, ironically. It will come soon like a gush of cold air in a hot afternoon. It will come soon like a stranger you feel you have already met. It will come like a guest who would be here to stay. It will come like an eternity, a serendipity, an irony. It will come when it is time for it to come, the way you fall asleep and dreams arrive from a distant land, surely but stealthily.

The human mind has limits. We can only remember so many things; we can really only concentrate on one thing at a time. This tendency—for the process of fixing things to get harder as more time elapses—represents a similar limitation. When you’re working on a project, there’s a whole mind space that you create around it. You know all the different reasons why something is being done. You’re holding a pretty complicated construct in your head. Re-creating that construct a week later is hard. You have to remember all the factors that you were considering when you made that choice. You have to re-create the thought process that led you to that decision. You have to become your past self again, put yourself back inside a mind that no longer exists. Doing that takes time. A long time. Twenty-four times as long as it would take if you had fixed the problem when you first discovered it.

One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all.

The clock changed to 4:47. Passages in time. He had always wondered if it was possible to measure an interval, and here it was, two minutes had elapsed before his very eyes. One hundred and twenty seconds during which nothing had happened.

General relativity then establishes that objects move toward regions where time elapses more slowly; in a sense, all objects “want” to age as slowly as possible. From an Einsteinian perspective, that explains why an object falls when you let go of it.

She seemed to have encompassed time. She postulated the elapsed years during which no honeymoon nor any change had taken place, out of which the (now) five faces looked with a sort of lifeless and perennial bloom like painted portraits hung in a vacuum, each taken at its forewarned peak and smoothed of all thought and experience, the originals of which had lived and died so long ago that their joys and griefs must now be forgotten even by the very boards on which they had strutted and postured and laughed and wept.

We learn that CONTROL IS UP because we experience fights in which the victor ends up on top, that GOALS ARE DESTINATIONS because we walk toward something we want, and that TIME IS A MOVING OBJECT because things that approach us get closer and closer as time elapses.

The fate in store for you has already befallen past generations and will befall future generations no less surely. Thus one thing will never cease to rise out of another: life is granted to no one for permanent ownership, to all on lease. Look back now and consider how the bygone ages of eternity that elapsed before our birth were nothing to us. Here, then, is a mirror in which nature shows us the time to come after our death. Do you see anything fearful in it? Do you perceive anything grim? Does it not appear more peaceful than the deepest sleep?

There’s no beginning, middle and end to that experience. The split second it happens, it’s happened. In its entirety. The only time that really elapses is the time it takes you to catch up. To absorb what just happened to you. And nobody ever thinks it’s going to unhappen. Do they?

I myself was exceedingly astonished as I anxiously reflected how long a time had elapsed since the nineteenth year of my life, when I began to burn with a zeal for wisdom, planning that when I had found it I would abandon all the empty hopes and lying follies of hollow ambitions. And here I was already thirty, and still mucking about in the same mire in a state of indecision, avid to enjoy present fugitive delights which were dispersing my concentration, while I was saying: 'Tomorrow I shall find it; see, it will become perfectly clear, and I shall have no more doubts.

How do I know I’m in love if I don’t want to kill myself all the time? Mavis is the nicest person I’ve ever met, and it was hard to recognize I was in love with her because she never let so much time elapse between “hey wats up winky-face emoji” texts that I had deleted her number and had to respond, “NEW PHONE WHO DIS.

One way to understand that Einstein was talking about invariance, rather than declaring everything to be relative, is to think about how far a light beam would travel in a given period of time. That distance would be the speed of light multiplied by the amount of time it traveled. If we were on a platform observing this happening on a train speeding by, the elapsed time would appear shorter (time seems to move more slowly on the moving train), and the distance would appear shorter (rulers seem to be contracted on the moving train). But there is a relationship between the two quantities—a relationship between the measurements of space and of time—that remains invariant, whatever your frame of reference.62 A

The oldest Egyptian or Hindu philosopher raised a corner of the veil from the statue of divinity; and still the trembling robe remains raised, and I gaze upon as fresh a glory as he did, since it was I in him that was then so bold, and it is he in me that reviews the vision. No dust has settled on that robe; no time has elapsed since that divinity was revealed.

If the entire history of the Earth were condensed into a single day, one hour would equate to 200 million years, one minute to 3.3 million years and one second to 55,000 years. Life would appear as early as eight or nine o'clock in the morning, but human civilisation would not emerge until the last tenth of the last second of the day. From the morning that philosophers held the first ever debate on the steps of a temple in Ancient Greece... from the day slaves laid the first foundation stone of the Great Pyramid…… from the minute that Confucius welcomed his first disciple into the candlelit gloom of his thatched hut... right up until the moment you turned the first page of this book, only one tenth of the tick of the clock would have elapsed.

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks.

If you ever mention something fun that you are going to do with your young children, and there is any time that will elapse between the very moment you bring it up and when you are actually doing the fun thing, you will be batraged with questions during that entire time period. If you tell them that you might go to Disney at some point in the coming year, you have opened a Pandora's box.

It is not too bold a statement to say that a software development project is one of the riskiest investments a business makes. For example, the chance of a large software project being canceled increases with project duration. In the 1990s, those projects that exceeded two years of elapsed calendar time in development had a default rate that exceeded the worst rated junk bonds (something over 25%).

Einstein briefly considered calling his creation Invariance Theory, but the name never took hold. Max Planck used the term Relativtheorie in 1906, and by 1907 Einstein, in an exchange with his friend Paul Ehrenfest, was calling it Relativitätstheorie. One way to understand that Einstein was talking about invariance, rather than declaring everything to be relative, is to think about how far a light beam would travel in a given period of time. That distance would be the speed of light multiplied by the amount of time it traveled. If we were on a platform observing this happening on a train speeding by, the elapsed time would appear shorter (time seems to move more slowly on the moving train), and the distance would appear shorter (rulers seem to be contracted on the moving train). But there is a relationship between the two quantities—a relationship between the measurements of space and of time—that remains invariant, whatever your frame of reference.

That is how I see her to this day: standing there, her eyes shining under her toque, silhouetted against the backdrop of the sea, and separated from me by the transparent sky-blue stretch of time elapsed since that moment, the first glimpse of her in my memory, a very slight image of a face first desired and pursued, then forgotten, then found again, a face which since then I have often projected into the past, so as to say to myself, of a girl with me in my bedroom, ‘That was her!

Moreover and above all, a considerable interval of time had elapsed during which, if, from the historical point of view, events had, to some extent, seemed to justify the Dreyfusard argument, the anti-Dreyfusard opposition had doubled its violence, and, from being purely political, had become social. It was now a question of militarism, of patriotism, and the waves of anger that had been stirred up in society had had time to gather the force which they never have at the beginning of a storm.

The Good News: Taller, Longer-Lived, and Healthier Bodies The last 150 years have profoundly transformed how we eat, work, travel, fight disease, keep clean, and even sleep. It is as if the human species had a total makeover: our daily lives would be barely comprehensible to our ancestors from just a few generations ago, but we are essentially identical genetically, anatomically, and physiologically. The change has been so rapid that too little time has elapsed for more than a modicum of natural selection to have occurred.

Am back to it again, that space in time where my mind elapse and my flesh be in the driver’s seat dressed up in immorality spending the nights flirting with whatever demon I choose. Now my soul in kind with the darkness I chose, for damnation was the pill I sought when will comes free and deeds of evil orgasmic and thrilling with every breath. Inevitably am the man nailed to his corpse while chained to his sins for the veil that covered was shattered and the evil that was me was finally born a manifestation of flesh.

US, OVER TIME, PASSING BY As time elapses we will grow older and we will grow wiser. We will fall in and out of love. We will destroy each other only to build each other back up again. We won’t even notice we’re changing until it’s already happened, because change is just the act of becoming. We see it happen so naturally every day. The sun sets, the night rolls in, the stars start to shine and the moon glows. When morning comes the dawn will creep in and embrace the night, allowing the day to break and the sun to rise again. We will continue to change, tethered to time and influenced by everything around us. The relationships we search for and the ones that search us out. The relationships we thought could never be and the ones that we could never live without. They’re all on their way to becoming something else, never static, always moving. Because time is the biggest player in the game, and it is why everything is changing. If you try to picture every moment in a relationship all at once, then that right there would be us, over time, passing by. Changing, folding, becoming something else.

When Franz returned to himself, he seemed still to be in a dream. He thought himself in a sepulchre, into which a ray of sunlight in pity scarcely penetrated. He stretched forth his hand, and touched stone; he rose to his seat, and found himself lying on his bournous in a bed of dry heather, very soft and odoriferous. The vision had fled; and as if the statues had been but shadows from the tomb, they had vanished at his waking. He advanced several paces towards the point whence the light came, and to all the excitement of his dream succeeded the calmness of reality. He found that he was in a grotto, went towards the opening, and through a kind of fanlight saw a blue sea and an azure sky. The air and water were shining in the beams of the morning sun; on the shore the sailors were sitting, chatting and laughing; and at ten yards from them the boat was at anchor, undulating gracefully on the water. There for some time he enjoyed the fresh breeze which played on his brow, and listened to the dash of the waves on the beach, that left against the rocks a lace of foam as white as silver. He was for some time without reflection or thought for the divine charm which is in the things of nature, specially after a fantastic dream; then gradually this view of the outer world, so calm, so pure, so grand, reminded him of the illusiveness of his vision, and once more awakened memory. He recalled his arrival on the island, his presentation to a smuggler chief, a subterranean palace full of splendor, an excellent supper, and a spoonful of hashish. It seemed, however, even in the very face of open day, that at least a year had elapsed since all these things had passed, so deep was the impression made in his mind by the dream, and so strong a hold had it taken of his imagination. Thus every now and then he saw in fancy amid the sailors, seated on a rock, or undulating in the vessel, one of the shadows which had shared his dream with looks and kisses. Otherwise, his head was perfectly clear, and his body refreshed; he was free from the slightest headache; on the contrary, he felt a certain degree of lightness, a faculty for absorbing the pure air, and enjoying the bright sunshine more vividly than ever.

When married people develop such an intense but inappropriate fixation to somebody other than their mate, they may be driven to jeopardize or even destroy a reasonable marital relationship. In the heat of passion, they seem incapable of attaching any real weight to the potentially disastrous consequences of their infatuation—the possible breakup of their marriage. They cannot “turn off” their infatuation even if they want to! Yet, when enough time has elapsed without their seeing “the other woman (or man),” they generally find that their infatuation dies down.

Unconditional self-acceptance is based on the worth a person feels for his being, not letting his actions define his identity. Under these conditions, doing something stupid doesn’t mean you’re a fool. It relates to lived experience, not to identity. Even if we accept the idea that our actions don’t define us as a person, the experience of doing something stupid feels uncomfortable. Yet the memory of the most innocuous of our stupid actions fades quickly; at worst, we feel a slight embarrassment after a certain amount of time has elapsed. At best, we can look back and laugh about it.

During those periods in which our bitterness of spirit, though steadily diminishing, still persists, a distinction must be drawn between the bitterness which comes to us from our constantly thinking of the person herself and that which is revived by certain memories, some cutting speech, some word in a letter that we have had from her. The various forms which that bitterness can assume we shall examine when we come to deal with another and later love affair; for the present it must suffice to say that, of these two kinds, the former is infinitely the less cruel. That is because our conception of the person, since it dwells always within ourselves, is there adorned with the halo with which we are bound before long to invest her, and bears the marks if not of the frequent solace of hope, at any rate of the tranquillity of a permanent sorrow. (It must also be observed that the image of a person who makes us suffer counts for little if anything in those complications which aggravate the unhappiness of love, prolong it and prevent our recovery, just as in certain maladies the cause is insignificant beyond comparison with the fever which follows it and the time that must elapse before our convalescence.)

With all this talk of distance and duration being relative depending on the observer’s motion, some may be tempted to ask: So which observer is “right”? Whose watch shows the “actual” time elapsed? Which length of the rod is “real”? Whose notion of simultaneity is “correct”? According to the special theory of relativity, all inertial reference frames are equally valid. It is not a question of whether rods actually shrink or time really slows down; all we know is that observers in different states of motion will measure things differently. And now that we have dispensed with the ether as “superfluous,” there is no designated “rest” frame of reference that has preference over any other.

It is especially true of the seven decades that have elapsed since the end of World War Two. During this period humankind has for the first time faced the possibility of complete self-annihilation and has experienced a fair number of actual wars and genocides. Yet these decades were also the most peaceful era in human history – and by a wide margin. This is surprising because these very same decades experienced more economic, social and political change than any previous era. The tectonic plates of history are moving at a frantic pace, but the volcanoes are mostly silent. The new elastic order seems to be able to contain and even initiate radical structural changes without collapsing into violent conflict.3

We focus too much on the puddles and forget about the dry land separating them. The late modern era has seen unprecedented levels not only of violence and horror, but also of peace and tranquillity. Charles Dickens wrote of the French Revolution that ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ This may be true not only of the French Revolution, but of the entire era it heralded. It is especially true of the seven decades that have elapsed since the end of World War Two. During this period humankind has for the first time faced the possibility of complete self-annihilation and has experienced a fair number of actual wars and genocides. Yet these decades were also the most peaceful era in human history – and by a wide margin. This

This anxiety meant that I spent a lot of time hiding, usually in my room, after any pleasant exchange with another person. And there were rules to the anxiety, practically mathematical in their consistency: The less well you knew the person, the greater the pressure the second time around to be special or charming, if that’s what you thought you’d been the first time; mostly it was about reinforcement. Also: The shorter the time that elapsed from your first encounter to your second, the greater the pressure; hence the lecture-to-library agony. And finally: The better the original interaction, the greater the pressure. Often, my anxiety would set in prior to the end of the interaction—I’d just want it to be over while we all still liked each other, before things turned.

This was, moreover, a period when I saw quite a lot of Gilberte, with whom I had resumed my friendship: for in the long term the rhythm of our lives does not scan with the timescale of our friendships. Once a sufficient period of time has elapsed, we see (just as we see the revival of former ministries in politics or of forgotten plays in the theater) friendly relations resumed, after long years of interruption, between the same people as before, and revived with pleasure. After ten years of reasons for one person to be too much in love, and reasons for the other not to tolerate such despotic demands, the reasons cease to exist. Only affinities matter, and everything that Gilberte would have refused me previously, she easily granted me, no doubt because I no longer desired it.

At the telegraph office, while drafting my telegram with all the excitement of a man burning with hope, I noted how much less helpless I was now than in my childhood and in relation to Mlle d’Éporcheville than to Gilberte. I need do no more than take the simple trouble to write my telegram, and the clerk had only to accept it, for the swiftest of electric communications networks to transmit it across the length and breadth of France, right down to the Mediterranean coast. Robert would bring his whole libertine past to bear on identifying the person whom I had just encountered, would place it at the disposal of the fiction that I was starting to sketch and which I need not even worry about any more, for the reply would be bound to bring my romance to a conclusion in one way or another before twenty-four hours had elapsed.

Fifty years elapsed between the retreat of Xerxes and the beginning of the war; during these years took place all those operations of the Hellenes against one another and against the Barbarian which I have been describing. The Athenians acquired a firmer hold over their empire and the city itself became a great power. The Lacedaemonians saw what was going on, but during most of the time they remained inactive and hardly attempted to interfere. They had never been of a temper prompt to take the field unless they were compelled; and they were in some degree embarrassed by wars near home. But the Athenians were growing too great to be ignored and were laying hands on their allies.They could now bear it no longer: they made up their minds that they must put out all their strength and overthrow the Athenian power by force of arms. And therefore they commenced the Peloponnesian War. (Book 1 Chapter 118.2)

We know from studies of priming that unnoticed stimuli in our environment have a substantial influence on our thoughts and actions. These influences fluctuate from moment to moment. The brief pleasure of a cool breeze on a hot day may make you slightly more positive and optimistic about whatever you are evaluating at the time. The prospects of a convict being granted parole may change significantly during the time that elapses between successive food breaks in the parole judges' schedule. Because you have little direct knowledge of what goes on in your mind, you will never know that you might have made a different judgement or reached a different decision under very slightly different circumstance. Formulas do not suffer from such problems. Given the same input, they always return the same answer. When predictability is poor -- which it is in most of the studies reviewed by Meehl and his followers -- inconsistency is destructive of any predictive validity.

When a man is asleep, he has in a circle round him the chain of the hours, the sequence of the years, the order of the heavenly host. Instinctively, when he awakes, he looks to these, and in an instant reads off his own position on the earth’s surface and the amount of time that has elapsed during his slumbers; but this ordered procession is apt to grow confused, and to break its ranks. Suppose that, towards, morning, after a night of insomnia, sleep descends upon him while he is reading, in quite a different position from that in which he normally goes to sleep, he has only to lift his arm to arrest the sun and turn it back in its course, and, at the moment of waking, he will have no idea of the time, but will conclude that he has just gone to bed. Or suppose that he gets drowsy in some even more abnormal position; sitting in an armchair, say, after dinner: then the world will go hurtling out of orbit, the magic chair will carry him at full speed through time and space, and when he opens his eyes again he will imagine that he went to sleep months earlier in another place. But for me it was enough if, in my own bed, my sleep was so heavy as completely to relax my consciousness; for then I lost all sense of the place in which I had gone to sleep, and when I awoke in the middle of the night, not knowing where I was, I could not even be sure at first who I was; I had only the most rudimentary sense of existence, such as may lurk and flicker in the depths of an animal's consciousness; I was more destitute than the cave-dweller; but then the memory - not yet of the place in which I was, but of various other places where I had lived and might now very possibly be - would come like a rope let down from heaven to draw me up out of the abyss of not-being, from which I could never have escaped by myself: in a flash I would traverse centuries of civilisation, and out of a blurred glimpse of oil-lamps, then of shirts with turned-down collars, would gradually piece together the original components of my ego. Perhaps the immobility of the things that surround us is forced upon them by our conviction that they are themselves and not anything else, by the immobility of our conception of them. For it always happened that when I awoke like this, and my mind struggled in an unsuccessful attempt to discover where I was, everything revolved around me through the darkness: things, places, years. My body, still too heavy with sleep to move, would endeavour to construe from the pattern of its tiredness the position of its various limbs, in order to deduce therefrom the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, to piece together and give a name to the house in which it lay. Its memory, the composite memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulder-blades, offered it a whole series of rooms in which it had at one time or another slept, while the unseen walls, shifting and adapting themselves to the shape of each successive room that it remembered, whirled round it in the dark.

The beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the reason that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person requires—as I required in the matter of this sonata—to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new.

There was an artist in the city of Kouroo who was disposed to strive after perfection. One day it came into his mind to make a staff. Having considered that in an imperfect work time is an ingredient, but into a perfect work time does not enter, he said to himself, It shall be perfect in all respects, though I should do nothing else in my life. He proceeded instantly to the forest for wood, being resolved that it should not be made of unsuitable material; and as he searched for and rejected stick after stick, his friends gradually deserted him, for they grew old in their works and died, but he grew not older by a moment. His singleness of purpose and resolution, and his elevated piety, endowed him, without his knowledge, with perennial youth. As he made no compromise with Time, Time kept out of his way, and only sighed at a distance because he could not overcome him. Before he had found a stock in all respects suitable the city of Kouroo was a hoary ruin, and he sat on one of its mounds to peel the stick. Before he had given it the proper shape the dynasty of the Candahars was at an end, and with the point of the stick he wrote the name of the last of that race in the sand, and then resumed his work. By the time he had smoothed and polished the staff Kalpa was no longer the pole-star; and ere he had put on the ferule and the head adorned with precious stones, Brahma had awoke and slumbered many times. But why do I stay to mention these things? When the finishing stroke was put to his work, it suddenly expanded before the eyes of the astonished artist into the fairest of all the creations of Brahma. He had made a new system in making a staff, a world with full and fair proportions; in which, though the old cities and dynasties had passed away, fairer and more glorious ones had taken their places. And now he saw by the heap of shavings still fresh at his feet, that, for him and his work, the former lapse of time had been an illusion, and that no more time had elapsed than is required for a single scintillation from the brain of Brahma to fall on and inflame the tinder of a mortal brain. The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?

and I entered into sleep, which is like a second apartment that we have, into which, abandoning our own, we go in order to sleep. It has its own system of alarms, and we are sometimes brought violently awake there by the sound of a bell, heard with perfect clarity, even though no one has rung. It has its servants, its particular visitors who come to take us out, so that, just when we are ready to get up, we are obliged to recognize, by our almost immediate transmigration into the other apartment, that of our waking hours, that the room is empty, that no one has come. The race that inhabits it, like that of the earliest humans, is androgynous. A man there will appear a moment later in the aspect of a woman. Objects have the ability to turn into men, and men into friends or enemies. The time that elapses for the sleeper, in sleep of this kind, is utterly different from the time in which a waking man’s life transpires. Its passage may now be far more rapid, a quarter of an hour seeming like a whole day; or at other times much longer, we think we have just dozed off, and have slept right through the day. And then, on sleep’s chariot, we descend into depths where the memory can no longer keep pace with it, and where the mind stops short and is forced to turn back.

gratified her; it was only right that her food should fear her. If ever she should fear it, she would know it was her time to die. A league farther upstream, the Varden were packed against the Jiet River like a herd of red deer against the edge of a cliff. The Varden had arrived at the crossing yesterday, and since then, perhaps a third of the men-who-were-friends and the Urgals-who-were-friends and the horses-she-must-not-eat had forded the river. The army moved so slowly, she sometimes wondered how humans ever had time to do anything other than travel, considering how short their lives were. It would be much more convenient if they could fly, she thought, and wondered why they did not choose to. Flying was so easy, it never ceased to puzzle her why any creature would remain earthbound. Even Eragon retained his attachment to the soft-hard-ground, when she knew he could join her in the sky at any time merely by uttering a few words in the ancient language. But then, she did not always understand the actions of those who tottered about on two legs, whether they had round ears, pointed ears, or horns or were so short she could squash them under her feet. A flicker of movement to the northeast caught her attention, and she angled toward it, curious. She saw a line of five-and-forty weary horses trudging toward the Varden. Most of the horses were rider-less; therefore, it did not occur to her until another half hour had elapsed and she could make out the faces of the men in the saddles that the group might be Roran’s returning from their raid. She wondered what had happened to so

Which is actually good because we’re doing an AP Euro study group this week at the library—I mean good that it got canceled, not good that someone died—so I was wondering too if maybe I can use the car, so you won’t have to come pick me up super late every night?” Alma had been a wildly clingy kid, but now she is a mostly autonomous and wholly inscrutable seventeen-year-old; she is mean and gorgeous and breathtakingly good at math; she has inside jokes with her friends about inexplicable things like Gary Shandling and avocado toast, paints microscopic cherries on her fingernails and endeavors highly involved baking ventures, filling their fridge with oblong bagels and six-layer cakes. “I’m asking now because last time you told me I didn’t give you enough notice,” she says. She has recently begun speaking conversationally to Julia and Mark again after nearly two years of brooding silence, and now it’s near impossible to get her to stop. She regales them with breathless incomprehensible stories at the dinner table; she delivers lengthy recaps of midseason episodes of television shows they have never seen; she mounts elaborate and convincing defenses of things she wants them to give her, or give her permission to do. Conversing with her is a mechanical act requiring the constant ability to shift gears, to backpedal or follow inane segues or catapult from the real world to a fictional one without stopping to refuel. There’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that she won’t be accepted next month to several of the seventeen exalted and appallingly expensive colleges to which she has applied, and because Julia would like the remainder of her tenure at home to elapse free of trauma, she responds to her daughter as she did when she was a napping baby, tiptoeing around her to avoid awakening unrest. The power dynamic in their household is not unlike that of a years-long hostage crisis.

When the least obvious beauties of Vinteuil’s sonata were revealed to me, already, borne by the force of habit beyond the reach of my sensibility, those that I had from the first distinguished and preferred in it were beginning to escape, to avoid me. Since I was able only in successive moments to enjoy all the pleasures that this sonata gave me, I never possessed it in its entirety: it was like life itself. But, less disappointing than life is, great works of art do not begin by giving us all their best. In Vinteuil’s sonata the beauties that one discovers at once are those also of which one most soon grows tired, and for the same reason, no doubt, namely that they are less different from what one already knows. But when those first apparitions have withdrawn, there is left for our enjoyment some passage which its composition, too new and strange to offer anything but confusion to our mind, had made indistinguishable and so preserved intact; and this, which we have been meeting every day and have not guessed it, which has thus been held in reserve for us, which by the sheer force of its beauty has become invisible and has remained unknown, this comes to us last of all. But this also must be the last that we shall relinquish. And we shall love it longer than the rest because we have taken longer to get to love it. The time, moreover, that a person requires—as I required in the matter of this sonata—to penetrate a work of any depth is merely an epitome, a symbol, one might say, of the years, the centuries even that must elapse before the public can begin to cherish a masterpiece that is really new. So that the man of genius, to shelter himself from the ignorant contempt of the world, may say to himself that, since one’s contemporaries are incapable of the necessary detachment, works written for posterity should be read by posterity alone, like certain pictures which one cannot appreciate when one stands too close to them.

Queen Anne of England established the Longitude Act in 1714, and offered a monetary prize of over a million in today’s dollars to anyone who invented a method to accurately calculate longitude at sea. Longitude is about determining one’s point in space. So one might ask what it has to do with clocks? Mathematically speaking, space (distance) is the child of time and speed (distance equals time multiplied by speed). Thus, anything that moves at a constant speed can be used to calculate distance, provided one knows for how long it has been moving. Many things have constant speeds, including light, sound, and the rotation of the Earth. Your brain uses the near constancy of the speed of sound to calculate where sounds are coming from. As we have seen, you know someone is to your left or right because the sound of her voice takes approximately 0.6 milliseconds to travel from your left to your right ear. Using the delays it takes any given sound to arrive to your left and right ears allows the brain to figure out if the voice is coming directly from the left, the right, or somewhere in between. The Earth is rotating at a constant speed—one that results in a full rotation (360 degrees) every 24 hours. Thus there is a direct correspondence between degrees of longitude and time. Knowing how much time has elapsed is equivalent to knowing how much the Earth has turned: if you sit and read this book for one hour (1/24 of a day), the Earth has rotated 15 degrees (360/24). Thus, if you are sitting in the middle of the ocean at local noon, and you know it is 16:00 in Greenwich, then you are “4 hours from Greenwich”—exactly 60 degrees longitude from Greenwich. Problem solved. All one needs is a really good marine chronometer. The greatest minds of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could not overlook the longitude problem: Galileo Galilei, Blaise Pascal, Robert Hooke, Christiaan Huygens, Gottfried Leibniz, and Isaac Newton all devoted their attention to it. In the end, however, it was not a great scientist but one of the world’s foremost craftsman who ultimately was awarded the Longitude Prize. John Harrison (1693–1776) was a self-educated clockmaker who took obsessive dedication to the extreme.

Commencez!' cried I, when they had all produced their books. The moon-faced youth (by name of Jules Vanderkelkov, as I afterwards learned) took the first sentence. The 'livre de lecteur' was 'The Vicar of Wakefield', much used in foreign schools, because it is supposed to contain prime samples of conversational English. It might, however, have been a Runic scroll for any resemblance the worse, as enunciated by Jules, bore to the language in ordinary use amongst the natives of Great Britain. My God! how he did snuffle, snort, and wheeze! All he said was said in his throat and nose, for it is thus the Flamands speak; but I heard him to the end of his paragraph without proffering a word of correction, whereat he looked vastly self-complacent, convinced, no doubt, that he had acquitted himself like a real born and bred 'Anglais'. In the same unmoved silence I listened to a dozen in rotation; and when the twelfth had concluded with splutter, hiss, and mumble, I solemnly laid down the book. 'Arrêtez!', said I. There was a pause, during which I regarded them all with a steady and somewhat stern gaze. A dog, if stared at hard enough and long enough, will show symptoms of embarrassment, and so at length did my bench of Belgians. Perceiving that some of the faces before me were beginning to look sullen, and others ashamed, I slowly joined my hands, and ejaculated in a deep 'voix de poitrine' - 'Comme c'est affreux!' They looked at each other, pouted, coloured, swung their heels, they were not pleased, I saw, but they were impressed, and in the way I wished them to be. Having thus taken them down a peg in their self-conceit, the next step was to raise myself in their estimation - not a very easy thing, considering that I hardly dared to speak for fear of betraying my own deficiencies. 'Ecoutez, messieurs!' I said, and I endeavoured to throw into my accents the compassionate tone of a superior being, who, touched by the extremity of the helplessness which at first only excited his scorn, deigns at length to bestow aid. I then began at the very beginning of 'The Vicar of Wakefield,' and read, in a slow, distinct voice, some twenty pages, they all the while sitting mute and listening with fixed attention. By the time I had done nearly an hour had elapsed. I then rose and said, - 'C'est assez pour aujourd'hui, messieurs; demain nous recommençerons, et j'espère que tout ira bien.' With this oracular sentence I bowed, and in company with M. Pelet quitted the schoolroom.

We went away, leaving Dan sitting on the door-sill reading his book, and Jimmy P. snoozing blissfully on the sofa. When we returned—Felix and the girls and I were ahead of the others—Dan was still sitting in precisely the same place and attitude; but there was no Jimmy in sight. "Dan, where's the baby?" cried Felicity. Dan looked around. His jaw fell in blank amazement. I never say any one look as foolish as Dan at that moment. "Good gracious, I don't know," he said helplessly. "You've been so deep in that wretched book that he's got out, and dear knows where he is," cried Felicity distractedly. "I wasn't," cried Dan. "He MUST be in the house. I've been sitting right across the door ever since you left, and he couldn't have got out unless he crawled right over me. He must be in the house." "He isn't in the kitchen," said Felicity rushing about wildly, "and he couldn't get into the other part of the house, for I shut the hall door tight, and no baby could open it—and it's shut tight yet. So are all the windows. He MUST have gone out of that door, Dan King, and it's your fault." "He DIDN'T go out of this door," reiterated Dan stubbornly. "I know that." "Well, where is he, then? He isn't here. Did he melt into air?" demanded Felicity. "Oh, come and look for him, all of you. Don't stand round like ninnies. We MUST find him before his mother gets here. Dan King, you're an idiot!" Dan was too frightened to resent this, at the time. However and wherever Jimmy had gone, he WAS gone, so much was certain. We tore about the house and yard like maniacs; we looked into every likely and unlikely place. But Jimmy we could not find, anymore than if he had indeed melted into air. Mrs. Patterson came, and we had not found him. Things were getting serious. Uncle Roger and Peter were summoned from the field. Mrs. Patterson became hysterical, and was taken into the spare room with such remedies as could be suggested. Everybody blamed poor Dan. Cecily asked him what he would feel like if Jimmy was never, never found. The Story Girl had a gruesome recollection of some baby at Markdale who had wandered away like that— "And they never found him till the next spring, and all they found was—HIS SKELETON, with the grass growing through it," she whispered. "This beats me," said Uncle Roger, when a fruitless hour had elapsed. "I do hope that baby hasn't wandered down to the swamp. It seems impossible he could walk so far; but I must go and see. Felicity, hand me my high boots out from under the sofa, there's a girl." Felicity, pale and tearful, dropped on her knees and lifted the cretonne frill of the sofa. There, his head pillowed hardly on Uncle Roger's boots, lay Jimmy Patterson, still sound asleep!

The Flock required only four or five hours of sleep a night. That a lot of time for work. And the amnesia that in the past had crippled us became an advantage. Our production multiplied because each personalfty could focus on a separate task. Jo, for example, worked for many hours researching and writing a paper, unaware of what else needed to be done. When I pushed Jo aside to fulfill my graduate-assistant duties, I didn't worry about the progress of the paper. When Jo came back to work, she picked up precisely where she had left off, with no concern about her "lost time". She had near-perfect recall of all that she experienced. This was augmented by her near-perfect amnesia for all the time that elapsed between her points of consciousness. Being a multiple apparently created more efficient use of my conscious and semiconscious mind. I didn't want to give up my greater productivity to become just like everyone else.

Every retelling of a story is never the same since the storyteller seldom remains frozen or impervious to new facts and frames. What remains an exciting prospect is revisiting this story once again after some time has elapsed, through the refreshed lens of a “newer” me, who, in a paradoxical twist, will be an “older” me. Recall Carl Jung, who said: ‘The past is as uncertain as the future’.

Let God be true, and every man a liar.” This postscript may close with the impressive caution of a great critic and theologian of the last century, which, though it has special reference to the Apocalypse, is equally applicable to the whole prophetical portion of the New Testament. “If it be objected that the prophecies in the Apocalypse are not yet fulfilled, that they are therefore not fully understood, and that hence arises the difference of opinion in respect to their meaning, I answer, that if the prophecies are not yet fulfilled, it is wholly impossible that the Apocalypse should be a Divine work; since the author expressly declares (Chap. 1:1) that the things which it contains ‘must shortly come to pass.’ Consequently, either a great part of them, I will not say all, must have been fulfilled, or the author’s declaration, that they should shortly be completed, is not consistent with fact. It is true that to the Almighty a thousand years are but as one day and one day as a thousand years; but if we therefore explain the term ‘shortly,’ as denoting a period longer than that which has elapsed since the Apocalypse was written, we sacrifice the love of truth to the support of a preconceived opinion. For when the Deity condescends to communicate information to mankind, He will of Course use such language as is intelligible to mankind; and not name a period short which all men consider as long, or the communication will be totally useless. Besides, in reference to God’s eternity, not only seventeen hundred but seventeen thousand years are nothing. But the author of the Apocalypse himself has wholly precluded any such evasion, by explaining (Chap. 1:3) what he meant by the term ‘shortly,’ for he there says, ‘Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein; for the time is at hand.’ According, therefore, to the author’s own declaration, the Apocalypse contains prophecies with which the very persons to whom it was sent were immediately concerned. But if none of these prophecies were designed to be completed till long after their death, those persons were not immediately concerned with them, and the author would surely not have said that they were blessed in reading prophecies of which the time was at hand, if those prophecies were not to be fulfilled till after the lapse of many ages” (J. D. Michaelis, “Introduction to the New Testament,” vol. 4: pp. 503, 504).

MN4, discovered late in 2004 and recently named Apophis, the Greek name for the Egyptian God Apep –the destroyer. At one point, the probability of Apophis striking the Earth on 13 April 2029 was thought to be as high as 1 in 37. Now, to everyone’s relief, those odds have increased to 1 in 8,000. Again, these may sound very long odds, but they are actually only 80 times greater than those offered during summer 2001 for England beating Germany 5–1 at football. A few years ago, scientists came up with an index –known as the Torino Scale –to measure the impact threat, and so far Apophis is the first object to register and sustain a value greater than zero. At present it scores a 1 on the scale –defined as ‘an event meriting careful monitoring’. The object is the focus of considerable attention as efforts continue to better constrain its orbit, and it is perfectly possible –as we find out more –that it could rise to 1 on the Torino Scale, becoming an ‘event meriting concern’. It is very unlikely, however, to go any higher, and let’s hope that many years elapse before we encounter the first category 10 event –defined as ‘a certain collision with global consequences’.

There’s a note in there,” Paolo said, gesturing at the bundle. “I’m sure he’d rather you hear from him, not me.” He bowed slightly, his inky black hair falling forward to obscure part of his face. “Buona notte, Signorina Cassandra.” With that, he turned away, disappearing into the darkness in just a few long strides. Cass re-bolted the door. Her heart was still beating hard. She looked down at the wrapped square. It was about two feet by two feet and as thick as her wrist. Lighting a candle, she laid the bundle on the long wobbly table where the servants prepared food for the villa and took their own meals. She held her breath as she tugged at the coarse twine wrapped around the package. The muslin unfolded in layers, revealing a canvas beneath. A folded scrap of parchment fluttered to the kitchen floor. Cass barely noticed it. She was too busy staring at the painting. There she was on the divan in Tommaso’s studio. Just a couple of weeks had elapsed between now and then, but already it felt like years, like the dream of a different lifetime. Falco had captured her tiniest quirks on the canvas: the smattering of freckles across her cheeks, the unruly piece of hair behind her left ear that worked its way out of any arrangement. And her smile--Cass almost couldn’t believe it was real. She looked radiant, like she was experiencing true happiness for the first time. She remembered Falco’s soft touches as he posed her, how delirious she’d been each time his fingers grazed her skin. She remembered how excited she was at being alone with him, the endless possibilities, the countless dangers. Cass wished she could dive into the painting and go back to that night where she had felt love for the first time.

A long time elapsed, and the parents had not mentioned the name of their dead child. They never spoke of the little girl they had lost; their sorrow would have become doubly heavy if it had been brought out into clear daylight, and its power acknowledged. Now they tried to push it away, not let it penetrate beyond thought. As long as words didn't help, why use them? Exchanged between two mourning people, they were only a dissonant sound, disturbing the bitter consolation of silence.

But peanuts are hardly representative of the average food. Everyone knows—via “visual observation of stool samples,” to use the New England Journal of Medicine’s way of saying “a glance before flushing”—that chunks of peanuts make their way through the alimentary canal undigested. Nuts are known for this. Peanuts (and corn kernels) are so uniquely and reliably hard to break down that they are used as “marker foods” in do-it-yourself tests of bowel transit time*—the time elapsed between consumption and dismissal.

Cambridge, Oct. 28. 1811. "Dear Madam, "I am about to write to you on a silly subject, and yet I cannot well do otherwise. You may remember a cornelian, which some years ago I consigned to Miss ——, indeed gave to her, and now I am going to make the most selfish and rude of requests. The person who gave it to me, when I was very young, is dead, and though a long time has elapsed since we met, as it was the only memorial I possessed of that person (in whom I was very much interested), it has acquired a value by this event I could have wished it never to have borne in my eyes. If, therefore, Miss —— should have preserved it, I must, under these circumstances, beg her to excuse my requesting it to be transmitted to me at No. 8. St. James's Street, London, and I will replace it by something she may remember me by equally well. As she was always so kind as to feel interested in the fate of him that formed the subject of our conversation, you may tell her that the giver of that cornelian died in May last of a consumption, at the age of twenty-one, making the sixth, within four months, of friends and relatives that I have lost between May and the end of August. "Believe me, dear Madam, yours very sincerely, "Byron. "P.S. I go to London to-morrow.

The second is sleep pressure. At this very moment, a chemical called adenosine is building up in your brain. It will continue to increase in concentration with every waking minute that elapses. The longer you are awake, the more adenosine will accumulate. Think of adenosine as a chemical barometer that continuously registers the amount of elapsed time since you woke up this morning.

Small means “Under perfect conditions this will take less than one week of elapsed time to get to ‘Ready For Acceptance Test.’” Perfect conditions means that we have exactly the right people working only on this feature with no disruptions. Medium means one to two weeks (again, under perfect conditions). Large means more than two weeks. Large features have to be broken down further before they are allowed into development.

must feel to be speeding along at this height with no visible means of support. Twilight fell: the sky was turning to a light, dusky purple littered with tiny silver stars, and soon only the lights of Muggle towns gave them any clue of how far from the ground they were, or how very fast they were travelling. Harry’s arms were wrapped tightly around his horse’s neck as he willed it to go even faster. How much time had elapsed since he had seen Sirius lying on the Department of Mysteries floor? How much longer would Sirius be able to resist Voldemort? All Harry knew for sure was that his godfather had neither done as Voldemort wanted, nor died, for he was convinced that either outcome would have caused him to feel Voldemort’s jubilation or fury course through his own body, making his scar sear as painfully as it had on the night Mr Weasley was attacked. On they flew through the gathering darkness; Harry’s face

attention to the amount of time that elapses from the moment you recognize the notification to the moment you’re reaching for the phone. If you’re anything like me or the rest of our doomed species, I’m willing to bet there’s not a lot of time that elapses. Much like the dog in the Pixar film, Up, we are easily conditioned to become slaves to these impulses, almost like having an electronic squirrel in our pockets.

Extraneous motion decreases the time elapsed between two events in spacetime, whereas it increases the distance traveled between two points in space.

On the one hand, we pass the slowly elapsing, nearly still time; on the other, we experience time itself as ineluctably passing, the moment entirely swallowed up by the past before it has had a chance to make itself known.

My client described her dreams in the same way I’d heard countless visitations depicted: super-vivid. Many report that the dreams felt almost like real-life memories. Whereas normal dreams are often nonsensical, inconsistent in chronology, and varyingly vague, spiritual dreams have an unmistakable sharpness. They also tend to be remembered as short interactions, regardless of time elapsed. To an intuitive person, dream visitations are conspicuous and very difficult to ignore.

As the first humans acquired tools and an appreciation of minimalist cave art, they turned their attention to improving their lives and understanding the cosmos. Homo erectus erected the first blazing fire 500 000 years ago. After burgers went from raw to medium-well, a truly long time elapsed before the next human milestone: the bun. The first planting of grains and other crops, which occurred just 12 000 years ago, ended our million-year low-carb diet and freed us from being hunters. No longer plagued by the frustration of trying to sneak up on animals with bigger ears and faster legs, humans started staying put. Our nomadic days were ending.

When his phone rang, he checked his watch, surprised to see that forty minutes had elapsed, time in which he’d thought of almost nothing. It was Hugo Beck, probably pretending to be interested in how things were going, but actually calling with a new job. Dan didn’t mind that, and would rather keep busy than not.

Time did not so much elapse as grow less relevant.

you had been in that capsule long enough, you’d eventually have felt hungry, thirsty, and tired. But those are markers of biological time. You still wouldn’t have known exactly how much time had elapsed according to the clock, because mechanical time is purely a human construct. Ancient

Some dogs will whine or bark in their crates when you disappear from their view. If this happens, do not reappear when she’s making noise, as you do not want to teach her that whining brings a reward (your return). Instead, wait until she settles down and stops whining, and then reappear quietly. Make notes in your logbook about how much time elapsed before she started whining, so that the next time you do this exercise, you can be sure to return more quickly, before she has a chance to get going. If your dog barks or whines for a very long time, you may need to bring in a trainer or behaviorist to determine if it’s the beginning of true separation anxiety, or simply part of your dog getting used to her new home. It’s

I accordingly turned her over upon the quarter, and was in the act of nailing on the canvass, when I observed a very large spermaceti whale, as well as I could judge, about eighty-five feet in length; he broke water about twenty rods off our weather-bow, and was lying quietly, with his head in a direction for the ship. He spouted two or three times, and then disappeared. In less than two or three seconds he came up again, about the length of the ship off, and made directly for us, at the rate of about three knots. The ship was then going with about the same velocity. His appearance and attitude gave us at first no alarm; but while I stood watching his movements, and observing him but a ship’s length off, com- ing down for us with great celerity, I involuntarily ordered the boy at the helm to put it hard up; intending to sheer off and avoid him. The words were scarcely out of my mouth, before he came down upon us with full speed, and struck the ship with his head, just forward of the fore-chains; he gave us such an appalling and tremendous jar, as nearly threw us all on our faces. The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock and trembled for a few seconds like a leaf. We looked at each other with perfect amazement, deprived almost of the power of speech. Many minutes elapsed before we were able to realize the dreadful accident; during which time he passed under the ship, grazing her keel as he went along, came up underside of her to leeward, and lay on the top of the water (apparently stunned with the violence of the blow), for the space of a minute; he then suddenly started off, in a direction to leeward.

How much would you say? Take a pencil and use this empty page to scribble, sketch, and do some calculations. The answer is on the next page, but I strongly encourage you to have fun and try it out for yourself first. Scribble, sketch, and have fun! I hope you did try to solve it yourself, because learning is so much more fulfilling when it is interactive. If you did not, too bad for you. ☹ In truth, the bacteria have only filled 3.125% of the glass. But how can this be? Well it is simple. If they double every minute, and they fill the entire glass in 60 minutes, then they will have filled half the glass the minute before 60 (or 50% after 59 minutes), half of that the minute before 59 (or 25% after 58 minutes), and so on. Table 3.1 summary of the last 10 minutes, starting from the end.  Time Elapsed    Amount Filled  60 minutes   100 .000%   59 minutes   50 .000%   58 minutes   25 .000%   57 minutes   12. 500%   56 minutes   6. 250%   55 minutes   3. 125%   54 minutes   1. 563%   53 minutes   0. 781%   52 minutes   0. 391%   51 minutes   0. 195%     Table 3.1: Exponential growth of bacteria in a bottle over the last 10 minutes. It all makes sense now, right? Suddenly it becomes clear, even obvious. Who could not get this? It is so simple, right? Apparently, it is not. The most common replies I get are between 50% and 90%. Even college graduates typically get it wrong. And let?s not talk about politicians. We will come back to this in the Appendix, with some real-world examples. For now, I think it is safe to say that we all understand what steady growth means. Let’s now see how this applies to our main focus in the next chapter: information technology.

Each group was required to propose its own “fitness function”—a linear equation that it could use to measure its own impact without ambiguity. For example, a two-pizza team in charge of sending advertising e-mails to customers might choose for its fitness function the rate at which these messages were opened multiplied by the average order size those e-mails generated. A group writing software code for the fulfillment centers might home in on decreasing the cost of shipping each type of product and reducing the time that elapsed between a customer’s making a purchase and the item leaving the FC in a truck. Bezos wanted to personally approve each equation and track the results over time. It would be his way of guiding a team’s evolution. Bezos was applying

In other cases, however-those of Copernicus, Einstein, and contemporary nuclear theory, for example-considerable time elapses between the first consciousness of breakdown and the emergence of a new paradigm. When that occurs, the historian may capture at least a few hints of what extraordinary science is like. Faced with an admittedly fundamental anomaly in theory, the scientist's first effort will often be to isolate it more precisely and give it structure. Though now aware that they cannot be quite right, he will push the rules of normal science harder than ever to see, in the area of difficulty, just where and how far they can be made to work. Simultaneously he will seek for ways of magnifying the breakdown, of making it more striking and perhaps also more suggestive than it had been when displayed in experiments the outcome of which was thought to be known in advance. And in the latter effort, more than in any other part of the post-paradigm development of science, he will look almost like our most prevalent image of the scientist. He will, in the first place, often seem a man searching at random, trying experiments just to see what will happen, looking for an effect whose nature he cannot quite guess. Simultaneously, since no experiment can be conceived without some sort of theory, the scientist in crisis will constantly try to generate speculative theories that, if successful, may disclose the road to a new paradigm and, if unsuccessful, can be surrendered with relative ease.