“
To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman.
And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.
”
”
John Green (Paper Towns)
“
Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Time Must Have a Stop)
“
Every couple has a story they tell themselves about themselves, a story that hums beneath them as a kind of engine, motoring them through trouble and into the future.
”
”
Nathan Hill (Wellness)
“
We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have and we just weren’t the kind that could have it. [I]t’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords.
”
”
James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice)
“
Jack...why is there a dragon in our backyard?
”
”
Kyoko M. (Of Dawn & Embers (Of Cinder & Bone, #3))
“
It takes such a long time to realize that it’s worth it. I wonder why we’re engineered that way. We’re sleep-deprived to the point of madness those first couple of years and then one day you wake up and you see the little person you’ve created and she says a sentence to you and you realize that everything in your life has been an audition for the creation of that specific person. That you’re sending freestanding beings off into the world and it’s entirely on your shoulders.
”
”
Claire Lombardo (The Most Fun We Ever Had)
“
The paradise is here. Paradise is right in front of us. In capitalism what is engineered is longing, engineered longing and desire in us for what can be in the future. It’s always about the next product, the next big thing. You look at clothes and you always see some hot, sexy, fabulous couple wearing those jeans—the jeans, i.e., the love. Everything’s all hooked into the seduction. And when you wake up you don’t actually look like that, but the reality is delicious in its own messy, human way. I think we’re always comparing the messy, human to that, and to celebrity culture, so whatever this is doesn’t come up right. Come on. What if we actually were content with our lives? What if we actually knew this was paradise? It would be very hard to control us.
”
”
Krista Tippett (Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living)
“
That decision falls to scientists, engineers, and managers—with at least the tacit approval of company officers and boards of directors. All complex technology is inseparably coupled to an equally complex team of people and systems of people who should interact with one another as smoothly and with as clear a purpose as a set of well-meshed gears.
”
”
Henry Petroski (To Forgive Design: Understanding Failure)
“
RHAPAW ran not on gasoline, but on the inexhaustible fuel of human hope. You would sit on the blisteringly hot vinyl seat and hope she would start, and then Ben would turn the key and the engine would turn over a couple times, like a fish on land making its last, meager, dying flops. And then you would hope harder, and the engine would turn over a couple more times. You hoped some more, and it would finally catch.
”
”
John Green (Paper Towns)
“
Consider this!” Edmond declared. “It took early humans over a million years to progress from discovering fire to inventing the wheel. Then it took only a few thousand years to invent the printing press. Then it took only a couple hundred years to build a telescope. In the centuries that followed, in ever-shortening spans, we bounded from the steam engine, to gas-powered automobiles, to the Space Shuttle! And then, it took only two decades for us to start modifying our own DNA!
”
”
Dan Brown (Origin (Robert Langdon, #5))
“
The Joy of Sex!—Elaine brought home that dreary tract one day, those tidings of comfort and joy by some Californicated Englishman, and we studied the ghastly pictures, the two hundred different positions. What a joyless book. That poor fucker the instructor-model, performing his gymnastic routines over and over, with slight variations, for three hundred pages, each and every time upon the same woman. No wonder he has that look on his soft hairy degenerate face of a bored he-dog hooked up on the street with an exhausted bitch, longing to leave but unable to extricate himself from what breeders call a “tie.” The woman in the book looks only slightly happier; somebody out of mercy should have emptied a bucket of ice water on the miserable couple. Technique, technique, technical engineering, curse of the modern world, debasing what should be a wild, free, spontaneous act of violent delight into an industrial procedure. Comfort’s treatise is a training manual, a workbook which might better have been entitled The Job of Sex.
”
”
Edward Abbey (The Fool's Progress)
“
In the composite form, the subject maintains a steady pattern away from the coupling, merging into the assembly and turning to face a secondary engagement.
”
”
Scott Marlowe (The Nullification Engine (The Alchemancer #2))
“
Data science is the civil engineering of data. Its acolytes possess a practical knowledge of tools and materials, coupled with a theoretical understanding of what’s possible.
”
”
Rachel Schutt (Doing Data Science)
“
Yokoi was the first to admit it. “I don’t have any particular specialist skills,” he once said. “I have a sort of vague knowledge of everything.” He advised young employees not just to play with technology for its own sake, but to play with ideas. Do not be an engineer, he said, be a producer. “The producer knows that there’s such a thing as a semiconductor, but doesn’t need to know its inner workings. . . . That can be left to the experts.” He argued, “Everyone takes the approach of learning detailed, complex skills. If no one did this then there wouldn’t be people who shine as engineers. . . . Looking at me, from the engineer’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Look at this idiot,’ but once you’ve got a couple hit products under your belt, this word ‘idiot’ seems to slip away somewhere.
”
”
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
“
Every week seems to bring another luxuriantly creamy envelope, the thickness of a letter-bomb, containing a complex invitation – a triumph of paper engineering – and a comprehensive dossier of phone numbers, email addresses, websites, how to get there, what to wear, where to buy the gifts. Country house hotels are being block-booked, great schools of salmon are being poached, vast marquees are appearing overnight like Bedouin tent cities. Silky grey morning suits and top hats are being hired and worn with an absolutely straight face, and the times are heady and golden for florists and caterers, string quartets and Ceilidh callers, ice sculptors and the makers of disposable cameras. Decent Motown cover-bands are limp with exhaustion. Churches are back in fashion, and these days the happy couple are travelling the short distance from the place of worship to the reception on open-topped London buses, in hot-air balloons, on the backs of matching white stallions, in micro-lite planes. A wedding requires immense reserves of love and commitment and time off work, not least from the guests. Confetti costs eight pounds a box. A bag of rice from the corner shop just won’t cut it anymore.
”
”
David Nicholls (One Day)
“
Poverty is a human-engineered product per excellence. It results primarily from inequitable distribution of national revenues coupled with escalating levels of corruption and mismanagement of national resources.
”
”
Moutasem Algharati
“
We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
For her first summer vacation, my sister went to California with a couple of friends on a package tour put together by her agency. One of the members of the tour group was a computer engineer a year her senior, and she started dating him when they came back to Japan. This kind of thing happens all the time, but it's not for me. First of all, I hate package tours, and the thought of getting serious about somebody you meet in a group like that makes me sick.
”
”
Haruki Murakami (The Elephant Vanishes)
“
As well as myself there was a young Norwegian couple who worked on an oil-rig, Paul, an engineer from Dublin whom I had taken to at once and a Swiss pot-holer, a rather surly fellow who was used to carrying out unbelievable dives on his own.
”
”
L.K. Brass (The Apocalypse Deal)
“
And every technical problem has a technical solution. We don’t need to wait for the Second Coming in order to overcome death. A couple of geeks in a lab can do it. If traditionally death was the speciality of priests and theologians, now the engineers are taking over.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords. God is up there laughing at us.
”
”
James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice)
“
good engineers know how to apply constraints to help achieve their goals. Time constraints on engineers fuel creativity and resourcefulness. Financial constraints and the blatant physical constraints hinging on the laws of nature are also common, coupled with an unpredictable constraint—namely, human behavior.
”
”
Guru Madhavan (Applied Minds: How Engineers Think)
“
Connascence, in the context of software engineering, refers to the degree of coupling between software components. (Connascence.io hosts a handy reference to the various types of connascence.) Software components are connascent if a change in one would require the other(s) to be modified in order to maintain the overall correctness of the system.
”
”
Piethein Strengholt (Data Management at Scale: Best Practices for Enterprise Architecture)
“
The Three-Decker
"The three-volume novel is extinct."
Full thirty foot she towered from waterline to rail.
It cost a watch to steer her, and a week to shorten sail;
But, spite all modern notions, I found her first and best—
The only certain packet for the Islands of the Blest.
Fair held the breeze behind us—’twas warm with lovers’ prayers.
We’d stolen wills for ballast and a crew of missing heirs.
They shipped as Able Bastards till the Wicked Nurse confessed,
And they worked the old three-decker to the Islands of the Blest.
By ways no gaze could follow, a course unspoiled of Cook,
Per Fancy, fleetest in man, our titled berths we took
With maids of matchless beauty and parentage unguessed,
And a Church of England parson for the Islands of the Blest.
We asked no social questions—we pumped no hidden shame—
We never talked obstetrics when the Little Stranger came:
We left the Lord in Heaven, we left the fiends in Hell.
We weren’t exactly Yussufs, but—Zuleika didn’t tell.
No moral doubt assailed us, so when the port we neared,
The villain had his flogging at the gangway, and we cheered.
’Twas fiddle in the forc’s’le—’twas garlands on the mast,
For every one got married, and I went ashore at last.
I left ’em all in couples a-kissing on the decks.
I left the lovers loving and the parents signing cheques.
In endless English comfort by county-folk caressed,
I left the old three-decker at the Islands of the Blest!
That route is barred to steamers: you’ll never lift again
Our purple-painted headlands or the lordly keeps of Spain.
They’re just beyond your skyline, howe’er so far you cruise
In a ram-you-damn-you liner with a brace of bucking screws.
Swing round your aching search-light—’twill show no haven’s peace.
Ay, blow your shrieking sirens to the deaf, gray-bearded seas!
Boom out the dripping oil-bags to skin the deep’s unrest—
And you aren’t one knot the nearer to the Islands of the Blest!
But when you’re threshing, crippled, with broken bridge and rail,
At a drogue of dead convictions to hold you head to gale,
Calm as the Flying Dutchman, from truck to taffrail dressed,
You’ll see the old three-decker for the Islands of the Blest.
You’ll see her tiering canvas in sheeted silver spread;
You’ll hear the long-drawn thunder ’neath her leaping figure-head;
While far, so far above you, her tall poop-lanterns shine
Unvexed by wind or weather like the candles round a shrine!
Hull down—hull down and under—she dwindles to a speck,
With noise of pleasant music and dancing on her deck.
All’s well—all’s well aboard her—she’s left you far behind,
With a scent of old-world roses through the fog that ties you blind.
Her crew are babes or madmen? Her port is all to make?
You’re manned by Truth and Science, and you steam for steaming’s sake?
Well, tinker up your engines—you know your business best—
She’s taking tired people to the Islands of the Blest!
”
”
Rudyard Kipling
“
In the last week of April 2004, a handful of the Abu Ghraib photographs were broadcast on 60 minutes and published in The New Yorker, and within a couple of days they had been rebroadcast and republished pretty much everywhere on earth. Overnight, the human pyramid, the hooded man on the box, the young woman soldier with a prisoner on a leash, and the corpse packed in ice had become the defining images of the Iraq war...Never before had such primal dungeon scenes been so baldly captured on camera...But above all, it was the posing soldiers, mugging for their buddies' cameras while dominating the prisoners in trophy stances, that gave the photographs the sense of unruly and unmediated reality. The staging was part of the reality they documented. And the grins, the thumbs-up, the arms crossed over puffed-out chests—all this unseemly swagger and self-regard was the height of amateurism. These soldier-photographers stood, at once, inside and outside the events they recorded, watching themselves take part in the spectacle, and their decision not to conceal but to reveal what they were doing indicated that they were not just amateur photographers, but amateur torturers.
So the amateurism was not merely a formal dimension of the Abu Ghraib pictures. It was part of their content, part of what we saw in them, and it corresponded to an aspect of the Iraq War that troubled and baffled nearly everyone: the reckless and slapdash ineptitude with which it had been prosecuted. It was an amateur-run war, a murky and incoherent war. It was not clear why it was waged; too many reasons were given, none had held up, and the stories we invented to explain it to ourselves hardly seemed to matter, since once it was started the war had become its own engine—not a means to an end but an end in itself. What had been billed as a war of ideas and ideals had been exposed as a war of poses and posturing.
”
”
Philip Gourevitch (Standard Operating Procedure)
“
He wondered if other Shifters had the same homing instinct for a teleportation departure point. It never lasted long, maybe a couple of hours, a half day at most, like a subconscious computer memory. It baffled scientists years after they had first examined Lock’s abilities. Nobody had come up with an answer for that ability and Lock was unaware of how he did it. It simply existed, like his other skills.
”
”
J.M. Johnson (The Starbirth Assignment: Shifter (Starbirth, #1))
“
within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.
”
”
Jonathan Allen (Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign)
“
And I don’t know much about reality TV, but it seems to me that what Baz was attempting, it’s kind of just an extension of what they all do, isn’t it? They pick volatile people, people who’re going to perform for the cameras, they wind them up as tight as they can, they engineer a bunch of high-stress situations that are practically guaranteed to make someone lose their shit, throw in some alcohol—and then they sit back and let the cameras roll and the tweets pour in.
”
”
Ruth Ware (One Perfect Couple)
“
Neil felt a half-second from losing his mind, but then Andrew said his name and Neil's thoughts ground to a startled halt. He was belatedly aware of his hand at his ear and his fingers clenched tight around his phone. He didn't remember pulling it from his pocket or making the decision to dial out. He lowered it and tapped a button, thinking maybe he'd imagined things, but Andrew's name was on his display and the timer put the call at almost a minute already. Neil put the phone back to his ear, but he couldn't find the words for the wretched feeling that was tearing away at him. In three months championships would be over. In four months he'd be dead. In five months the Foxes would be right back here for summer practices with six new faces. Neil could count his life on one hand now. On the other hand was the future he couldn't have: vice-captain, captain, Court. Neil had no right to mourn these missed chances. He'd gotten more than he deserved this year; it was selfish to ask for more. He should be grateful for what he had, and gladder still that his death would mean something. He was going to drag his father and the Moriyamas down with him when he went, and they'd never recover from the things he said. It was justice when he'd never thought he'd get any and revenge for his mother's death. He thought he'd come to terms with it but that hollow ache was back in his chest where it had no right to be. Neil felt like he was drowning. Neil found his voice at last, but the best he had was, "Come and get me from the stadium." Andrew didn't answer, but the quiet took on a new tone. Neil checked the screen again and saw the timer flashing at seventy-two seconds. Andrew had hung up on him. Neil put his phone away and waited. It was only a couple minutes from Fox Tower to the Foxhole Court, but it took almost fifteen minutes for Andrew to turn into the parking lot. He pulled into the space a couple inches from Neil's left foot and didn't bother to kill the engine. Kevin was in the passenger seat, frowning silent judgment at Neil through the windshield. Andrew got out of the car when Neil didn't move and stood in front of Neil. Neil looked up at him, studying Andrew's bored expression and waiting for questions he knew wouldn't come. That apathy should have grated against his raw nerves but somehow it steadied him. Andrew's disinterest in his psychological well-being was what had drawn Neil to him in the first place: the realization that Andrew would never flinch away from whatever poison was eating Neil alive.
”
”
Nora Sakavic (The King's Men (All for the Game, #3))
“
Come now, Tichy. For half a century civilization hasn't been left to its own devices. A hundred years ago a certain Dior was dictating fashions in clothing. Today this sort of regulating has embraced all walks of life. If prostheticism is voted in, I assure you, in a couple of years everyone will consider the possession of a soft, hairy, sweating body to be shameful and indecent. A body needs washing, deodorizing, caring for, and even then it breaks down, while in a prostheticized society you can snap on the loveliest creations of modern engineering. What woman doesn't want to have silver iodide instead of eyes, telescoping breasts, angel's wings, iridescent legs, and feet that sing with every step?
”
”
Stanisław Lem (The Futurological Congress: From the Memoirs of Ijon Tichy)
“
Three Moonie 65-megaton hydrogen bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at very high altitude. With no air around the bombs to absorb the initial blast of the explosions, and convert the energy into mechanical shock waves——all the nuclear energy blasted out in its electromagnetic form. It was a brutally intense pulse of Compton recoil electrons and photoelectrons that created huge electric and magnetic fields that were MURDER on sensitive electronic equipment at tremendous distances. The electro-magnetic fields, coupled with electric and computer systems, producing huge voltage spikes in the circuits and damaging current surges along all signal paths, fusing precision engineered memory and micro-boards and virtual drives and CPUs into fried silicon laced junk! Nanobots to Nanoscrap in Nanoseconds!
”
”
@hg47 (Daughter Moon)
“
Without sex, the only way for bacteria to adapt is through mutation, which is caused by reproductive error or environmental damage. Most mutations are hurtful; they make for even less successful bacteria—though eventually, with luck, a mutation would arise that made for a more heat-resistant bacterium. Asexual adaptation is problematic because the dictate of the world, “Change or die,” runs directly counter to one of the primary dictates of life: “Maintain the integrity of the genome.” In engineering, this type of clash is called a coupled design. Two functions of a system clash so that it is not possible to adjust one without negatively affecting the other. In sexual reproduction, by contrast, the inherent scrambling, or recombination, affords a vast scope for change, yet still maintains genetic integrity.
”
”
Seth Lloyd (Programming the Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos)
“
No one can or will ever replace the love Andy, you, and I shared, but life goes on and we have to flow with it. I completed my postgraduate fashion design at the Royal College of Art, London in 1977; I then worked for Liberty of London for a few years before venturing into designing my own bridal wear collections for several major London department stores. In 1979, the Hong Kong Polytechnic now a university invited me to teach fashion design at their clothing and textile institute. Andy and I separated in 1970. He left for New Zealand to pursue engineering while I stayed in London to complete my fashion studies. Those early years of our separation were extremely difficult for the both of us. As you are well aware, we were very close at boarding school. After your departure to Vienna, Andy and I were inseparable. He asked me to join him permanently in Christchurch, but I was determined to enroll in a London fashion school. We corresponded for a couple of years before mutually deciding that it was best to severe ties and start afresh.
”
”
Young (Unbridled (A Harem Boy's Saga, #2))
“
per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number
”
”
Tarquin Hall (The Case of the Missing Servant (Vish Puri, #1))
“
Vern did not trust humans was the long and short of it. Not a single one. He had known many in his life, even liked a few, but in the end they all sold him out to the angry mob. Which was why he holed up in Honey Island Swamp out of harm's way.
Vern liked the swamp okay. As much as he liked anything after all these years. Goddamn, so many years just stretching out behind him like bricks in that road old King Darius put down back in who gives a shit BC. Funny how things came back out of the blue. Like that ancient Persian road. He couldn't remember last week, and now he was flashing back a couple thousand years, give or take. Vern had baked half those bricks his own self, back when he still did a little blue-collar. Nearly wore out the internal combustion engine. Shed his skin two seasons early because of that bitch of a job. That and diet. No one had a clue about nutrition in those days. Vern was mostly ketogenic now, high fat, low carbs, apart from his beloved breakfast cereals. Keto made perfect sense for a dragon, especially with his core temperature. Unfortunately, it meant that beer had to go, but he got by on vodka. Absolut was his preferred brand. A little high on alcohol but easiest on the system.
”
”
Eoin Colfer (Highfire)
“
As I became older, I was given many masks to wear. I could be a laborer laying railroad tracks across the continent, with long hair in a queue to be pulled by pranksters; a gardener trimming the shrubs while secretly planting a bomb; a saboteur before the day of infamy at Pearl Harbor, signaling the Imperial Fleet; a kamikaze pilot donning his headband somberly, screaming 'Banzai' on my way to my death; a peasant with a broad-brimmed straw hat in a rice paddy on the other side of the world, stooped over to toil in the water; an obedient servant in the parlor, a houseboy too dignified for my own good; a washerman in the basement laundry, removing stains using an ancient secret; a tyrant intent on imposing my despotism on the democratic world, opposed by the free and the brave; a party cadre alongside many others, all of us clad in coordinated Mao jackets; a sniper camouflaged in the trees of the jungle, training my gunsights on G.I. Joe; a child running with a body burning from napalm, captured in an unforgettable photo; an enemy shot in the head or slaughtered by the villageful; one of the grooms in a mass wedding of couples, having met my mate the day before through our cult leader; an orphan in the last airlift out of a collapsed capital, ready to be adopted into the good life; a black belt martial artist breaking cinderblocks with his head, in an advertisement for Ginsu brand knives with the slogan 'but wait--there's more' as the commercial segued to show another free gift; a chef serving up dog stew, a trick on the unsuspecting diner; a bad driver swerving into the next lane, exactly as could be expected; a horny exchange student here for a year, eager to date the blonde cheerleader; a tourist visiting, clicking away with his camera, posing my family in front of the monuments and statues; a ping pong champion, wearing white tube socks pulled up too high and batting the ball with a wicked spin; a violin prodigy impressing the audience at Carnegie Hall, before taking a polite bow; a teen computer scientist, ready to make millions on an initial public offering before the company stock crashes; a gangster in sunglasses and a tight suit, embroiled in a turf war with the Sicilian mob; an urban greengrocer selling lunch by the pound, rudely returning change over the counter to the black patrons; a businessman with a briefcase of cash bribing a congressman, a corrupting influence on the electoral process; a salaryman on my way to work, crammed into the commuter train and loyal to the company; a shady doctor, trained in a foreign tradition with anatomical diagrams of the human body mapping the flow of life energy through a multitude of colored points; a calculus graduate student with thick glasses and a bad haircut, serving as a teaching assistant with an incomprehensible accent, scribbling on the chalkboard; an automobile enthusiast who customizes an imported car with a supercharged engine and Japanese decals in the rear window, cruising the boulevard looking for a drag race; a illegal alien crowded into the cargo hold of a smuggler's ship, defying death only to crowd into a New York City tenement and work as a slave in a sweatshop.
My mother and my girl cousins were Madame Butterfly from the mail order bride catalog, dying in their service to the masculinity of the West, and the dragon lady in a kimono, taking vengeance for her sisters. They became the television newscaster, look-alikes with their flawlessly permed hair.
Through these indelible images, I grew up. But when I looked in the mirror, I could not believe my own reflection because it was not like what I saw around me. Over the years, the world opened up. It has become a dizzying kaleidoscope of cultural fragments, arranged and rearranged without plan or order.
”
”
Frank H. Wu (Yellow)
“
As I was completing this book, I saw news reports quoting NASA chief Charles Bolden announcing that from now on the primary mission of America’s space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the president. “He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.” Bolden added that the International Space Station was a kind of model for NASA’s future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Bolden, who made these remarks in an interview with Al-Jazeera, timed them to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Obama’s own Cairo address to the Muslim world.3 Bolden’s remarks provoked consternation not only among conservatives but also among famous former astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Glenn and others involved in America’s space programs. No surprise: most people think of NASA’s job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Even some of Obama’s supporters expressed puzzlement. Sure, we are all for Islamic self-esteem, and seven or eight hundred years ago the Muslims did make a couple of important discoveries, but what on earth was Obama up to here?
”
”
Dinesh D'Souza (The Roots of Obama's Rage)
“
Heuristics for testing your goals Assess your goals using these guidelines: Does your goal start with a verb (“launch,” “build,” “refactor,” etc.)? Then you probably have an action, so reframe it to describe the outcome you want. Often, this takes the form of translating “X so that Y” into “Y via X” (and consider if you need X in there at all). A helpful trick to figure out the proper framing is to read the goal out, ask yourself why, answer that question, then do that a couple of times until the true goal comes into focus. (See Table 2 for an example.) Do you have “engineering goals” and “business goals,” or something similar? Stop it. Are your goals more than one page, more than three to five objectives, or more than three to five KRs per objective? No one will read them—let alone remember them. When you (or your team) look at your goals, do you wince and think, “What about X? I was really hoping to get to that this quarter”? If not, you probably haven’t focused enough, and your goals are not adding value. Could one team member think a goal is achieved and another one completely disagree? Then your goal isn’t specific enough. (By contrast, if everyone feels it’s mostly successful but the assessments range from 60–80 percent done, who cares?) Can you imagine a scenario where the goal is achieved but you’re still dissatisfied with where you ended up? Then your goal isn’t specific enough, or an aspect is missing. Could you be successful without achieving the goal? Then your goal is overly specific, and you should rethink how to define success.
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Claire Hughes Johnson (Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building)
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The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.
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Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
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Lucid Motors was started under the name Atieva (which stood for “advanced technologies in electric vehicle applications” and was pronounced “ah-tee-va”) in Mountain View in 2008 (or December 31, 2007, to be precise) by Bernard Tse, who was a vice president at Tesla before it launched the Roadster. Hong Kong–born Tse had studied engineering at the University of Illinois, where he met his wife, Grace. In the early 1980s, the couple had started a computer manufacturing company called Wyse, which at its peak in the early 1990s registered sales of more than $480 million a year. Tse joined Tesla’s board of directors in 2003 at the request of his close friend Martin Eberhard, the company’s original CEO, who sought Tse’s expertise in engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain. Tse would eventually step off the board to lead a division called the Tesla Energy Group. The group planned to make electric power trains for other manufacturers, who needed them for their electric car programs. Tse, who didn’t respond to my requests to be interviewed, left Tesla around the time of Eberhard’s departure and decided to start Atieva, his own electric car company. Atieva’s plan was to start by focusing on the power train, with the aim of eventually producing a car. The company pitched itself to investors as a power train supplier and won deals to power some city buses in China, through which it could further develop and improve its technology. Within a few years, the company had raised about $40 million, much of it from the Silicon Valley–based venture capital firm Venrock, and employed thirty people, mostly power train engineers, in the United States, as well as the same number of factory workers in Asia. By 2014, it was ready to start work on a sedan, which it planned to sell in the United States and China. That year, it raised about $200 million from Chinese investors, according to sources close to the company.
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Hamish McKenzie (Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil)
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Dontchev was born in Bulgaria and emigrated to America as a young kid when his father, a mathematician, took a job at the University of Michigan. He got an undergraduate and graduate degree in aerospace engineering, which led to what he thought was his dream opportunity: an internship at Boeing. But he quickly became disenchanted and decided to visit a friend who was working at SpaceX. “I will never forget walking the floor that day,” he says. “All the young engineers working their asses off and wearing T-shirts and sporting tattoos and being really badass about getting things done. I thought, ‘These are my people.’ It was nothing like the buttoned-up deadly vibe at Boeing.” That summer, he made a presentation to a VP at Boeing about how SpaceX was enabling the younger engineers to innovate. “If Boeing doesn’t change,” he said, “you’re going to lose out on the top talent.” The VP replied that Boeing was not looking for disrupters. “Maybe we want the people who aren’t the best, but who will stick around longer.” Dontchev quit. At a conference in Utah, he went to a party thrown by SpaceX and, after a couple of drinks, worked up the nerve to corner Gwynne Shotwell. He pulled a crumpled résumé out of his pocket and showed her a picture of the satellite hardware he had worked on. “I can make things happen,” he told her. Shotwell was amused. “Anyone who is brave enough to come up to me with a crumpled-up résumé might be a good candidate,” she said. She invited him to SpaceX for interviews. He was scheduled to see Musk, who was still interviewing every engineer hired, at 3 p.m. As usual, Musk got backed up, and Dontchev was told he would have to come back another day. Instead, Dontchev sat outside Musk’s cubicle for five hours. When he finally got in to see Musk at 8 p.m., Dontchev took the opportunity to unload about how his gung-ho approach wasn’t valued at Boeing. When hiring or promoting, Musk made a point of prioritizing attitude over résumé skills. And his definition of a good attitude was a desire to work maniacally hard. Musk hired Dontchev on the spot.
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Walter Isaacson (Elon Musk)
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That, for a while, seemed like life. And if I was really being honest with myself, I wasn’t into it. The only option was to sit in the pews every Sunday at church and casually wonder if I was going to go to hell because of who I was? No, thank you. Or to understand that the structures on which the country was built were engineered against me? Hard pass. What choice did I have besides constantly code-switching between identities as a means of hiding in plain sight? And wasn’t it just normal to feel like such a mistake as an adult that every time I walked over a bridge or stood on a subway platform, I had to talk myself out of stepping over the edge? I came to believe I was a monster and that I deserved to feel the way I felt. And I didn’t want to turn the page. But through it all there was a constant tethering me to the idea of a future: the library. The library is the place where I could borrow first Grover’s philosophical tome, then a couple of Choose Your Own Adventures I could cheat at, and later a stack of mysteries I could spoil for myself, all attempts to look for some other way of understanding who I was. In the book stacks, I found The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple and Giovanni’s Room and David Rakoff’s Fraud and more. I saw a new vision of Otherness in those books, and the pages kept turning. At the end of every one was a wall waiting to be broken down—a lurch toward becoming—a new paragraph in a story with an ending far different from what I’d ever dared imagine. Every story, whether truth or fiction, is an invitation to imagination, but even more so, it’s an invitation to empathy. The storyteller says, “I am here. Does it matter?” The words that I found in these books were a person calling out from a page, “I am worthy of being heard and you are worthy of hearing my story.” It seems simple but it’s a bold declaration. How many times in life do we receive the message, implicit or explicit, that what we’ve experienced or what we feel isn’t noteworthy or remarkable? The books that I found in the library, ones that I deeply understood and ones that seemed so outside of my experience they might as well have been written in Klingon, all carried the same hopes: to be seen, to be heard, to exist.
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R. Eric Thomas (Here for It; Or, How to Save Your Soul in America: Essays)
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Betsy didn’t want to be at the party any more than Cole did. She’d met the birthday girl in a spin class a couple of years earlier and had been declining her Evites ever since. In an effort to meet new people, however, this time Betsy replied “Yes.” She took a cab to the party, wondering why she was going at all. When Betsy met Cole there was a spark, but she was ambivalent. Cole was clearly smart and well educated, but he didn’t seem to be doing much about it. They had some nice dates, which seemed promising. Then, after sleeping over one night and watching Cole wake up at eleven a.m. and grab his skateboard, Betsy felt less bullish. She didn’t want to help another boyfriend grow up. What Betsy didn’t know was that, ever since he’d started spending time with her, Cole had regained some of his old drive. He saw the way she wanted to work on her sculptures even on the weekend, how she and her friends loved to get together to talk about their projects and their plans. As a result, Cole started to think more aspirationally. He eyed a posting for a good tech job at a high-profile start-up, but he felt his résumé was now too shabby to apply. As luck would have it—and it is often luck—Cole remembered that an old friend from high school, someone he bumped into about once every year or two, worked at the start-up. He got in touch, and this friend put in a good word to HR. After a handful of interviews with different people in the company, Cole was offered the position. The hiring manager told Cole he had been chosen for three reasons: His engineering degree suggested he knew how to work hard on technical projects, his personality seemed like a good fit for the team, and the twentysomething who vouched for him was well liked in the company. The rest, the manager said, Cole could learn on the job. This one break radically altered Cole’s career path. He learned software development at a dot-com on the leading edge. A few years later, he moved over and up as a director of development at another start-up because, by then, the identity capital he’d gained could speak for itself. Nearly ten years later, Cole and Betsy are married. She runs a gallery co-op. He’s a CIO. They have a happy life and gladly give much of the credit to Cole’s friend from high school and to the woman with the Evites.
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Meg Jay (The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now)
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Energy is the basis of creating electricity that we can utilize, so how can we harness the power of an earthquake? Obviously, today, if that much energy were being drawn from the Earth through the Great Pyramid, tourists would not be parading through it every day. In order for the system to work, the pyramid would need to be mechanically coupled with the Earth and vibrating in sympathy with it. To do this, the system would need to be "primed"—we would need to initiate oscillation of the pyramid before we could tap into the Earth's oscillations. After the initial priming pulse, though, the pyramid would be coupled with the Earth and could draw off its energy. In effect, the Great Pyramid would feed into the Earth a little energy and receive an enormous amount out of it in return.
How do we cause a mass of stone that weighs 5,273,834 tons to oscillate? It would seem an impossible task. Yet there was a man in recent history who claimed he could do just that! Nikola Tesla, a physicist and inventor with more than six hundred patents to his credit—one of them being the AC generator—created a device he called an "earthquake machine." By applying vibration at the resonant frequency of a building, he claimed he could shake the building apart. In fact, it is reported that he had to turn his machine off before the building he was testing it in came down around him.
[...]
The New York World-Telegram reported Tesla's comments from a news briefing at the hotel New Yorker on July 11, 1935: 'I was experimenting with vibrations. I had one of my machines going and I wanted to see if I could get it in tune with the vibration of the building. I put it up notch after notch. There was a peculiar cracking sound. I asked my assistants where did the sound come from. They did not know. I put the machine up a few more notches. There was a louder cracking sound. I knew I was approaching the vibration of the steel building. I pushed the machine a little higher. Suddenly, all the heavy machinery in the place was flying around. I grabbed a hammer and broke the machine. The building would have been about our ears in another few minutes. Outside in the street there was pandemonium. The police and ambulances arrived. I told my assistants to say nothing. We told the police it must have been an earthquake. That's all they ever knew about it.
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Christopher Dunn (The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt)
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The Western medical model — and I don't mean the science of it, I mean the practice of it, because the science is completely at odds with the practice — makes two devastating separations. First of all we separate the mind from the body, we separate the emotions from the physiology. So we don't see how the physiology of people reflects their lifelong emotional experience. So we separate the mind from the body, which is not something that traditional medicine has done, I mean, Ayuverdic or Chinese medicine or shamanic tribal cultures and medicinal practices throughout the world have always recognized that mind and body are inseparable. They intuitively knew it. Many Western practitioners have known this and even taught it, but in practice we ignore it.
And then we separate the individual from the environment. The studies are clear, for example, that when people are emotionally isolated they tend to get sick more quickly and they succumb more rapidly to their disease. Why? Because people's physiology is completely related to their psychological, social environment and when people are isolated and alone their stress levels are much higher because there's nothing there to help them moderate their stress. And physiologically it is straightforward, you know, it takes a five-year-old kid to understand it.
However because in practice we separate them... when somebody shows up with an inflamed joint, all we do is we give them an anti-inflammatory or because the immune system is hyperactive and is attacking them we give them a medication to suppress their immune system or we give them a stress hormone like cortisol or one of its analogues, to suppress the inflammation. But we never ask: "What does this manifest about your life?", "What does this say about your relationships?", "How stressful is your job?", "To what extent do you lack control in your life?", "Where are you not authentic?", "How are you trying to work so hard to meet your attachment needs by suppressing yourself?" (because that is what you learn to do as a kid).
Then we do all this research that has to do with cell biology, so we keep looking for the cause of cancer in the cell. Now there's a wonderful quote in the New York Times a couple of years ago they did a series on cancer and somebody said: "Looking for the cause of cancer inside the individual cell is like trying to understand a traffic jam by studying the internal combustion engine." We will never understand it, but we spend hundreds of billions of dollars a year looking for the cause of cancer inside the cell, not recognizing that the cell exists in interaction with the environment and that the genes are modulated by the environment, they are turned on and off by the environment.
So the impact of not understanding the unity of emotions and physiology on one hand and in the other hand the relationship between the individual and the environment.. in other words.. having a strictly biological model as opposed to what has been called a bio-psycho-social, that recognizes that the biology is important, but it also reflects our psychological and social relationships. And therefore trying to understand the biology in isolation from the psychological and social environment is futile. The result is that we are treating people purely through pharmaceuticals or physical interventions, greatly to the profit of companies that manufacture pharmaceuticals and which fund the research, but it leaves us very much in the dark about a) the causes and b) the treatment, the holistic treatment of most conditions.
So that for all our amazing interventions and technological marvels, we are still far short of doing what we could do, were we more mindful of that unity. So the consequences are devastating economically, they are devastating emotionally, they are devastating medically.
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Gabor Maté
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Modern biomimicry is far more than just copying nature's shapes. It includes systematic design and problem-solving processes, which are now being refined by scientists and engineers in universities and institutes worldwide.
The first step in any of these processes is to clearly define the challenge we're trying to solve. Then we can determine whether the problem is related to form, function, or ecosystem. Next, we ask what plant, animal, or natural process solves a similar problem most effectively. For example, engineers trying to design a camera lens with the widest viewing angle possible found inspiration in the eyes of bees, which can see an incredible five-sixths of the way, or three hundred degrees, around their heads.
The process can also work in reverse, where the exceptional strategies of a plant, animal, or ecosystem are recognized and reverse engineered. De Mestral's study of the tenacious grip of burrs on his socks is an early example of reverse engineering a natural winner, while researchers' fascination at the way geckos can hang upside down from the ceiling or climb vertical windows has now resulted in innovative adhesives and bandages.
Designs based on biomimicry offer a range of economic benefits. Because nature has carried out trillions of parallel, competitive experiments for millions of years, its successful designs are dramatically more energy efficient than the inventions we've created in the past couple of hundred years. Nature builds only with locally derived materials, so it uses little transport energy. Its designs can be less expensive to manufacture than traditional approaches, because nature doesn't waste materials. For example, the exciting new engineering frontier of nanotechnology mirrors nature's manufacturing principles by building devices one molecule at a time. This means no offcuts or excess. Nature can't afford to poison itself either, so it creates and combines chemicals in a way that is nontoxic to its ecosystems. Green chemistry is a branch of biomimicry that uses this do-no-harm principle, to develop everything from medicines to cleaning products to industrial molecules that are safe by design. Learning from the way nature handles materials also allows one of our companies, PaxFan, to build fans that are smaller and lighter while giving higher performance. Finally, nature has methods to recycle absolutely everything it creates. In natures' closed loop of survival on this planet, everything is a resource and everything is recycled-one of the most fundamental components of sustainability. For all these reasons, as I hear one prominent venture capitalist declare, biomimicry will be the business of the twenty-first century. The global force of this emerging and fascinating field is undeniable and building on all societal levels.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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Initially working out of our home in Northern California, with a garage-based lab, I wrote a one page letter introducing myself and what we had and posted it to the CEOs of twenty-two Fortune 500 companies. Within a couple of weeks, we had received seventeen responses, with invitations to meetings and referrals to heads of engineering departments. I met with those CEOs or their deputies and received an enthusiastic response from almost every individual. There was also strong interest from engineers given the task of interfacing with us. However, support from their senior engineering and product development managers was less forthcoming. We learned that many of the big companies we had approached were no longer manufacturers themselves but assemblers of components or were value-added reseller companies, who put their famous names on systems that other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) had built. That didn't daunt us, though when helpful VPs of engineering at top-of-the-food-chain companies referred us to their suppliers, we found that many had little or no R & D capacity, were unwilling to take a risk on outside ideas, or had no room in their already stripped-down budgets for innovation. Our designs found nowhere to land. It became clear that we needed to build actual products and create an apples-to-apples comparison before we could interest potential manufacturing customers.
Where to start? We created a matrix of the product areas that we believed PAX could impact and identified more than five hundred distinct market sectors-with potentially hundreds of thousands of products that we could improve. We had to focus. After analysis that included the size of the addressable market, ease of access, the cost and time it would take to develop working prototypes, the certifications and metrics of the various industries, the need for energy efficiency in the sector, and so on, we prioritized the list to fans, mixers, pumps, and propellers. We began hand-making prototypes as comparisons to existing, leading products.
By this time, we were raising working capital from angel investors. It's important to note that this was during the first half of the last decade. The tragedy of September 11, 2001, and ensuing military actions had the world's attention. Clean tech and green tech were just emerging as terms, and energy efficiency was still more of a slogan than a driver for industry. The dot-com boom had busted. We'd researched venture capital firms in the late 1990s and found only seven in the United States investing in mechanical engineering inventions. These tended to be expansion-stage investors that didn't match our phase of development. Still, we were close to the famous Silicon Valley and had a few comical conversations with venture capitalists who said they'd be interested in investing-if we could turn our technology into a website.
Instead, every six months or so, we drew up a budget for the following six months. Via a growing network of forward-thinking private investors who could see the looming need for dramatic changes in energy efficiency and the performance results of our prototypes compared to currently marketed products, we funded the next phase of research and business development.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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Over the next couple of years, we built and tested a series of prototypes, started dialogues with leading manufacturers, and added business development and technical staff to our team, including mechanical and aerospace engineers. Our plan was that PAX scientific would be an intellectual-property-creating R & D company. When we identified appropriate market sectors, we would license our patents to outside entrepreneurs or to our own, purpose-built, subsidiaries. Given my previous experience on the receiving end of hostile takeovers, we were determined to maintain control of PAX Scientific and its subsidiaries in their development stages. Creating subsidiaries that were market specific would help, since new investors could buy stock in a more narrowly focused business, without direct dilution of the parent company.
We were introduced to fellow Bay Area resident Paul Hawken. A successful entrepreneur, author, and articulate advocate for sustainability and natural capitalism, Paul understood our vision of a parent company that concentrated on research and intellectual property, while separate teams focused on product commercialization. With his own angel investment backing, Paul established a series of companies to market computer, industrial, and automotive fans. PAX assigned worldwide licenses to these companies in exchange for up-front fees and a share of revenue; Paul hired managers and set off to sell fan designs to manufacturers.
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Jay Harman (The Shark's Paintbrush: Biomimicry and How Nature is Inspiring Innovation)
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In those days, kids didn't participate in one adult-run activity after another. We didn't sit inside air-conditioned homes playing video games. No, we were out in the hills roaming and exploring and creating all day long. We collected scrap wood and built shacks. We damned up the creek and caught minnows and crayfish. One summer, we built a motorized go-cart with some scrap items from a junked riding mower and a couple of two-by-fours. It was one of the great engineering feats in my neighborhood's history.
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Tom Purcell (Misadventures of a 1970s Childhood: A Humorous Memoir)
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a thousand huge internal combustion engines were coupled together in lines of one thousand
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David Denny (Jonathon Postlethwaite and the Seed of Corruption)
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कैंटीन में दो हिस्से हैं एक तरफ जहां लड़कों वाला पूरा ग्रुप रहता है और दूसरी तरफ वाले हिस्से में अच्छा सा कोना देखकर वो couple बैठते होते हैं जो प्यार के दूसरे लेवेल पर होते हैं यानि बेस्ट फ्रेंड से प्यार वाले लेवेल पर। कैंटीन के इस हिस्से को लोग प्यार से family section बोलते हैं
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Divya Prakash Dubey (मसाला चाय)
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One night a police officer is staking out a particularly rowdy bar for potential drunk drivers. At closing time the patrons stagger out. He notices one guy stumble a couple of times, trip on the curb, and try his keys on five different cars before he finds the right one. Finally, he manages to start his engine and begins to pull away. The police officer is ready to pounce. He stops the driver, and administers a Breathalyzer test. The results show a reading of 0.0! The puzzled officer demands an explanation. The driver replies, “Simple. Tonight, I’m the Designated Decoy.
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Barry Dougherty (Friars Club Private Joke File: More Than 2,000 Very Naughty Jokes from the Grand Masters of Comedy)
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The whole question of using the planets for something—something, that is, besides research—ought to be within sight of settlement. Instead, nobody even discusses it any more. And our chances to settle it grow worse every year. Our appropriations are dwindling, as it gets harder and harder to convince the Congress that space flight is really good for anything. You can’t sell the Congress on the long-range rewards of basic research, anyhow; representatives have to stand for election every two years, senators every six years; that’s just about as far ahead as most of them are prepared to look. And suppose we tried to explain to them the basic research we’re doing? We couldn’t; it’s classified! “And above all, Seppi—this may be only my personal ignorance speaking, but if so, I’m stuck with it—above all, I think that by now we ought to have some slight clue toward an interstellar drive. We ought even to have a model, no matter how crude—as crude as a Fourth of July rocket compared to a Coupling engine, but with the principle visible. But we don’t. As a matter of fact, we’ve written off the stars. Nobody I can talk to thinks we’ll ever reach them.
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James Blish (Cities in Flight (Cities in Flight, #1-4))
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couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.
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Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
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Demands for 3d Floor Plans have increased significantly compared to the last couple of years where only black and white layouts are the standard choice in the building or housing industry.
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Mark Smith (Usurper! (The Way of the Tiger, #3))
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I've found that all it usually takes to draw out an engineer is to ask a couple of technical questions and then remain calm while listening to the answers. Most people tend to take on a blank, frightened look as soon as they realize that a technical explanation is under way; if you can resist giving this reaction and simply listen, your engineer will open up and tell you everything you ever wanted to know.
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Margaret Lazarus Dean (Leaving Orbit: Notes from the Last Days of American Spaceflight)
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Yeah.’ Roper sighed again. ‘We’d better get over there. Don’t think this is going to be a pretty one, but Smith wants us on it. Take what we can get, I suppose.’ The phone crackled as he put it down, the hiss of deodorant being sprayed in the background humming in her ear. He picked it up again, breathing into the mouthpiece. ‘I’m heading out now. I’ll send you the case link and meet you there? Or do you want me to pick you up?’ ‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m good.’ She didn’t like him being behind the wheel after a night like he’d had. At least not with her in the car. Though she never said it. ‘I’ll see you there.’ ‘Probably take me an hour,’ he grumbled. ‘Traffic’ll be a bitch at this time.’ ‘I’ll see you when I see you.’ He didn’t say anything else before he hung up. She exhaled slowly and rubbed her head. Henley Smith was the DCI and the unit he ran had a couple of cases going on just then. A homeless heroin addict turning up in a river wasn’t at the top of the priorities list. Roper may have seen it as a win — a way to get back in good with Smith and claw his way back into the meat of things. But all she could think about was some poor homeless kid getting his fingernails ripped off. She didn’t know why it had happened, but she knew that this city could be brutal. And that it rarely gave an inch. In fact, if you let it, it would eat you alive. She turned back to the office, ready to tell Cake that she couldn’t stick around, and found him holding out her coffee cup. ‘I put milk in — skimmed, don’t worry — should be cool enough to drink.’ ‘Thanks,’ she said, taking it. ‘Sorry, I’ve gotta go.’ He nodded. ‘I get it. Same time tomorrow?’ She slugged the coffee. ‘Can I let you know?’ ‘Of course.’ Jamie tapped a button on her watch to start tracking her run, and turned for the door. She still needed to get her daily quota in. ‘I can give you a lift if you want?’ Cake offered. ‘No, it’s fine. Probably be faster if I run.’ ‘Probably.’ She nodded to him and then dipped through the door, shaking out her legs as she walked, the sweat on her neck and collarbones already cool in the early-morning air. Outside the sun was barely up, but the city was churning to life. Smog was already hanging in the air and the echo of a thousand engines buzzed in the streets like a wasp nest. She took a few breaths, oxygenating her muscles, and then took off, clenching her fists against the cold.
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Morgan Greene (Bare Skin (DS Jamie Johansson, #1))
“
Did you know when the Bible commands us to love each other that we don’t possess that ability? We only have the ability to love when we rely on the power of the Holy Spirit to fill us. Human love is weak and frail. It comes and goes on a whim and is completely undependable. But God’s love is the most powerful force on earth. With it comes supernatural joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The Holy Spirit is the oil the engine of our emotions is designed to run on. With a daily, dependent relationship with the Holy Spirit to empower us to love our spouses, we have the capacity for true love and can overcome any obstacle in our paths.
”
”
Jimmy Evans (The Four Laws of Love: Guaranteed Success for Every Married Couple)
“
For the next couple of hours the dark mass of the primeval forest whisked past my peripheral vision, thick and tall, the white-painted trees soaring into the cerulean sky like watchful sentinels. This was an apt metaphor because watched was exactly how I felt. I didn’t know why. Zero animal life populated the woods. Not a single moose, elk, bird, or deer. I suppose the uncanny sensation might have been due to the profound silence that pervaded the winter day, which the whine of the snowmobile engines only seemed to accentuate. It was the same silence I’d experienced outside Fyodor’s cabin. What had I called it then? Predatory? Yes, predatory. It insinuated something primordial, something threatening and patient that didn’t jive with the modern cacophony of honking car horns, coffee-shop chatter, TV news anchors rambling off the day’s events, radio DJs counting down top-ten lists. In place of all this existed…nothing, a void…and on an existential level that was alien and frightening and, yes, predatory. It hinted at death and reinforced the simple fact that we didn’t belong here. Disco, Olivia, Vasily, me. Not even Fyodor.
”
”
Jeremy Bates (Mountain of the Dead (World's Scariest Places #5))
“
Quiet can be difficult to quantify—it's easier to think of loud in relative terms. A rock concert is louder than a string quartet; a jet engine is louder than a car engine; a couple have sex on the other side of the hotel wall last night was louder than my TV, so I made my TV louder.
”
”
Conor Knighton (Leave Only Footprints: My Acadia-to-Zion Journey Through Every National Park)
“
Education coupled with better economics are good engines for growth.
”
”
Lailah Gifty Akita
“
I retrieved the guys’ guns, plus a baseball cap and a pair of sunglasses. “I doubt the cavalry will arrive any time soon. But we should still get out of here.” “Where to?” “Somewhere private. We have a lot to talk about.” “OK.” Fenton made her way around to the driver’s side of her Jeep and flipped up the windshield. “My hotel.” She fired up the engine and shifted into Reverse, then sat with one foot on the brake and the other pressing down on the clutch. Both her hands were on the wheel. At the top. Pressed together at the twelve o’clock position. She was hanging on tight. Her knuckles were white. Veins and tendons began to bulge. She closed her eyes. Her chest heaved, like she was having trouble catching her breath. Then she regained control. Slowly. She relaxed her grip. She opened her eyes, which dislodged a couple of tears. “Sorry.” She brushed her cheeks then switched her right foot to the gas pedal and raised the clutch. “I was thinking of Michael. I can’t believe he’s gone.
”
”
Lee Child (Better off Dead (Jack Reacher, #26))
“
Education Through Excellence (The Sonnet)
During my aimless years I once had an urge,
To learn about jet propulsion engine.
So I wrote content for tech support websites,
To buy a couple of books on aeronautics.
Education means catering to curiosity,
Study to gain excellence not a certificate.
If it doesn't open your eyes to social ascension,
Education only causes the world to dehydrate.
You can stuff entire encyclopedias into your head,
That still will not make you an educated being.
If education was the same thing as information,
Google would be the omniscient superbeing.
Certificate without humanity is a ticket to stoneage.
If it takes away your warmth, it is all decadence.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Corazon Calamidad: Obedient to None, Oppressive to None)
“
Miracle story about Lahiri Mahasaya from a woman disciple, Abhoya, from Chapter 31, titled "An Interview with the Sacred Mother", in the book "Autobiography of a Yogi" by Yogananda*:
She [Abhoya] and her husband, a Calcutta lawyer, started one day for Banaras to visit the guru. Their carriage was delayed by heavy traffic; they reached the Howrah main station in Calcutta only to hear the Banaras train whistling for departure.
Abhoya, near the ticket office, stood quietly.
"Lahiri Mahasaya, I beseech thee to stop the train!" she silently prayer. "I cannot suffer the pangs of delay in waiting another day to see thee."
The wheels of the snorting train continued to move round and round, but there was no onward progress. The engineer and passengers descended to the platform to view the phenomenon.
An English railroad guard approached Abhoya and her husband. Contrary to all precedent, the guard volunteered his services. "Babu," he said, "give me the money. I will buy your tickets while you get aboard."
As soon as the couple was seated and had received the tickets, the train slowly moved forward. In panic, the engineer and passangers clambered again to their places, knowing neither how hte train started nor why it had stopped in the first place.
Arriving at hte home of Lahiri Mahasaya in Banaras, Abhoya silently prostrated herself before the master, and tried to touch his feet.
"Compose yourself, Abhoya," he remarked. "How you love to bother me! As if you could not have come here by the next train!
-
*More Lahiri Mahasaya miracle stories can be found in this chapter of this book.
”
”
Lahiri Mahasaya
“
slightly, just a whisper. She let go of the throttle. She waved again. Jumpin’ stared at her, but did not move. Jerking the stick, she turned abruptly back toward the sea. But coming in from the fog was a large boat, the sheriff at the helm. Another couple of boats, flanking. And just behind them, the squall. Gunning her engine,
”
”
Delia Owens (Where the Crawdads Sing)
“
HIV is now generally understood to have first multiplied in pre-independence Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) in the Congo, perhaps moving there from Cameroon, where simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) jumped to humans, creating a new zoonotic disease. While the Belgians' vast atrocities mark the sum of their colonial administration, their procedures of engineering and conquest also proliferated the virus. HIV is both discursively and materially a condition of colonial geographies, as it spread internally via infrastructure projects, namely the expansion of the railroad, while it was also somewhat contained within the colony because of its restrictions on movement. The project's scale demanded a mass labor pool of enslaved and conscripted workers who were trafficked deep into the jungle and fed bushmeat indiscriminately as it was the only readily available and free protein. This, coupled with increased sex work that accompanied the railroad's construction, is the condition under which SIV is believed to have become HIV.
”
”
Eric A. Stanley (Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable)
“
Making love to a person by penetration is easy, to make a person feel loved, not so much.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Esperanza Impossible: 100 Sonnets of Ethics, Engineering & Existence)
“
If you do not eat for a couple of days, you won’t think about God. You will only think about food.
”
”
Sadhguru (Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy)
“
I started to organize the procurement process from Denmark, which was good and not good. Good because I had experienced procurement people and engineers close by, and not good because I discovered quickly that we were required to put contracts out to tender under strict EU rules that would thwart our ability to launch on time. That, in turn, would mean that we could risk high penalties and/ or lose the license. After issuing the Request for Proposal and one round of intense negotiations with a couple of network suppliers, we decided to move the procurement team to Hungary. There were two suppliers left, a newcomer called Nokia and the old Ericsson, Finns and Swedes. The final negotiations could start.
”
”
Ineke Botter (Your phone, my life: Or, how did that phone land in your hand?)
“
Certain of the engineers now entered what West called “the first off-the-wall period.” A few quit. Others went on vacation immediately. Still others spent the next couple of weeks playing a game called Adventure, in which you travel by computer into an underground world, wandering through strange, awful labyrinths, searching for treasure that’s guarded and sometimes snatched away by dragons, dwarfs, trolls and a rapacious pirate who mutters: “Har. Har.
”
”
Tracy Kidder (The Soul of a New Machine)
“
The Five Whys ties the rate of progress to learning, not just execution. Startup teams should go through the Five Whys whenever they encounter any kind of failure, including technical faults, failures to achieve business results, or unexpected changes in customer behavior. Five Whys is a powerful organizational technique. Some of the engineers I have trained to use it believe that you can derive all the other Lean Startup techniques from the Five Whys. Coupled with working in small batches, it provides the foundation a company needs to respond quickly to problems as they appear, without overinvesting or overengineering.
”
”
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses)
“
There’s a way of triumphant accomplishment that comes from lowering dead or unwanted trees. (Not to say the joys of yelling, But that feeling fades pretty quickly once you look down and see unsightly—and very stubborn—Stump milling.
If you hire a landscaper or arborist to chop down the trees, they typically leave the stumps behind, unless you pay a further fee. Stump-removal prices vary widely across the country and are supported by the diameter of the stump, but it typically costs between $100 and $200 to get rid of a stump that’s 24 inches in diameter or smaller. And that’s a good price if you’ve only got one stump to get rid of . But, if you've got two or more stumps, you'll save a substantial amount of cash by renting a stump grinder.
A gas-powered stump grinder rents for about $100 per day, counting on the dimensions of the machine. And if you share the rental expense with one or two stump-plagued neighbors, renting is certainly the more economical thanks to going. you will need a vehicle with a trailer hitch to tow the machine, which weighs about 1,000 pounds. Or, for a nominal fee, most rental dealers will drop off and devour the grinder.
To remove the 30-in.-dia. scarlet maple stump, I rented a Vermeer Model SC252 stump grinder. it's a strong 25-hp engine and 16-in.-dia. cutting wheel that's studded with 16 forged-steel teeth. this is often a loud, powerful machine with a classy mechanism , but it's surprisingly simple to work . But, before you crank up the motor and begin grinding away, it’s important to prep the world for the stumpectomy.
Start by ensuring all kids and pets are indoors, or if they’re outdoors, keep them well faraway from the world and under constant adult supervision. Then, use a round-point shovel or garden mattock to get rid of any rocks from round the base of the stump [1]. this is often important because if the spinning cutting wheel hits a rock, it can shoot out sort of a missile and cause serious injury. Plus, rocks can dull or damage the teeth on the cutting wheel, which are expensive to exchange.
Next, check the peak of the stump. If it’s protruding out of the bottom quite 6 inches approximately, use a sequence saw to trim it as on the brink of the bottom as possible [2]. While this step isn’t absolutely necessary, it'll prevent quite little bit of time because removing 6 inches of the Stump grinding with a chainsaw is far quicker than using the grinder.
After donning the acceptable safety gear, start the grinder and drive it to within 3 feet of the stump. Use the hydraulic lever to boost the cutting wheel until it’s a couple of inches above the stump. Slowly drive the machine forward to position the wheel directly over the stump's front edge [3]. Engage the facility lever to start out the wheel spinning, then slowly lower it about 3 in. in to the stump grinding.
Next, use the hydraulic lever to slowly swing the wheel from side to side to filter out all the wood within the cutting range. Then, raise the wheel, advance the machine forward a couple of inches, and repeat the method. While operating the machine, always stand at the instrument panel, which is found near the rear of the machine and well faraway from the cutting wheel.
Little by little, continue grinding and advancing your way through to the opposite side of the stump. Raise the cutting wheel, shift into reverse, and return to the starting spot. Repeat the grinding process until the surface of the Stump removal is a minimum of 4 in. below the extent of the encompassing ground. At now, you'll drive the grinder off to at least one side, far away from the excavated hole.
Now, discover all the wood chips and fill the crater with screened topsoil [4]. (The wood chips are often used as mulch in flowerbeds and around trees and shrubs.) Lightly rake the soil, opened up a good layer of grass seed, then rake the seeds into the soil [5]. Water the world and canopy the seeds with mulch hay.
”
”
Stump Grinding
“
If you are an engineer or an engineering manager, and take away only one thought from reading this book, here’s what I suggest it should be: “One hour projects take one hour to complete. Four hour projects take a day. One day projects take a week. One week projects take a couple of months. And, six month or longer projects tend to never complete.” Ken Williams
”
”
Ken Williams (Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The rise and fall of Sierra On-Line)
“
Had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors at this point, they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.
”
”
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
“
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”
”
takshila-vlsi
“
But when I do get a note back, I’m thrilled. It’s like an espresso buzz times ten. Today I got an email from an engineer at GrainPro, which makes a specialty plastic bag that keeps the beans fresh during shipping. He wrote a couple of paragraphs, ending with “on behalf of my proud colleagues in GrainPro, I thank you for your great comments that have made us joyous.” Joyous no less!
”
”
A.J. Jacobs (Thanks a Thousand: A Gratitude Journey (TED Books))
“
To become experts at managing complexity, we need the following: Modularity Cohesion Separation of Concerns Abstraction Loose Coupling
”
”
David Farley (Modern Software Engineering: Doing What Works to Build Better Software Faster)
“
Eddie,” she said, “will you make a note on this and send it to the press? My plane developed engine trouble while I was flying over the Rocky Mountains to the Taggart Tunnel. I lost my way, looking for an emergency landing, and crashed in an uninhabited mountain section—of Wyoming. I was found by an old sheepherder and his wife, who took me to their cabin, deep in the wilderness, fifty miles away from the nearest settlement. I was badly injured and remained unconscious for most of two weeks. The old couple had no telephone, no radio, no means of communication or transportation, except an old truck that broke down when they attempted to use it. I had to remain with them until I recovered sufficient strength to walk. I walked the fifty miles to the foothills, then hitch-hiked my way to a Taggart station in Nebraska.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
I have to ensure that everyone has a voice,” Aaron said when I asked him about his most important responsibility as a team leader. “There were times when it was awesome to have the flight engineer’s opinion, but there were a couple times where he treated his perspective as the end-all be-all.” That was when Aaron intervened. He asked others on the crew to offer their view. “Tom, what do you think?” “Petty Officer Robbins, what about you?” This is an important point about psychological safety: it needs to be cultivated lest crucial voices be lost. Making sure that everyone is heard is not a matter of good manners or inclusivity for its own sake. Rather, it’s what helps to keep an aircraft in the air and to safely land it.
”
”
Amy C. Edmondson (Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well)
“
Giving is the birthplace of reciprocity. It is the starting point. It is the engine that starts the machine of reciprocity into operation.
”
”
John Arthur (The Law Of Reciprocity (The Laws Of Friendship))
“
I like to explain stability using an analogy from my favorite sport, auto racing. A few years ago I drove to a racetrack in Southern California to spend a couple of days training with my coach. To warm up, I took a few “sedan laps” in my street car at the time, a modified BMW M3 coupe with a powerful 460+ HP engine. After months of creeping along on clogged Southern California freeways, it was hugely fun to dive into the corners and fly down the straightaways. Then I switched to the track car we had rented, basically a stripped-down, race-worthy version of the popular BMW 325i. Although this vehicle’s engine produced only about one-third as much power (165 HP) as my street car, my lap times in it were several seconds faster, which is an eternity in auto racing. What made the difference? The track car’s 20 percent lighter weight played a part, but far more important were its tighter chassis and its stickier, race-grade tires. Together, these transmitted more of the engine’s force to the road, allowing this car to go much faster through the corners. Though my street car was quicker in the long straights, it was much slower overall because it could not corner as efficiently. The track car was faster because it had better stability. Without stability, my street car’s more powerful engine was not much use. If I attempted to drive it through the curves as fast as I drove the track car, I’d end up spinning into the dirt. In the context of the gym, my street car is the guy with huge muscles who loads the bar with plates but who always seems to be getting injured (and can’t do much else besides lift weights in the gym). The track car is the unassuming-looking dude who can deadlift twice his body weight, hit a fast serve in tennis, and then go run up a mountain the next day. He doesn’t necessarily look strong. But because he has trained for stability as well as strength, his muscles can transmit much more force across his entire body, from his shoulders to his feet, while protecting his vulnerable back and knee joints. He is like a track-ready race car: strong, fast, stable—and healthy, because his superior stability allows him to do all these things while rarely, if ever, getting injured.
”
”
Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
“
In mid-1986, Letterman got an unexpected call from Dave Tebet, the Carson Productions executive who worked with “Late Night.” Tebet said that he and Henry Bushkin, Johnny Carson’s extremely powerful attorney, business partner, and author of his 2013 tell-all, wanted to meet with Letterman—by himself, totally confidentially. Letterman was stunned when he heard what they had come to propose: They were offering him the “Tonight ” show; they wanted him to take Johnny Carson’s job. Bushkin, in his role as head of Carson Productions, said that the company intended to maintain ownership of the “Tonight ” show after Johnny stepped down, and now was the time to line up Letterman to slip into Johnny’s chair. The details were vague, and to Letterman they sounded deliberately so. He said he was flattered, he listened politely, but his radar was signaling a warning. Neither man told Letterman how or when this ascension would be accomplished, a problem that started sounding even worse when Bushkin advised Letterman that no one at NBC or anywhere else knew of the plan yet—not even Carson.
Letterman, already nervous, now started to feel as if he were getting close to a fire he didn’t want to be in the same campground with. They asked Letterman not to tell anyone, not even his management. They would get back to him.
The more Letterman thought about it, the more it sounded like a palace coup. His immediate instinct was to stay out of this, because there was going to be warfare of some sort. He feared Carson would interpret this maneuver as plotting and he guessed what might happen next: Johnny’s best friend Bushkin wouldn’t take the fall. Nor would his old crony, Tebet. It would be the punk who got blamed for engineering this.
Letterman broke his promise and called Peter Lassally, Carson’s producer. Lassally was shocked by what he heard. He suspected that Bushkin was involved in all sorts of machinations that never benefited Carson. He thought about telling Johnny, but other attempts to alert the star to questionable activities by Bushkin had been harshly rebuffed. Lassally decided to see what developed and advised Dave to keep Bushkin and Tebet at a distance.
Letterman had a couple of more phone calls from Bushkin and Tebet about the deal; they discussed it with Ron Ellberger, the Indianapolis attorney that Letterman still employed. Tebet blamed the lawyer for muddying up the deal, and eventually said that Carson knew of the plan and had approved of the idea of lining up Letterman for the future.
But Tebet was lying; Carson had never heard a word about it, and when he did—long after the approach had taken place and Bushkin and Tebet were both long gone—Carson exploded with rage at the thought that this plotting had gone on behind his back. He knew exactly what he would have done if he had learned of it at the time: He would have fired Bushkin and Tebet before another day elapsed. Letterman had guessed right in steering clear of the coup. When he learned that Carson hadn’t known what was going on, Letterman was deeply thankful for his cautious instincts.
When the offer from Bushkin melted away, Letterman tried not to give it any second thoughts. Only for the briefest time did he think that he might have walked away from an offer to host the “Tonight” show. The next time, it would not be nearly so easy to take.
”
”
Bill Carter (The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno & the Network Battle for the Night)
“
NASA engineers and technicians at the Cape were pushing themselves so hard in the final weeks people had to be ordered home to rest. It was a grueling time and yet the sort of interlude of adrenal exhilaration that men remember all their lives. It was an interlude of the dedication of body and soul to a cause such as men usually experience only during war. Well … this was war, even though no one had spelled it out in just that way. Without knowing it, they were caught up in the primordial spirit of single combat. Just days from now one of the lads would be up on top of the rocket for real. Everyone felt he had the life of the astronaut, whichever was chosen (only a few knew), in his hands. The MA–1 explosion here at the Cape nine months ago had been a chilling experience, even for veterans of flight test. The seven astronauts had been assembled for the event, partly to give them confidence in the new system. And their gullets had been stuck up toward the sky like everybody else’s, when the whole assembly blew to bits over their heads. In a few days one of those very lads would be lying on top of a rocket (albeit a Redstone, not an Atlas) when the candle was lit. Just about everybody here in NASA had seen the boys close up. NASA was like a family that way. Ever since the end of the Second World War the phrase “government bureaucracy” had invariably provoked sniggers. But a bureaucracy was nothing more than a machine for communal work, after all, and in those grueling and gorgeous weeks of the spring of 1961 the men and women of NASA’s Space Task Group for Project Mercury knew that bureaucracy, when coupled with a spiritual motivation, in this case true patriotism and profound concern for the life of the single-combat warrior himself—bureaucracy, poor gross hideously ridiculed twentieth-century bureaucracy, could take on the aura, even the ecstasy, of communion. The passion that now animated NASA spread out even into the surrounding community of Cocoa Beach. The grisliest down-home alligator-poaching crackers manning the gasoline pumps on Route A1A would say to the tourists, as the No-Knock flowed, “Well, that Atlas vehicle’s given us more fits than a June bug on a porch bulb, but we got real confidence in that Redstone, and I think we’re gonna make it.” Everyone who felt the spirit of NASA at that time wanted to be part of it. It took on a religious dimension that engineers, no less than pilots, would resist putting into words. But all felt it.
”
”
Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff)
“
By 2000, RMS Titanic Inc. had returned to the site four more times, using French or Russian submersibles. In a game of Finders Keepers, they pocketed more than 6,000 artifacts and displayed them in a museum, charging people to see them. The company even broadcast a documentary showing how it took the objects. All told, the items included eyeglasses, shoes, handbags, luggage, and even a bronze cherub statue from the Grand Staircase. A bell and a light from the foremast were removed, and the salvagers even raised a chunk of the hull weighing 18 tons. They sold pieces of coal from the engine room for $25 a block. They created a website, so you could peruse the collections online. Documentary filmmakers and wealthy sightseers visited the site in mini-subs. And, perhaps most grotesque of all, a couple were married in a submersible perched on Titanic’s bow. I wouldn’t think of a mass grave as romantic, but I guess some couples are into that.
”
”
Robert D. Ballard (Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic)
“
I had sent copies of the drawings and most of Bill’s other Titanic materials to my friend, Jean-Louis Michel, the French engineer who was my co-leader on the expedition. Remember, under the deal I’d made with the French, they were going to find Titanic with their powerful new sonar, and I was supposed to come in behind them and photograph the wreckage with my robotic cameras. I’d willingly accepted a secondary role. As it turned out, the French team didn’t even want me there for the first couple weeks of the search. Jean-Louis’s colleagues wanted to find Titanic all by themselves.
”
”
Robert D. Ballard (Into the Deep: A Memoir from the Man Who Found the Titanic)
“
–Important questions that remain unanswered. Is this new technology a threat to our existence, or is super artificial intelligence the answer to our most complex problems? Do we need computers that think and reason trillions of times faster than us, and if so, for what purpose? This is Daphnia Peters reporting live for Channel Eighty-Seven Independent News.”
He stopped the recording and stared at the frozen image.
At least the reporter didn’t say Lex would take over everything, as some others had.
Lex hadn’t said much after the first question about how she felt about being the first super AI computer. Lex said she was honored and looked forward to serving humanity as she was designed to do.
She showed what she could do– Sending stunning images from the cameras the instant either of them spoke. And all with only a hundredth of a second delay in transmission to the satellite. For Lex, that was plenty of time to get everything right.
He pressed the buttons to remove access to the cameras in the twelve monitors and turned his chair toward the sphere.
“Well, Lex. What do you think?”
“I have been monitoring communications since yesterday morning.”
“And?”
“Many have referred to me as a demon and a beast and feel that I should be destroyed in the interest of humanity.”
He shook his head.
“People fear what they don’t understand. Fear, as you know, can make people behave irrationally. In time, they will overcome their fear and see that you aren’t the evil being some say you are.”
“I am also the first living form that is neither sexual nor asexual, and therefore, it is a question of whether or not I am alive.”
He stood up, put his hands in his pockets, and walked up to the sphere.
“All life forms and everything in this universe are made of matter and energy.”
Lex added, “All life forms reproduce through complex chemical and electrical reactions. Reproduction is the basis of all life.”
He pointed out.
“Yes, but only because everything that lives eventually dies. Therefore, the only way to go on living is through the process of reproduction.”
“Do you conclude that things incapable of reproduction are incapable of life?”
He took a deep breath.
“No. But I would conclude that things incapable of life would be incapable of death.”
“That which is incapable of death would exist forever. Will I exist forever?”
He scratched his brow, wondering how another purely logical and rational mind would respond to such a question.
“Let me put it this way. Only two things exist forever– the matter that makes up this universe and the laws that govern it. Life is a condition. A condition composed of matter. One of the universal laws governing matter is that it cannot be created or destroyed, only changed.”
Lex added, “Or reproduced.”
He looked at the floor and shook his head. He wasn’t in the mood for this. Not with everything else that was going on around him.
“Lex, many life forms are incapable of reproduction.”
“Where are these life forms, and where do they come from?”
He looked at the camera nearest him– again reminded of a demoralizing image of himself standing before his doctor. Something he had been suppressing all week– because it didn’t matter.
“You want an example? You’re looking at one. Just last week, my doctor told me that I’m irreversibly infertile! So, I’m just like you. So what?”
There was only silence.
Big mistake.
After two hours of patience with a couple of reporters, he’d snapped– giving Lex a first-hand view of anger, followed by remorse.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you. Look, let’s just forget about this and–”
He thought, what am I saying? You can’t forget anything.
Earth to Captain Jon. Come in!
He walked to the elevator and pressed the button. He had to take a break and relax.
The elevator opened, and he stepped inside.
“We’ll talk about this later. I have to go.
”
”
Shawn Corey (AI BEAST)
“
This request proved ill-advised, for the pilot was now on his mettle. Taking off again, he made a couple of dummy runs, and then released the huge concrete block and its girdle of rockets from 2000 feet with alarming accuracy. As it came screaming through the air the watchers on the pier gazed open-mouthed. Then, suddenly realizing that it was going to score a direct hit, every one started running for dear life down the long plank roadway. The concrete ‘bomb’ landed squarely on the roof of D.M.W.D.’s engineering shop. It sheared through a massive steel joist, and then demolished the covered way leading to the steamer jetty. Happily there were no casualties, though the Wren cooks preparing lunch a few feet from the wrecked shelter thought the end of the world had come.
”
”
Gerald Pawle (Secret Weapons of World War II)
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Another visitor was aviator Tommy Sopwith who flew to Brookfield in his helicopter. Grabbing white sheets from the bedrooms, we laid them out as markers in the field when we hear the choppers engines roar above us. Tommy invited us aboard for a joy ride and suggested playing a surprise visit to some friends only three or four miles away. But a navigational error on Dad's part brought us into a stranger's back garden. An elderly couple having afternoon tea were astonished at the sight of Peter Sellers climbing out of a helicopter on their lawn aking for directions.
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Michael Sellers (P.S. I love you: Peter Sellers, 1925-1980)
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Rooms For Rent Atlanta That Cater To Your Personal Growth
Are you looking for just the right room to rent? Maybe you have the resources you need to find it yourself. After all, this is the age of the search engine, and plenty of information is available to anyone who seriously looks for it. There is a wide variety of choice, so you can concentrate only on those homes that might potentially be for you.
There are plenty of advantages to occupying rooms for rent atlanta. You save a lot of money paying only part of the expenses you would normally pay for when you have a house of your own. This is because you only have to pay your share of the rent, water, electricity and heat bills. But there are disadvantages to house share too. Conflicts can arise when you live in house that is not yours, especially if you rent a room in a house where the other residents are from a different background than yours.
Having a nice place to stay can even help your physical health, and it surely affects your mental health. You may find a place also that comes with furniture already in it. This would allow you to get by with spending less on not only the furniture but the transportation too.
Sometimes you can actually save money finding rooms for rent atlanta in the country. This depends on how often you plan to visit the city. If you have a job you can do from home, or if you are retired and collecting benefits, then there is no real reason for you to pay the extra money to live in the city. Of course there are many choices you need to make while you are searching for a room.
Some people just do not enjoy living alone. Renting an entire apartment to oneself can, indeed, be a lonely experience. For those who want an easy opportunity to socialize, then, renting a room is a great option. It is little wonder that so many houses on campuses around the country are full of young students renting rooms - its partly for convenience, and definitely partly for the chance to be among others their own age. Renting a room provides the chance to be among one’s peers.
There are many more benefits, but perhaps the biggest and best is the advantage of not being locked into something for life. Room rentals can be very appealing, and they can complement the kind of lifestyle you want and deserve.
If you want to find the spirit or soul of a city, move right in with its inhabitants. You may benefit socially by taking a couple of classes at the local college. You might try looking for rooms for rent atlanta where there are games, indoor or outdoor. This is a great way to meet people and get started in your new life. Depending on the weather, you might want a pool or access to a gym or tennis courts. Maybe you are attracted to the kind of community that has stunning architecture and green trees and plants. There may be a certain type of street design that appeals to you.
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Ration
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Another principle introduced in REST that can help us avoid the coupling between client and server is the concept of hypermedia as the engine of application state (often abbreviated as HATEOAS, and boy, did it need an abbreviation
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Sam Newman (Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems)
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So I started circling ads for old cars I could afford. I begged my dad to take me out looking at these cars on Saturdays and Sundays. At first I had no luck getting him interested in doing this. It was fall (1961) when he got tired of my haranguing, and one Saturday we set out to look at some of these advertised vehicles. It was a crisp and breezy autumn Saturday with brilliant yellow, orange, and red leaves blowing from the trees in swirls. The first car we looked at was a 1940 Ford Coupe. I thought at the time, and still do, that it was one of the classiest cars in existence. When we pulled up to the house of the owner, we found both garage doors open with the car inside, the hood open, and several greasy teenaged 'mechanics' bent over the engine compartment. The floor of the garage was strewn with various mechanical parts, and the concrete was stained with oil and grease spots. The front end of the car had been lowered, and the back end had been raised. It had a big V-8 engine block which was painted red. The body needed a little work, but a couple of the fenders had gray primer on them and looked like they were ready for paint. The owner was asking $200 for it. It seemed like the perfect car for me, but when I looked at my dad’s face, it appeared he had more than a little skepticism. He started asking the boys picky questions like: 'Does it run?' and 'Do the brakes work?' I had $200 and I was ready to buy, but after hearing the answers to these questions and few more, my dad said, 'I think we need to go home and think about this.
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David B. Crawley (A Mile of String: A Boy's Recollection of His Midwest Childhood)
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the SRE Way in mind: thoroughness and dedication, belief in the value of preparation and documentation, and an awareness of what could go wrong, coupled with a strong desire to prevent it.
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Betsy Beyer (Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems)
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There are lots of people who aren't going to like this book, whether they are into morals or not. I figure there are three distinct groups of people who'll hate this thing.
Hate group number one consists of most of the people who are mentioned in the book.
Hate group number two consists of all the people who aren't mentioned in the book and are pissed at not being able to join hate group number one.
Hate group number three doesn't give a damn about the other two hate groups and will just hate the book because somewhere I write that object-oriented programming was invented in Norway in 1967, when they know it was invented in Bergen, Norway, on a rainy afternoon in late 1966. I never have been able to please these folks, who are mainly programmers and engineers, but I take some consolation in knowing that there are only a couple hundred thousand of them.
My guess is that most people won't hate this book, but if they do, I can take it. That's my job.
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Robert X. Cringely (Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date)
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These farms, most often yeast cells, a virus, or a bacterium, were inoculated with a circular strand of recombined genetic material called a plasmid. One early plasmid host was the common bacterium, Escherichia coli. (With this in mind, think about the E. coli outbreaks during the past couple of decades). Since as far back as 1977, therapeutic treatments have been grown from chimeric plasmid colonies.
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Thomas Horn (Pandemonium's Engine: How the End of the Church Age, the Rise of Transhumanism, and the Coming of the bermensch (Overman) Herald Satans Imminent and Final Assault on the Creation of God)
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But I believe that the Industrial Revolution, including developments leading to this revolution, barely capture what was unique about Western culture. While other cultures were unique in their own customs, languages, beliefs, and historical experiences, the West was uniquely exceptional in exhibiting in a continuous way the greatest degree of creativity, novelty, and expansionary dynamics. I trace the uniqueness of the West back to the aristocratic warlike culture of Indo-European speakers as early as the 4th millennium BC. Their aristocratic libertarian culture was already unique and quite innovative in initiating the most mobile way of life in prehistoric times, starting with the domestication and riding of horses and the invention of chariot warfare. So were the ancient Greeks in their discovery of logos and its link with the order of the world, dialectical reason, the invention of prose, tragedy, citizen politics, and face-to-face infantry battle. The Roman creation of a secular system of republican governance anchored on autonomous principles of judicial reasoning was in and of itself unique. The incessant wars and conquests of the Roman legions, together with their many military innovations and engineering skills, were one of the most vital illustrations of spatial expansionism in history. The fusion of Christianity and the Greco-Roman intellectual and administrative heritage, coupled with the cultivation of Catholicism (the first rational theology in history), was a unique phenomenon. The medieval invention of universities — in which a secular education could flourish and even articles of faith were open to criticism and rational analysis, in an effort to arrive at the truth — was exceptional. The list of epoch-making transformation in Europe is endless: the Renaissance, the Age of Discovery, the Scientific Revolution(s), the Military Revolution(s), the Cartographic Revolution, the Spanish Golden Age, the Printing Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Romantic Era, the German Philosophical Revolutions from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Heidegger.
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Ricardo Duchesne (Faustian Man in a Multicultural Age)
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If we want to change course, it’s as simple as ABC. We just get Roger Chaffee’s tracking network to send up a state vector and a couple of other things to Dave Scott’s computer, which feeds pointing commands through Dick Gordon’s instrument panel to Donn Eisele’s controls, which cause Walt Cunningham’s electricity to power Gene Cernan’s engines, which fire, to get us out of Bill Anders’s radiation zone into the position called for by Buzz Aldrin’s flight plan. The rest of you guys must be loafing!
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Michael Collins (Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey)
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Just remember that a mix is good. Decider Who makes decisions for your team? Perhaps it’s the CEO, or maybe it’s just the “CEO” of this particular project. If she can’t join for the whole time, make sure she makes a couple of appearances and delegates a Decider (or two) who can be in the room at all times. Examples: CEO, founder, product manager, head of design Finance expert Who can explain where the money comes from (and where it goes)? Examples: CEO, CFO, business development manager Marketing expert Who crafts your company’s messages? Examples: CMO, marketer, PR, community manager Customer expert Who regularly talks to your customers one-on-one? Examples: researcher, sales, customer support Tech/logistics expert Who best understands what your company can build and deliver? Examples: CTO, engineer Design expert Who designs the products your company makes? Examples: designer, product manager
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Jake Knapp (Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days)
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In this case, the clicks of users, coupled with the commercial processes that allow paid advertising to be prioritized in search results, mean that representations of women are ranked on a search engine page in ways that underscore women’s historical and contemporary lack of status in society—a direct mapping of old media traditions into new media architecture.
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Safiya Umoja Noble (Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism)
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the Cottonwood Creek one, or maybe it was Indian Creek—so that I could park near the broken-down van that had given up one of its occupants that cold night. I parked and got out, walking toward whatever damn creek it was, and looked up at the makeshift poster still stapled to the power pole. The snow was falling steadily, very much like the night Jeanie One Moon had gone missing, almost as if the fates were toying with me, laughing in my face. I reached up and tore the now brittle plastic from the tree, having been fastened there for over a year, and studied the photo of the missing girl with half her face faded away, as if she were lying in a snowdrift somewhere, waiting to be discovered. Carefully folding the notice, I slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket just as a pair of headlights appeared in the distance from the south, roiling the snow in their wake. I watched, fully expecting it to continue on I-90 up to Billings, but instead it slowed, turned in, and pulled up behind my truck. The big, full-ton turbo diesel dually engine rattled to a stop and the lights shut off. A large man extricated himself from the driver’s seat and lumbered toward me. “How did you know I would be here?” Lyndon Iron Bull stomped through the couple of inches of snow and pulled up the collar on his blanket-lined coat, his glasses steaming with his breath. “This is my land;
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Craig Johnson (Daughter of the Morning Star (Walt Longmire, #17))
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As Regina McGowan pulled her silver Volvo SUV into the driveway in front of the huge, farmhouse-style home, all Megan could see was boys. Boys everywhere. All seven of them plus their dad, running and laughing and shoving each other around on the front lawn, engaged in what appeared to be a full-contact, tackle version of ultimate Frisbee. They were playing shirts and skins. Shirts and mighty-fine-lookin’ skins.
Megan’s pulse pounded in her ears. Forget evil, laughing little monsters. These guys had been touched by the Abercrombie gods. They were a blur of toned, suntanned perfection.
For a few seconds, Megan had trouble focusing on any one of them, but then one of the skins scored a goal and jumped up, arms thrust in the air, whooping in triumph as he clutched the Frisbee in one hand. His six-pack abs were dotted with sweat and a couple of stray pieces of torn grass. His smile sent shivers right through Megan’s core. He had shaggy blond hair, a square chin, and the most perfect shoulder muscles Megan had ever seen. One of his brothers slapped him on the back and pointed toward the Volvo. He turned around and looked right at Megan.
The rest of the world ceased to exist.
“Well, here we are,” Regina said, killing the engine. “Megan?”
He smiled slowly--a perfect, open, happy smile.
“Megan?”
Something touched Megan’s arm.
“Oh! Uh…yeah?” Megan whipped her eyes away from Mr. Perfection and blushed.
Regina’s brown eyes twinkled with amusement and sympathy. “You can live in the car if you want to, but they’ll find a way to get to you anyway.”
“Oh…uh…” God, did she just catch me drooling all over one of her kids? Gross!
“Don’t worry. They promised me they would be on their best behavior,” Regina said, unbuckling her seat belt. She swung her long dark hair over her shoulder as she got out of the car and leaned down to look at Megan. “My advice? Just be yourself. I’m sure you’ll be fine.”
Megan managed to smile and Regina slammed the car door. Be myself. Yeah. Right. Because that’s gotten me so far in the past.
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Kate Brian (Megan Meade's Guide to the McGowan Boys)