Equipment Operator Quotes

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Inability to accept the mystic experience is more than an intellectual handicap. Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination. For in a civilization equipped with immense technological power, the sense of alienation between man and nature leads to the use of technology in a hostile spirit—-to the “conquest” of nature instead of intelligent co-operation with nature.
Alan W. Watts
When it’s over, all the equipment used is destroyed, even your clothing. Once it’s over every operator wipes his cranial hard drive clean of every moment of the mission, and you collectively go into blackout mode.
John M. Vermillion (Awful Reckoning: A Cade Chase and Simon Pack Novel)
Ours was now a country in which the cost of replacing a broken machine with a newer model was typically lower than the cost of having it fixed by an expert, which itself was typically lower than the cost of sourcing the parts and figuring out how to fix it yourself. This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
What also happened, however, was that another DSRV-equipped submarine put to sea occasionally, except that this DSRV really was a saturation diving chamber designed to look like a DSRV. The job of these guys was no more and no less than to retrieve pieces of Soviet missile warheads from the ocean bottom at the splash zone of their test site in the Sea of Okhotsk, and to tap into the Soviet underwater communications cables snaking along the bottom through that area.
Robert G. Williscroft (Operation Ivy Bells)
You would never know by looking at them, but Hope’s lips are the softest, juiciest, most kissable lips ever. She thinks there’s nothing special, just like she thinks that most of her outstanding features are standard operating equipment, but someday, Doug will tell her—hers are the lips men kill for. Hope’s smell and her body are familiar and unfamiliar at once—like a whisper or a dream. Her back is more muscular, her arms thinner than he remembers. None of it matters. He loved her then and he loves her now.
Joan Gelfand (Extreme)
A digital computer is essentially a huge army of clerks, equipped with rule books, pencil and paper, all stupid and entirely without initiative, but able to follow millions of precisely defined operations. The difficulty lies in handing over the rule book.
Christopher W. Alexander
the wilderness should be preserved for political reasons. We may need it someday not only as a refuge from excessive industrialism but also as a refuge from authoritarian government, from political oppression. Grand Canyon, Big Bend, Yellowstone, and the High Sierras may be required to function as bases for guerrilla warfare against tyranny...The value of wilderness, on the other hand, as a base for resistance to centralized domination is demonstrated by recent history. In Budapest and Santo Domingo, for example, popular revolts were easily and quickly crushed because an urbanized environment gives the advantage to the power with technological equipment. But in Cuba, Algeria, and Vietnam the revolutionaries, operating in mountain, desert, and jungle hinterlands with the active or tacit support of a thinly dispersed population, have been able to overcome or at least fight to a draw official establishment forces equipped with all of the terrible weapons of twentieth century militarism.
Edward Abbey
Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.
Stacy Schiff (Cleopatra)
To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
Historically, shamans have always been part of the society where they lived, taking care of its problems, whenever they were allowed to operate. For centuries shamanic cultures have been persecuted in the western world until they were almost entirely exterminated. They have managed to survive in secrecy or through complex esoteric camouflage. Nowadays there seems to be more freedom and this ancient knowledge can re-emerge and be used in our own cultural context and not relegated somewhere else. The world needs shamans able to function on the roads, among the electronic equipment and engines, in the squares and markets of our contemporary society.
Franco Santoro (Astroshamanism: A Journey into the Inner Universe (1))
In a real road-construction situation, I would never get out of my car when traffic is backed up, walk over to the foreman of the crew, and ask if I can help make the road so that it all moves more quickly. Yet I found myself doing just that with God in my past when He was trying to repair me. Construction sites have caution cones and broken pavement and heavy equipment I'm not qualified to operate. I must have looked just as out of place trying to make repairs on myself all those years. When I put my trust in Him and have patience in Him as the foreman of my life--the One who is repairing a broken relationship with my mom, building me a stronger and healthier body and assembling healthier friendships and a marriage with a solid foundation--I live a life with much fewer obstructions on my ultimate commute to becoming fearless. And I trust that God has made the plans to finish the good work He has already begun. He will continue constructing the life He knows I'm meant to lead as I travel freely in my journey of "becoming.
Michelle Aguilar (Becoming Fearless: My Ongoing Journey of Learning to Trust God)
Gray clouds were charging across tissues of white, which stretched and shredded and tore slowly, until through their final layers there gleamed a hint of the disappearing blue. Summer was retreating. The wind roared, the trees groaned, yet the noise seemed insufficient for those vast operations in heaven. The weather was breaking up, breaking, broken, and it is a sense of the fit rather than of the supernatural that equips such crises with the salvos of angelic artillery.
E.M. Forster
Where else short of colonizing another planet could they hide the required plant, machinery and equipment – and the manpower to operate it – away from the prying eyes of Joe Citizen, investigative journalists and inquisitive everyday people like us?
James Morcan (Underground Bases (The Underground Knowledge Series, #7))
The vast majority of funding in support of women appears to have been directed toward the training of women as participants in political, civil, and economic processes. This approach to women's empowerment is based on two assumptions. The first is that Iraqi women need training to bring them into the public sphere. . . . The second is that women, if equipped with appropriate skills, merely need encouragement to participate and flourish in public life. Such an approach does not consider the social and political context in which women operate and that undoubtedly affects their ability to participate.
Nadje Al-Ali (What Kind of Liberation?: Women and the Occupation of Iraq)
EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know. The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.
Bret Anthony Johnston
Each half of the arch is made from several sections. Enormous jacks, whose only prior job was raising the sunken Kursk submarine in 2001, were used to lift each stage higher and higher until it reached its full height of 110 meters. Inside are remotely-operated heavy-duty overhead cranes, to be used for moving people and equipment.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
In a new plant for even established processes or products, there will probably be a shake-down period of six to eight weeks that will prove rather expensive. It takes this long to get the equipment adjusted to the required operating efficiency and to weed out the inevitable "bugs" that seem to occur in breaking in modern intricate machinery.
Philip A. Fisher (Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings (Wiley Investment Classics Book 6))
the Corps have now developed a hybrid bee. It is not a genetic splice, my Friends. No: it is a greater abomination! Bees are seized while still in larval form, and micro-mechanical systems are inserted into them. Tissue grows around the insert, and when the full adult or “imago” emerges, it is a bee cyborg spy controllable by a CorpSeCorps operator, equipped to transmit, and thus to betray.
Margaret Atwood (The Year of the Flood (MaddAddam, #2))
It was history’s first co-operative international scientific venture, and almost everywhere it ran into problems. Many observers were waylaid by war, sickness or shipwreck. Others made their destinations but opened their crates to find equipment broken or warped by tropical heat. Once again the French seemed fated to provide the most memorably unlucky participants. Jean Chappe spent months travelling to Siberia by coach, boat and sleigh, nursing his delicate instruments over every perilous bump, only to find the last vital stretch blocked by swollen rivers, the result of unusually heavy spring rains, which the locals were swift to blame on him after they saw him pointing strange instruments at the sky. Chappe managed to escape with his life, but with no useful measurements. Unluckier
Bill Bryson (A Short History of Nearly Everything)
Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.
Vernor Vinge (A Deepness in the Sky (Zones of Thought, #2))
The corridors looked different in this wing. It had fewer doors and seemed more utilitarian, like it’d been built for equipment or supplies. Sure enough, the first door she reached had a sign reading PHYSICAL PLANT OPERATIONS: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Since anyone authorized to open the door had been dead for at least a couple hundred years, she figured there was no harm in sneaking a peek. She jiggled the handle. It was locked. Clarke
Kass Morgan (Homecoming (The Hundred, #3))
It’s never enough,” he repeated, “but it is so much more than we had before. Without the Millennium project there would be no drugs, there would be no surgical equipment, there would be no way to operate the generator—I would be redundant most of the time. They say funding will continue, but someday it will stop, and when the funding stops, most likely everything we have done will be put to waste. I do not see how we are going to continue after they have left.
Nina Munk (The Idealist: Jeffrey Sachs and the Quest to End Poverty)
And he carefully stored what he considered the most vital piece of equipment: a satellite phone with solar-powered batteries, which would allow the men not only to record short audio dispatches but also to check in every day with an ALE operator and report their coordinates and medical condition. If the team failed to communicate for two consecutive days, ALE would dispatch a search-and-rescue plane—what Worsley called “the most expensive taxi ride in the world.
David Grann (The White Darkness)
We know of course that the whole point is, the saints are not gods and never have been gods; even if they have often moved into temples which old pagan gods have had to evacuate, and even if they have often been smeared over with a little ancient paganism, the most ignorant and simple Catholics have always known that they are the very opposite of gods, men—that is, creatures, not creators. Even the most free-handed miracle workers among the saints do not operate by powers of their own, but by virtue of their association with God who created them and us all. And if popular legend often has a tendency to transform them, making it appear that they were distinguished from birth in a particular way, that from the very first they were equipped with extraordinary and unconventional qualities, this may be due to an unconscious attempt to provide an excuse for us ordinary people, who would be glad to evade the troublesome duty of becoming saints.
Sigrid Undset (Stages on the Road)
This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
In Panama, I knew Noriega himself was the object of controversy. The "arms deal" was the final stage of Operation Carrier Pigeon where the planes were to wait in Saudi Arabia until all bank transactions were cleared and the load was ready for disbursement. Saudi Arabian King Fahd would then fund the Contras via Noriega for Reagan after all evidences had been properly covered up -- just as he had done in Afghanistan. After the shipment, there would be no further deals through Noriega involving Fahd, because Noriega could no longer be trusted. Besides, Fahd had increased diplomatic relations with Mexico for covert operations, and Iran-Contra was just beginning to heat up. Noriega did not seem to be upset by the news of losing Saudi Arabian business, although he was somber and took some time to respond. His translator was working over some complex computer equipment after I delivered the message. I left Noriega's yacht with John and a brief message for Dick Cheney at the Pentagon.
Cathy O'Brien (TRANCE Formation of America: True life story of a mind control slave)
Without denying that adaptation may be one of God's methods of operation, it may be definitely said, that an intelligent Master of the universe, in which we believe, has the power to prepare an earth to fit the needs of man; or fit man to meet the conditions of earth. If He were not able to do so, He would be inferior to His creatures who build houses for human comfort, and equip them with heating, freezing, and many other devices. The argument for adaptation, standing alone, requires chance as a creative force. That we do not and cannot believe.
John A. Widtsoe (An Understandable Religion)
The Pentagon, for its part, has given away military intelligence and millions of dollars in firepower to state and local agencies willing to make the rhetorical war a literal one. Almost immediately after the federal dollars began to flow, law enforcement agencies across the country began to compete for funding, equipment, and training. By the late 1990s, the overwhelming majority of state and local police forces in the country had availed themselves of the newly available resources and added a significant military component to buttress their drug-war operations.
Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness)
This was, he told the King, a femfatalatron, an erotifying device stochastic, elastic and orgiastic, and with plenty of feedback; whoever was placed inside the apparatus instantaneously experienced all the charms, lures, wiles, winks and witchery of all the fairer sex in the Universe at once. The femfatalatron operated on a power of forty megamors, with a maximum attainable efficiency—given a constant concupiscence coefficient—of ninety-six percent, while the system's libidinous lubricity, measured of course in kilocupids, produced up to six units for every remote-control caress. This marvelous mechanism, moreover, was equipped with reversible ardor dampers, omnidirectional consummation amplifiers, absorption philters, paphian peripherals, and "first-sight" flip-flop circuits, since Trurl held here to the position of Dr. Yentzicus, creator of the famous oculo-oscular feel theory. There were also all sorts of auxiliary components, like a high-frequency titillizer, an alternating tantalator, plus an entire set of lecherons and debaucheraries; on the outside, in a special glass case, were enormous dials, on which one could carefully follow the course of the whole decaptivation process. Statistical analysis revealed that the femfatalatron gave positive, permanent results in ninety-eight cases of unrequited amatorial superfixation out of a hundred.
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
If the operating equipment of the 21st century is a portable device, this means the modern factory is not a place at all. It is the day itself. The computer age has liberated the tools of productivity from the office. Most knowledge workers, whose laptops and smartphones are portable all-purpose media-making machines, can theoretically be as productive at 2 p.m. in the main office as at 2 a.m. in a Tokyo WeWork or at midnight on the couch.29 Compared to generations prior, control over your time has diminished. And since controlling your time is such a key happiness influencer, we shouldn’t be surprised that people don’t feel much happier even though we are, on average, richer than ever.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels.
Annie Jacobsen (Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America)
The goal of Combined Intelligence Objectives Subcommittee was to investigate all things related to German science. Target types ran the gamut: radar, missiles, aircraft, medicine, bombs and fuses, chemical and biological weapons labs. And while CIOS remained an official joint venture, there were other groups in the mix, with competing interests at hand. Running parallel to CIOS operations were dozens of secret intelligence-gathering operations, mostly American. The Pentagon’s Special Mission V-2 was but one example. By late March 1945, Colonel Trichel, chief of U.S. Army Ordnance, Rocket Branch, had dispatched his team to Europe. Likewise, U.S. Naval Technical Intelligence had officers in Paris preparing for its own highly classified hunt for any intelligence regarding the Henschel Hs 293, a guided missile developed by the Nazis and designed to sink or damage enemy ships. The U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) were still heavily engaged in strategic bombing campaigns, but a small group from Wright Field, near Dayton, Ohio, was laying plans to locate and capture Luftwaffe equipment and engineers. Spearheading Top Secret missions for British intelligence was a group of commandos called 30 Assault Unit, led by Ian Fleming, the personal assistant to the director of British naval intelligence and future author of the James Bond novels. Sometimes, the members of these parallel missions worked in consort with CIOS officers in the field.
Annie Jacobsen (Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America)
The pistol had been one hell of a find, because it hadn't quite been what she'd thought it was at first blush. Not simply the S&W Mk 39, but rather a modified version of the same, the Mk 22 Mod 0, also called the "hush puppy". It was Vietnam-era, not the most reliable gun in the world, but wonderfully silent, not only equipped with a silencer to eliminate the sound of gunfire, but also with a slide lock, to keep the actual mechanical operation of the gun quiet as well. She'd test-fired the gun at the market before purchasing, and been stunned that it still worked. The Uzbek vendor had offered to sell it to her cheap. "It's too quiet," he'd explained. "No one wants it." Chace shut her eyes, half smiling at the memory.
Greg Rucka (Private Wars (Queen & Country, #2))
If Marzulli's anatomical observation of the elongated skulls of the Paracas were right in that they are completely devoid of a sagittal suture (i.e., Scaphocephaly), then such a desired physically induced mutation could be perceived as a medical procedure aimed at increasing the transfer of perceptual, sensory, motor and cognitive information between the two hemispheres; this was possibly done to prevent each hemisphere from processing information outside the awareness of the other. In essence, this meant that the operation was intended to prevent the brain from producing and developing any margin of a double consciousness as normal humans are equipped with; culminating thereby in some form of a unified consciousness.
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
Dunkirk was to hold out until the day on which all the Allied troops in the pocket who could embark to Britain had done so. Ramsay and the British Government initially assumed that no more than 45,000 troops could be saved, but over the nine days between dawn on Sunday, 26 May and 03.30 on Tuesday, 4 June, no fewer than 338,226 Allied soldiers were rescued from death or capture, 118,000 of whom were French, Belgian and Dutch. Operation Dynamo – so named because Ramsay’s bunker at Dover had housed electrical equipment during the Great War – was the largest military evacuation in history so far, and a fine logistical achievement, especially as daylight sailings had to be suspended on 1 June due to heavy Luftwaffe attacks.
Andrew Roberts (The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War)
In order to find and eliminate a Constraint, Goldratt proposes the “Five Focusing Steps,” a method you can use to improve the Throughput of any System: 1. Identification: examining the system to find the limiting factor. If your automotive assembly line is constantly waiting on engines in order to proceed, engines are your Constraint. 2. Exploitation: ensuring that the resources related to the Constraint aren’t wasted. If the employees responsible for making engines are also building windshields, or stop building engines during lunchtime, exploiting the Constraint would be having the engine employees spend 100 percent of their available time and energy producing engines, and having them work in shifts so breaks can be taken without slowing down production. 3. Subordination: redesigning the entire system to support the Constraint. Let’s assume you’ve done everything you can to get the most out of the engine production system, but you’re still behind. Subordination would be rearranging the factory so everything needed to build the engine is close at hand, instead of requiring certain materials to come from the other end of the factory. Other subsystems may have to move or lose resources, but that’s not a huge deal, since they’re not the Constraint. 4. Elevation: permanently increasing the capacity of the Constraint. In the case of the factory, elevation would be buying another engine-making machine and hiring more workers to operate it. Elevation is very effective, but it’s expensive—you don’t want to spend millions on more equipment if you don’t have to. That’s why Exploitation and Subordination come first: you can often alleviate a Constraint quickly, without resorting to spending more money. 5. Reevaluation: after making a change, reevaluating the system to see where the Constraint is located. Inertia is your enemy: don’t assume engines will always be the Constraint: once you make a few Changes, the limiting factor might become windshields. In that case, it doesn’t make sense to continue focusing on increasing engine production—the system won’t improve until windshields become the focus of improvement. The “Five Focusing Steps” are very similar to Iteration Velocity—the more quickly you move through this process and the more cycles you complete, the more your system’s Throughput will improve.
Josh Kaufman (The Personal MBA: Master the Art of Business)
When electronic communication networks enter the habitat of the individual consumer they are equipped from the start with a safety device: the possibility of instant, trouble-free and (hopefully) painless disconnection — of cutting off communication in a way that would leave parts of the network unattended and deprive them of relevance, together with their power to be a nuisance. It is that safety device, and not the facility of getting in touch, let alone of staying together permanently, that endears the electronic substitute for face-to-face socializing to men and women trained to operate in a market-mediated world. In such a world, it is the act of getting rid of the unwanted, much more than the act of getting hold of the desired, that is the meaning of individual freedom.
Zygmunt Bauman (Consuming Life)
It was perhaps, then, not surprising that it was Colonel Beppo Schmid, not General Martini, who on 16 July submitted to Göring the principal intelligence appreciation of the RAF, which became the basis for the Luftwaffe General Staff’s plans. He underestimated the strength of squadrons, claiming they were eighteen aircraft strong, when in fact they had between twenty-two and twenty-four aircraft. He also stated that only a limited number of airfields could be considered operational with modern maintenance and supply installations, which was nonsense. He badly underestimated current aircraft production figures to the tune of about 50 per cent and claimed there was ‘little strategic flexibility’, when, in fact, Dowding’s air defence system provided exactly the opposite. The Me110, he claimed, was a superior fighter to the Hurricane. Even more glaring were the omissions. The Luftwaffe had no concept of how the air defence system worked, no concept of there being three different commands – Fighter, Coastal and Bomber – and no understanding of how repairs were organized. ‘The Luftwaffe is clearly superior to the RAF,’ he concluded, ‘as regards strength, equipment, training, command and location of bases.’7 He was correct in terms of strength only. The rest of his claims were utter twaddle. On the eve of Adlertag, Schmid further reassured the Luftwaffe General Staff that some 350 British fighters had been destroyed since the beginning of July and that they were already being shot down faster than they could be produced. In fact, up to 12 August, 181 had been destroyed and more than 700 new fighter aircraft built.8 The gulf between fact and fiction was quite startling.
James Holland (The War in the West - A New History: Volume 1: Germany Ascendant 1939-1941 (A New History Vol 1))
A foreigner?" asked the missionary, still wondering who the stranger could be. "Oh, yes, certainly." The doctor's eyes twinkled. "Then he asked me about the other missions; I told him the London Mission had a settlement here, but it wasn't the least use going there as all the missionaries were away in the hills. After all it's devilish hot in the city. 'Then I'd like to go to one of the mission schools,' said the stranger. 'Oh, they're all closed,' I said. 'Well, then I'll go to the hospital.' 'That's well worth a visit,' I said, 'the American hospital is equipped with all the latest contrivances. Their operating theatre is perfect.' 'What is the name of the doctor in charge?' 'Oh, he's up in the hills.' 'But what about the sick?' 'There are no sick between May and September,' I said, 'and if there are they have to put up with the native dispensers.
W. Somerset Maugham (On A Chinese Screen)
We have no need of external weapons, nature has equipped us sufficiently by giving us reason. She has bestowed this weapon upon us, which is strong, imperishable, and obedient to our will, not uncertain or capable of being turned against its master. Reason suffices by itself not merely to take thought for the future, but to manage our affairs: what, then, can be more foolish than for reason to beg anger for protection, that is, for what is certain to beg of what is uncertain? what is trustworthy of what is faithless? what is whole of what is sick? What, indeed? since reason is far more powerful by itself even in performing those operations in which the help of anger seems especially needful: for when reason has decided that a particular thing should be done, she perseveres in doing it; not being able to find anything better than herself to exchange with.
Seneca (On Anger)
Theta programming, Phillips said, "involved the surgical implantation of sodium/lithium powered high frequency receiver/transducers coupled to a multi-range discharge capacitor that , when signaled by remote control would electronically stimulate designated parts of the brain to signal the victim to respond according to his or her hypnotic program. "These "Delgado" experiments were only partially successful," Phillips said, "with a high mortality and paralysis rate. However, the technical mind control equipment evolution has advanced to levels well beyond the grasp of most people. Non-implanted, non-programmed victims will hold the largest majority since, in the 1990's breakthroughs were made which allow mind control without either implant or trauma base". The new Theta programming," Phillips said, "operates by computer driven satellite directed energy. Now, anybody can become a target of the new technology.
Walter H Bowart (Operation Mind Control (the Complete Edition))
The evangelists and pastors mentioned in Ephesians 4:11 are then replaced in First Corinthians 12 with miracles and gifts of healings. These gifts of the Spirit are the primary ones that empower and qualify the evangelistic and pastoral offices. (The entry level into the fivefold ministry gifts is also at the level of working of miracles and gifts of healings because all five ministry offices — apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor, and teacher — should be equipped with these two gifts of the Spirit.) Next is the operation of helps, which handles the physical and material aspects of the ministry. One very important helps calling is what I call the “entrepreneurship of the simplicity of giving.” A person called to fulfill this operation is someone of means who has the capacity in his character and his calling to be used by God to pour thousands, if not millions, into the Kingdom of God for the governments of the Church.
Dave Roberson (The Walk of the Spirit - The Walk of Power: The Vital Role of Praying in Tongues)
In short, in contrast to the magician - who is still hidden in the medical practitioner – the surgeon at the decisive moment abstains from facing the patient man to man; rather, it is through the operation that he penetrates into him. Magician and surgeon compare to painter and cameraman. The painter maintains in his work a natural distance from reality, the cameraman penetrates deeply into its web. There is a tremendous difference between the pictures they obtain. That of the painter is a total one, that of the cameraman consists of multiple fragments which are assembled under a new law. Thus, for contemporary man the representation of reality by the film is incomparably more significant than that of the painter, since it offers, precisely because of the thoroughgoing permeation of reality with mechanical equipment, an aspect of reality which is free of all equipment. And that is what one is entitled to ask from a work of art.
Walter Benjamin (The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: An Influential Essay of Cultural Criticism; the History and Theory of Art (Hardcover))
Like all my father’s lessons, this one had broad applications beyond our immediate task. Ultimately, it was a lesson in the principle of self-reliance, which my father insisted that America had forgotten sometime between his own childhood and mine. Ours was now a country in which the cost of replacing a broken machine with a newer model was typically lower than the cost of having it fixed by an expert, which itself was typically lower than the cost of sourcing the parts and figuring out how to fix it yourself. This fact alone virtually guaranteed technological tyranny, which was perpetuated not by the technology itself but by the ignorance of everyone who used it daily and yet failed to understand it. To refuse to inform yourself about the basic operation and maintenance of the equipment you depended on was to passively accept that tyranny and agree to its terms: when your equipment works, you’ll work, but when your equipment breaks down you’ll break down, too. Your possessions would possess you.
Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
Believe me," Dr. Tamalet summed up, "if you wanted that operation in France, you could get it" Which is, of course, the boon and the bane of France's health care system. It offers a maximum of free choice among skillful doctors and well-equipped hospitals, with little or not waiting, at bargain-basement prices [in out-of-pocket terms to the consumer]. It's a system that enables the French to live longer and healthier lives, with zero risk of financial loss due to illness. But somebody has to pay for all that high-quality, ready-when-you-need-it care--and the patients, so far, have not been willing to do so. As a result, the major health insurance funds are all operating at a deficit, and the costs of the health care system are increasing significantly faster than the economy as a whole. That's why the doctors keep striking and the sickness funds keep negotiating and the government keeps going back to the drawing board, with a new 'major health care reform' every few years. So far, the saving grace for France's system has been the high level of efficiency, as exemplified by the 'carte vitale,' that keeps administrative costs low--much lower than in the United States.
T.R. Reid (The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care)
Clark Air base in Angeles City is a hub of commerce. The streets teem with industrious Filipinos hustling to make a living. Rusty cars and trucks clog narrow streets and honk their horns with abandon. Jeepneys ferry passengers around town for only a few pesos and serve as public transportation. The jeepney is the official vehicle of the Philippines. Jeepneys are long, open-sided jeeps and have bench seats for passengers. The best jeepneys are very ornate, their hoods festooned with a multitude of fancy chrome horses and ornaments, multihued streamers, and hand-operated rubber-bulb horns. Safety standards are third-world-relaxed in the PI, and jeepney drivers casually smoke cigarettes while they sit with plastic containers of gasoline nestled between their feet. The clear plastic jugs have a tube that connects to the engine and serves as the jeepney’s improvised gas tank, making it easier for the driver to monitor and conserve fuel. Jeepneys are not the only transportation available. Small, sidecar-equipped motorcycles called tricycles, also serve as cheap taxis, crowding the streets near popular establishments. The alleys are lined with side-by-side food stalls, and street vendors occupy every corner.
William F. Sine (Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force)
Because of the extreme heat fission generates, the reactor core must be kept cool at all costs. This is particularly important with an RBMK, which operates at an, “astonishingly high temperature,” relative to other reactor types, of 500°C with hotspots of up to 700°C, according to British nuclear expert Dr. Eric Voice. A typical PWR has an operating temperature of about 275°C. A few different kinds of coolant are used in different reactors, from gas to air to liquid metal to salt, but Chernobyl’s uses the same as most other reactors: light water, meaning it is just regular water. The plant was originally going to be fitted with gas-cooled reactors, but this was eventually changed because of a shortage of the necessary equipment.75 Water is pumped into the bottom of the reactor at high pressure (1000psi, or 65 atmospheres), where it boils and passes up, out of the reactor and through a condensator that separates steam from water. All remaining water is pushed through another pump and fed back into the reactor. The steam, meanwhile, enters a steam turbine, which turns and generates electricity. Each RBMK reactor produces 5,800 tons of steam per hour.76 Having passed through this turbogenerator, the steam is condensed back into water and fed back to the pumps, where it begins its cycle again.
Andrew Leatherbarrow (Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster)
Unchopping a Tree. Start with the leaves, the small twigs, and the nests that have been shaken, ripped, or broken off by the fall; these must be gathered and attached once again to their respective places. It is not arduous work, unless major limbs have been smashed or mutilated. If the fall was carefully and correctly planned, the chances of anything of the kind happening will have been reduced. Again, much depends upon the size, age, shape, and species of the tree. Still, you will be lucky if you can get through this stages without having to use machinery. Even in the best of circumstances it is a labor that will make you wish often that you had won the favor of the universe of ants, the empire of mice, or at least a local tribe of squirrels, and could enlist their labors and their talents. But no, they leave you to it. They have learned, with time. This is men's work. It goes without saying that if the tree was hollow in whole or in part, and contained old nests of bird or mammal or insect, or hoards of nuts or such structures as wasps or bees build for their survival, the contents will have to repaired where necessary, and reassembled, insofar as possible, in their original order, including the shells of nuts already opened. With spider's webs you must simply do the best you can. We do not have the spider's weaving equipment, nor any substitute for the leaf's living bond with its point of attachment and nourishment. It is even harder to simulate the latter when the leaves have once become dry — as they are bound to do, for this is not the labor of a moment. Also it hardly needs saying that this the time fro repairing any neighboring trees or bushes or other growth that might have been damaged by the fall. The same rules apply. Where neighboring trees were of the same species it is difficult not to waste time conveying a detached leaf back to the wrong tree. Practice, practice. Put your hope in that. Now the tackle must be put into place, or the scaffolding, depending on the surroundings and the dimension of the tree. It is ticklish work. Almost always it involves, in itself, further damage to the area, which will have to be corrected later. But, as you've heard, it can't be helped. And care now is likely to save you considerable trouble later. Be careful to grind nothing into the ground. At last the time comes for the erecting of the trunk. By now it will scarcely be necessary to remind you of the delicacy of this huge skeleton. Every motion of the tackle, every slightly upward heave of the trunk, the branches, their elaborately reassembled panoply of leaves (now dead) will draw from you an involuntary gasp. You will watch for a lead or a twig to be snapped off yet again. You will listen for the nuts to shift in the hollow limb and you will hear whether they are indeed falling into place or are spilling in disorder — in which case, or in the event of anything else of the kind — operations will have to cease, of course, while you correct the matter. The raising itself is no small enterprise, from the moment when the chains tighten around the old bandages until the boles hands vertical above the stump, splinter above splinter. How the final straightening of the splinters themselves can take place (the preliminary work is best done while the wood is still green and soft, but at times when the splinters are not badly twisted most of the straightening is left until now, when the torn ends are face to face with each other). When the splinters are perfectly complementary the appropriate fixative is applied. Again we have no duplicate of the original substance. Ours is extremely strong, but it is rigid. It is limited to surfaces, and there is no play in it. However the core is not the part of the trunk that conducted life from the roots up to the branches and back again. It was relatively inert. The fixative for this part is not the same as the one for the outer layers and the bark, and if either of these is involved
W.S. Merwin
If these avatars were real people in a real street, Hiro wouldn't be able to reach the entrance. It's way too crowded. But the computer system that operates the Street has better things to do than to monitor every single one of the millions of people there, trying to prevent them from running into each other. It doesn't bother trying to solve this incredibly difficult problem. On the Street, avatars just walk right through each other. So when Hiro cuts through the crowd, headed for the entrance, he really is cutting through the crowd. When things get this jammed together, the computer simplifies things by drawing all of the avatars ghostly and translucent so you can see where you're going. Hiro appears solid to himself, but everyone else looks like a ghost. He walks through the crowd as if it's a fogbank, clearly seeing The Black Sun in front of him. He steps over the property line, and he's in the doorway. And in that instant he becomes solid and visible to all the avatars milling outside. As one, they all begin screaming. Not that they have any idea who the hell he is -- Hiro is just a starving CIC stringer who lives in a U-Stor-It by the airport. But in the entire world there are only a couple of thousand people who can step over the line into The Black Sun. He turns and looks back at ten thousand shrieking groupies. Now that he's all by himself in the entryway, no longer immersed in a flood of avatars, he can see all of the people in the front row of the crowd with perfect clarity. They are all done up in their wildest and fanciest avatars, hoping that Da5id -- The Black Sun's owner and hacker-in-chief -- will invite them inside. They flick and merge together into a hysterical wall. Stunningly beautiful women, computer-airbrushed and retouched at seventy-two frames a second, like Playboy pinups turned three-dimensional -- these are would-be actresses hoping to be discovered. Wild-looking abstracts, tornadoes of gyrating light-hackers who are hoping that Da5id will notice their talent, invite them inside, give them a job. A liberal sprinkling of black-and-white people -- persons who are accessing the Metaverse through cheap public terminals, and who are rendered in jerky, grainy black and white. A lot of these are run-of-the-mill psycho fans, devoted to the fantasy of stabbing some particular actress to death; they can't even get close in Reality, so they goggle into the Metaverse to stalk their prey. There are would-be rock stars done up in laser light, as though they just stepped off the concert stage, and the avatars of Nipponese businessmen, exquisitely rendered by their fancy equipment, but utterly reserved and boring in their suits.
Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash)
The central ceremony of Ritual Witchcraft was the so-called "Sabbath" - a word of unknown origin having no relation to its Hebrew homonym. Sabbaths were celebrated four times a year - on Candlemass Day, February 2nd, on Rood Mass Day, May 1st, on Lammas Day, August 1st, and on the eve of All Hallows, October 31st. These were great festivals, often attended by hundreds of devotees, who came from considerable distances. Between Sabbaths there were weekly "Esbats" from small congregations in the village where the ancient religion was still practiced. At all high Sabbaths the devil himself was invariably present, in the person of some man who had inherited, or otherwise acquired, the honor of being the incarnation of the two-faced god of the Dianic cult. The worshipers paid homage to the god by kissing his reverse face - a mask worn, beneath an animal's tail, on the devil's backside. There was then, for some at least of the female devotees, a ritual copulation with the god, who was equipped for this purpose with an artificial phallus of horn or metal. This ceremony was followed by a picnic (for the Sabbaths were celebrated out of doors, near sacred trees or stones), by dancing and finally by a promiscuous sexual orgy that had, no doubt, originally been a magical operation for increasing the fertility of the animals on which primitive hunters and herdsmen depend for their livelihood. The prevailing atmosphere at the Sabbaths was one of good fellowship and mindless, animal joy. When captured and brought to trial, many of the who had taken part in the Sabbath resolutely refused, even under torture, even at the stake, to abjure the religion which had brought them so much happiness.
Aldous Huxley (The Devils of Loudun)
So here’s the million-dollar question: To what degree does menopause also deliver a customized update to your brain’s operating system? It is plausible that as the brain approaches menopause, it gets another chance to go leaner and meaner, discarding information and skills it no longer needs while growing new ones. For starters, some of the brain-ovary connections necessary to make babies are no longer needed, so arrivederci to that. But also all the neurologically expensive skills we reviewed in the last chapter—decoding baby talk, subduing temper tantrums, and high-level multitasking—are not as relevant once your birdie has flown the coop. They are still helpful, but not urgent. It only makes sense, then, that the brain would eventually start pruning away those expired connections—and what better biological clue to do so than menopause. Again, many believe that, as this latest and greatest brain update unfolds, that’s when hot flashes, brain fog, and other bothersome symptoms kick in. Once the update is complete, the symptoms start dissipating (which may take longer than the other two P’s because now we are . . . well, older). All this information is helpful to place menopause under a much broader lens. But where are the bonuses? Could it be that the menopausal brain morph might better equip us for our later years? Could menopause come with its own ingenuity, proving instrumental in preparing women for a new role in life as in society? Despite society having turned a blind eye toward any menopausal perks, there is increasing evidence that this profound hormonal event also bestows new meaning and purpose on women. HAPPINESS IS NOT A MYTH AFTER ALL Any major life transition can be a chance at reawakening, even if the road is rough.
Lisa Mosconi (The Menopause Brain)
I am excited to report that I may have gotten a job as an elevator attendant. It's a three-flight elevator, and my primary objective is to push one of three buttons, 1,2, or 3. I know, it seems complicated, but I am sure I am intellectually mature enough to handle it. I feel confident that I have this job because the owner of the elevator operating company, Mr. Pushkin, of Pushkin Push-button Services, shook my hand, winked at me, examined my index finger for button-pushing capabilities and then licked my armpit. It was very flattering. Since he is obviously a man who is continually rising in the elevator world, I asked him for some life advice. And do you know what he told me? He leaned in close so that his blue eyes were about two inches from my face, and then he leaned around to my ear and whispered, “Some men never leave the ground floor, and some men rise to the top. Still other men, like myself, enable these penthouse executives to reach the pinnacle of their company. But I never carry on conversation in an elevator, or at a urinal, and I’d never install a urinal on an elevator, for fear that men would be more inclined to converse freely as they traveled and emptied their bladder.” And without hesitation I replied, “Mr. Pushkin, I never shake a man’s hand after he just got done pissing, or shake my penis more than three times after pissing, but I am certain that I could operate an elevator equipped with a urinal. I know how to keep both my mouth and my pants zipped shut.” That’s when he glanced down and noticed that my fly was down. I was so embarrassed until he reached his hand down to my crotch and zipped me up as he winked and said, “It happens to the best of us.” And that’s when I noticed that not only was his fly unzipped, but his penis had been hanging out the whole time he’d been talking to me.
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
THE SK8 MAKER VS. GLOBAL INDUSTRIALIZATION This new era of global industrialization is where my personal analogy with the history of the skateboard maker diverges. It’s no longer cost-effective to run a small skateboard company in the U.S., and the handful of startups that pull it off are few and far between. The mega manufacturers who can churn out millions of decks at low cost and record speed each year in Chinese factories employ proprietary equipment and techniques that you and I can barely imagine. Drills that can cut all eight truck holes in a stack of skateboard decks in a single pull. CNC machinery to create CAD-perfect molds used by giant two-sided hydraulic presses that can press dozens of boards in a few hours. Computer-operated cutting bits that can stamp out a deck to within 1⁄64 in. of its specified shape. And industrial grade machines that apply multicolored heat-transfer graphics in minutes. In a way, this factory automation has propelled skateboarding to become a multinational, multi-billion dollar industry. The best skateboarders require this level of precision in each deck. Otherwise, they could end up on their tails after a failed trick. Or much worse. As the commercial deck relies more and more on a process that is out of reach for mere mortals, there is great value in the handmade and one of a kind. Making things from scratch is a dying art on the brink of extinction. It was pushed to the edge when public schools dismissed woodworking classes and turned the school woodshop into a computer lab. And when you separate society from how things are made—even a skateboard—you lose touch with the labor and the materials and processes that contributed to its existence in the first place. It’s not long before you take for granted the value of an object. The result is a world where cheap labor produces cheap goods consumed by careless customers who don’t even value the things they own.
Matt Berger (The Handmade Skateboard: Design & Build a Custom Longboard, Cruiser, or Street Deck from Scratch)
Professional Bio of Shahin Shardi, P.Eng. Materials Engineer Welding and Pressure Equipment Inspector, QA/QC Specialist Shahin Shardi is a Materials Engineer with experience in integrity management, inspection of pressure equipment, quality control/assurance of large scale oil and gas projects and welding inspection. He stared his career in trades which helped him understand fundamentals of operation of a construction site and execution of large scale projects. This invaluable experience provided him with boots on the ground perspective of requirements of running a successful project and job site. After obtaining an engineering degree from university of British Columbia, he started a career in asset integrity management for oil and gas facilities and inspection of pressure equipment in Alberta, Canada. He has been involved with numerus maintenance shutdowns at various facilities providing engineering support to the maintenance, operations and project personnel regarding selection, repair, maintenance, troubleshooting and long term reliability of equipment. In addition he has extensive experience in area of quality control and assurance of new construction activities in oil and gas industry. He has performed Owner’s Inspector and welding inspector roles in this area. Shahin has extensively applied industry codes of constructions such as ASME Pressure Vessel Code (ASME VIII), Welding (ASME IX), Process Piping (ASME B31.3), Pipe Flanges (ASME B16.5) and various pressure equipment codes and standards. Familiarity with NDT techniques like magnetic particle, liquid penetrant, eddy current, ultrasonic and digital radiography is another valuable knowledge base gained during various projects. Some of his industry certificates are CWB Level 2 Certified Welding Inspector, API 510 Pressure Vessel Inspector, Alberta ABSA In-Service Pressure Vessel Inspector and Saskatchewan TSASK Pressure Equipment Inspector. Shahin is a professional member of Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta.
Shahin Shardi
The last time I saw Collin was in 1917, at the foot of Mort-Homme. Before the great slaughter, Collin’d been an avid angler. On that day, he was standing at the hole, watching maggots swarm among blow flies on two boys that we couldn’t retrieve for burial without putting our own lives at risk. And there, at the loop hole, he thought of his bamboo rods, his flies and the new reel he hadn’t even tried out yet. Collin was imaging himself on the riverbank, wine cooling in the current his stash of worms in a little metal box and a maggot on his hook, writhing like… Holy shit. Were the corpses getting to him? Collin. The poor guy didn’t even have time to sort out his thoughts. In that split second, he was turned into a slab of bloody meat. A white hot hook drilled right through him and churned through his guts, which spilled out of a hole in his belly. He was cleared out of the first aid station. The major did triage. Stomach wounds weren’t worth the trouble. There were all going to die anyway, and besides, he wasn’t equipped to deal with them. Behind the aid station, next to a pile of wood crosses, there was a heap of body parts and shapeless, oozing human debris laid out on stretchers, stirred only be passing rats and clusters of large white maggots. But on their last run, the stretcher bearers carried him out after all… Old Collin was still alive. From the aid station to the ambulance and from the ambulance to the hospital, all he could remember was his fall into that pit, with maggots swarming over the open wound he had become from head to toe… Come to think of it, where was his head? And what about his feet? In the ambulance, the bumps were so awful and the pain so intense that it would have been a relief to pass out. But he didn’t. He was still alive, writhing on his hook. They carved up old Collin good. They fixed him as best they could, but his hands and legs were gone. So much for fishing. Later, they pinned a medal on him, right there in that putrid recovery room. And later still, they explained to him about gangrene and bandages packed with larvae that feed on death tissue. He owed them his life. From one amputation and operation to the next – thirty-eight in all – the docs finally got him “back on his feet”. But by then, the war was long over.
Jacques Tardi (Goddamn This War!)
Blackbeard the pirate was actually Edward Teach sometimes known as Edward Thatch, who lived from 1680 until his death on November 22, 1718. Blackbeard was a notorious English pirate who sailed around the eastern coast of North America. Although little is known about his childhood he may have worked as an apprentice on an English ship, during the second phase in a series of wars between the French and the English from 1754 and ended in 1778 as part of the American Revolutionary War. The war had different names depending on where it was fought. In the American colonies the war was known as the French and Indian War. During the time it was fought during the reign of Anne, Queen of Great Britain, it was called Queen Anne's War and in Europe it was known as the War of the Spanish Succession. During the earlier period of hostilities between France and England, some English ships were granted permission to raid French colonies and French ships and were considered privateers. Captain Benjamin Hornigold, whose crew Teach joined around 1716 operated from the Bahamian island of New Providence. Captain Hornigold placed Teach in command of a sloop that he had captured and during this time he was given the name Blackbeard. Horngold and Blackbeard sailing out of New Providence engaged in numerous acts of piracy. Their numbers were boosted by the addition of other captured ships. Blackbeard captured a French slave ship known as La Concorde and renamed her Queen Anne's Revenge. He renamed it “Queen Anne's Revenge” referring to Anne, Queen of England and Scotland returning to the throne of Great Britain. He equipped his new acquisition with 40 guns, and a crew of over 300 men. Becoming a world renowned pirate, most people feared him. In a failed attempt to run a blockade in place and refusing the governors pardon, he ran “Queen Anne's Revenge” aground on a sandbar near Beaufort, North Carolina and settled in North Carolina where he then accepted a royal pardon. The wreck of “Queen Anne's Revenge” was found in 1996 by private salvagers, Intersal Inc., a salvage company based in Palm Bay, Florida Not knowing when enough, he returned to plundering at sea. Alexander Spotswood, the Governor of Virginia formed a garrison of soldiers and sailors to protect the colony and if possible capture Blackbeard. On November 22, 1718 following a ferocious battle, Blackbeard and several of his crew were killed by a small force of sailors led by Lieutenant Robert Maynard. After his death, Blackbeard became a martyr and an inspiration for a number of fictitious books.
Hank Bracker
A particularly gruesome hunt targeted the basking shark, the second-largest fish in the world. At one time these creatures, which may reach fifteen metres in length, were abundant along the coast. For all their size they are peaceable giants, feeding on zooplankton in the nutrient-rich ocean waters close to the surface. They do not eat salmon or any other fish, but fishermen considered them a nuisance because they often became entangled in fishing gear. In 1949 the Department of Fisheries labelled them a "destructive pest" and in 1955 the department was persuaded to take aggressive action against the sharks in Barkley Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, where they were especially prevalent. A large triangular cutting blade was mounted on the bow of a fisheries patrol vessel, the Comox Post. This knife could be lowered just below the surface of the water. When the vessel drove straight into a lounging shark, the blade sliced the animal in half. Between 1955 and 1969, when the blade was in use, hundreds of sharks were slaughtered in the sound. "The great shark slaughter began at noon and continued for hours," wrote a reporter who witnessed one of these excursions in 1956. "We littered the beaches with their livers and the bottom with their carcasses." Other fisheries vessels that were not equipped with the knife had orders to simply ram any sharks they encountered in the hope of killing them. Basking sharks are today almost never encountered in Barkley Sound or anywhere else on the coast.
Daniel Francis (Operation Orca: Springer, Luna and the Struggle to Save West Coast Killer Whales)
The fascination with automation in part reflected the country’s mood in the immediate postwar period, including a solid ideological commitment to technological progress. Representatives of industry (along with their counterparts in science and engineering) captured this mood by championing automation as the next step in the development of new production machinery and American industrial prowess. These boosters quickly built up automation into “a new gospel of postwar economics,” lauding it as “a universal ideal” that would “revolutionize every area of industry.” 98 For example, the November 1946 issue of Fortune magazine focused on the prospects for “The Automatic Factory.” The issue included an article titled “Machines without Men” that envisioned a completely automated factory where virtually no human labor would be needed. 99 With visions of “transforming the entire manufacturing sector into a virtually labor-free enterprise,” factory owners in a range of industries began to introduce automation in the postwar period. 100 The auto industry moved with particular haste. After the massive wave of strikes in 1945–46, automakers seized on automation as a way to replace workers with machines. 101 As they converted back to civilian auto production after World War II, they took the opportunity to install new labor-saving automatic production equipment. The two largest automakers, Ford and General Motors, set the pace. General Motors introduced the first successful automated transfer line at its Buick engine plant in Flint in 1946 (shortly after a 113-day strike, the longest in the industry’s history). The next year Ford established an automation department (a Ford executive, Del S. Harder, is credited with coining the word “automation”). By October 1948 the department had approved $ 3 million in spending on 500 automated devices, with early company estimates predicting that these devices would result in a 20 percent productivity increase and the elimination of 1,000 jobs. Through the late 1940s and 1950s Ford led the way in what became known as “Detroit automation,” undertaking an expensive automation program, which it carried out in concert with the company’s plans to decentralize operations away from the city. A major component of this effort was the Ford plant in the Cleveland suburb of Brook Park, a $ 2 billion engine-making complex that attracted visitors from government, industry, and labor and became a national symbol of automation in the 1950s. 102
Stephen M. Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
As nervous systems developed, they acquired an elaborate network of peripheral probes—the peripheral nerves that are distributed to every parcel of the body’s interior and to its entire surface, as well as to specialized sensory devices that enable seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, and tasting. Nervous systems also acquired an elaborate collection of aggregated central processors in the central nervous system, conventionally called the brain.10 The latter includes (1) the spinal cord; (2) the brain stem and the closely related hypothalamus; (3) the cerebellum; (4) a number of large nuclei located above brain-stem level—in the thalamus, basal ganglia, and basal forebrain; and (5) the cerebral cortex, the most modern and sophisticated component of the system. These central processors manage learning and memory storage of signals of every possible sort and also manage the integration of these signals; they coordinate the execution of complex responses to inner states and incoming stimuli—a critical operation that includes drives, motivations, and emotions proper; and they manage the process of image manipulation that we otherwise know as thinking, imagining, reasoning, and decision making. Last, they manage the conversion of images and of their sequences into symbols and eventually into languages—coded sounds and gestures whose combinations can signify any object, quality, or action, and whose linkage is governed by a set of rules called grammar. Equipped with language, organisms can generate continuous translations of nonverbal to verbal items and build dual-track narratives of such items.
António Damásio (The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling, and the Making of the Cultural Mind)
For many decades after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the Soviet Union had been closed off, an almost forbidden place, another world. The Soviet oil industry operated largely in isolation, with little of the flow of technology and equipment that was common in the rest of the world.
Daniel Yergin (The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World)
You need a professional rotary cold-cut slicer for that, like they have at the deli. The home versions suck. But I highly recommend, if presenting sausage or meat on a buffet, that you slip the neighborhood deli guy a few bucks to slice what you need before you arrange it on platters. It makes all the difference in the world. Or if you have a few extra bucks, read the back of the paper for notices of restaurant auctions. As you've probably gathered by now, restaurants go out of business all the time, and have to sell off their equipment quickly and cheaply before the marshals do it for them. I know people who buy whole restaurants this way, in what's called a turnkey operation, and in a business with a failure rate of over 60 percent they often do very well. You can buy all sorts of professional quality stuff. I'd recommend pots and pans as a premium consideration if scavenging this way. Most of the ones sold for home use are dangerously flimsy, and the heavyweight equipment sold for serious home cooks is almost always overpriced.
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
In the early days of genetics, a gene could be 'dominant' or 'recessive', and that was about all there was to it; but gradually more and more terms had to be added to the vocabulary: repressors, apo-repressors, co-repressors, inducers, modifier genes, switch genes, operator genes which activate other genes, and even genes which regulate the rate of mutations in genes. Thus the action of the gene-complex was originally conceived as the unfolding of a simple linear sequence like that on a tape-recorder or the Behaviourist's conditioned-reflex chain; whereas it is now gradually becoming apparent that the genetic controls operate as a self-regulating micro-hierarchy, equipped with feedback devices which guide their flexible strategies. This not only protects the growing embryo against the hazards of ontogeny; it would also protect it against the evolutionary hazards of phylogeny, or random mutations in its own hereditary materials-the blind antics of the monkey at the typewriter.
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
Fieldking rotavator is better as it saves fuel, Time, soil compaction & wear and tear of the tractor as it accomplishes better pulverization in no time. And with Robust Multi Speed now no need for multiple operations of the cultivator, disc harrow, and leveler. Fielding Rotary Tillers is economical series and it can be coupled with 30 to 60 HP tractors quite easily. It is mainly intended with a rigid structure, multi-speed Gearbox, Visual Oil Level Indicator, Features of Fielding Rotavator Innovation – neatly designed keeping in mind minimum diesel consumption & breakages Better Production – It helps in holding wet of the soil and will increase soil porousness and aeration which boosts germination and growth of crops. Hard truth – Rigid structure, Multi-speed shell, Mechanical oil seal, Advanced designed Front support and serious duty back guard (Trialing board) makes it appropriate and effectively on object yet as in wet and paddy condition. Technically advanced – It specially installs with Spiral shapes of the rotor assembly to cut back the load on tractors, scale back fuel consumption and avoids tire slippage. Smartly Placed – Visual oil level indicator, scale back the possibilities to breakage of gears thanks to inaccessibility of minimum oil level within gear transmission. King of Crop – It makes the simplest bed to victimization at before and once rain. it’s in the main appropriate for every type of crops like cotton, castor, vegetable, sugarcane, banana, wheat, maize, and paddy. Easy to use – It will simply take away residues components of the previous crop, cut into items and completely combine it them into the soil in kind of organic manure to extend productivity. Long life – Powder coated glorious resistance to corrosion, maintains the machine in just-bought condition for a extended amount.
Julia Smith
This, however, is not the case. The load on a generating system depends on many variable factors. Among these are the fluctuating industrial demand; emergencies which may remove a part of the system from operation; and even passing clouds, which may make tens of thousands of offices and homes turn on their electric lights in the middle of the day. It follows that the automatic stations, as well as those operated by a working crew, must be within constant reach of the load dispatcher, who must be able to give orders to his machines; and this he does by sending appropriately coded signals to the power station, either over a special line designed for the purpose, or over existing telegraph or telephone lines, or over a carrier system making use of the power lines themselves. On the other hand, before the load dispatcher can give his orders intelligently, he must be acquainted with the state of affairs at the generating station. In particular, he must know whether the orders he has given have been executed, or have been held up through some failure in the equipment. Thus the machines in the generating station must be able to send return messages to the load dispatcher. Here, then, is one instance of language emanating from man and directed toward the machine, and vice versa.
Norbert Wiener (The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society (The Da Capo series in science))
Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs) have been around in the telecom world since the dawn of the 21st century. However, since their inception, their role has kept on changing. From broadly voice-based service providers to 3G purveyors, MVNOs have evolved in their services with time. Nowadays, in this world of intense competition, the success of MVNO completely depends on their ability to think out of the box. It is their ingenuity in creating customer-driven plans that decides their fate in today’s heavily saturated telecom market. The present-day MVNO subscribers are finicky, moody and disloyal. It is an MVNO’s task to inspire confidence in them, attract them towards their services and ensure that they stay loyal. The Challenge Faced by Different MVNOs Evoking customer trust and then ensuring that it is maintained is probably the toughest challenge faced by an MVNO in telecom. Especially in the competitive world of today that demands a differentiation in service along with an attractive pricing model. Based on their infrastructural capabilities, MVNOs can be divided into: 1. Skinny MVNOs: Equipped with their own voice mail, content applications, SMSC, prepaid and VAS. 2. Thin MVNOs: Apart from the infrastructure above, they also have AUC, EIR, HLR, and IN. 3. Thick MVNOs: Along with infrastructure of a thin MVNO, thick MVNOs also have a VLR and MSC. Regardless of the kind of MVNO that you are running, there are some major challenges that you need to overcome. While a skinny MVNO does not have to worry too much about the infrastructure, he cannot scale his operations as well as a thin or thick MVNO. On the other hand, a thick MVNO may be able to scale his operations well, but he might get too involved in managing the infrastructure with very little time for branding and marketing. The Importance of MVNE/MVNA Partnership for Overcoming Challenges As MVNOs are considerably smaller than a full-fledged MNO (Mobile Network Operator), they need support from MVNEs (Mobile Virtual Network Enablers) to get their job done. A capable MVNE with a comprehensive MVNO software solution like Telgoo5 can provide the following benefits to an MVNO: 1. Better billing – Billing is probably the toughest task for an MVNO to undertake all by itself. Any mistake or inefficiency in billing tasks can have a major bearing on MVNO subscribers. But when you partner with an MVNE like Vcare, you get access to a cutting-edge MVNO billing software solution. With a convergent billing solution by your side, you can create itemized bills with details of all types of services used by your subscribers. 2. Profitable deals with MNOs – Partnership with a competent MVNE/MVNA can help you get better-priced deals with an MNO. This will allow you to deliver the services at a lower rate to your MVNO subscribers while still making a profit. 3. Avoid red tape – Running a successful MVNO operation requires you to get into contracts with different carriers and vendors. By partnering with a competent MVNE like Vcare (who already has fully-licensed platforms and contracts with vendors), you are able to bypass the process of signing new deals, thereby saving considerable time and effort.
tomas jarvis
MOOSE: MANNED ORBITAL OPERATIONS SAFETY EQUIPMENT
Zeno Alexander (The Library of Ever (The Library of Ever, #1))
The Cuban Military includes the army, air and air defense forces, navy and various youth groups and reserve components. As a United Military Force it is called the “Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias – FAR” or “The Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces.” “FAR” extends into the civilian sector controlling 60% of the economy. Because of the overlapping interests, it is difficult to separate the various military branches which have been and are still controlled by Raúl Castro. In his speeches he frequently has stressed the military as the people's partner in the operation of the country. The General Officer’s, have duties that extend beyond their responsibilities to the military. Prior to the 1980’s, the Cuban military depended on the Soviet Union to support them and in return, Cuba supported the Soviet Union militarily in Africa, South America and the Middle East. Throughout the 1980’s, the amount of military equipment they received gave Cuba the most formidable military in Latin America. Because of corruption and drug trafficking by the Cuban army in 1989, a move was instituted by Raúl Castro to rout out the offenders, executing some and reassigning others to the Ministry of Interior, which became part of a much smaller army. Presently Cuba has deepened its military training program with China. The Cuban military has been reduced to 39,000 troops however the Territorial Militia Troops, the Youth Labor Army, and the Naval Militia, now more defensive in nature, still retains the potential to make any enemy invasion costly.
Hank Bracker
Intelligence is the decisive factor in planning guerrilla operations. Where is the enemy? In what strength? What does he propose to do? What is the state of his equipment, his supply, his morale? Are his leaders intelligent, bold, and imaginative or stupid and impetuous? Are his troops tough, efficient, and well disciplined, or poorly trained and soft? Guerrillas expect the members of their intelligence service to provide the answers to these and dozens more detailed questions. “Guerrilla intelligence nets are tightly organized and pervasive. In a guerrilla area, every person without exception must be considered an agent — old men and women, boys driving ox carts, girls tending goats, farm laborers, storekeepers, schoolteachers, priests, boatmen, scavengers. The local cadres “put the heat” on everyone, without regard to age or sex, to produce all conceivable information. And produce it they do.
Sebastian Marshall (PROGRESSION)
During World War II the top secret “Norden XV” or “Blue Ox” otherwise known the Army Airforce’s “Norden M Series Bombsights,” were used up to and including the Vietnam War by all American military aircraft with bomb carrying capabilities. This bombsight was considered a “Canonical Tachometric Design” meaning that it had the ability to measure the aircraft's direction and ground speed. In time the Norden improved its original design by using a computer that constantly calculated the aircraft’s flight characteristic and external wind forces to determine the bomb's impact point. When the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed, it came equipped with a Sperry A-3 Autopilot that only corrected angular deviations in the aircraft’s straight and level course. In time most bombsights were replaced by video displays on the instrument panel. Dumb or gravity bombs were mostly replaced with in-flight guidance bombs, such as laser-guided bombs or those using a GPS system. The last combat use of the Norden bombsight was by the US Navy during the covert “Operation Igloo White” mission when OP-2E Neptune aircraft dropped electronic sensors to detect enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report was declassified on May 5, 2013.
Hank Bracker
Media City, Dubai, UAE – Kazema Portable Toilets, one of the leading suppliers of plastic portable toilets, GRP portable toilets and sinks, and other portable sanitation equipment today, this week excitedly announced they have been named a finalist for their entry into the “RSA Customer Focus of the Year Award’ at the Gulf Capital SME Awards 2017. With all portable products being made from high quality, durable materials that can withstand the demands of sanitation, Kazema Portable Toilets carries a wide variety of ancillary products and accessories designed to assist business owners in earning more. Now in its 6th year as a regarded small to mid-sized business recognition awards ceremony, the SME Awards proudly identify startups, innovative SMES with exemplary products and services, SMEs which invest in their employees’ environment and customer strategy, and also the visionary entrepreneurs at the helm. “We’ve created a portable solution that is compatible with any business looking to add depth, expansion, and productivity to their operation,” said Raj, Founder and Owner of Kazema Portable Toilets. “We provide our clients with professional support worldwide that enables them to supply clients locally with our product, as well as harness it for widespread exportation.” Recognized for their high-stock, ready-to-use durable product today, Kazema Portable Toilets is one of the front-runners for their SME awards category. Kazema beat out hundreds in the category to be regarded as a finalist for their entrepreneurial solution to a problem every person encounters daily. “We are passionate about our work here at Kazema Portable Toilets, and we are honored to be named a finalist in such a reputable competition,” said Raj. “We want to thank SME for the recognition, and look forward to winning our category.
Kazema Portable Toilets
David and Neil were MBA students at the Wharton School when the cash-strapped David lost his eyeglasses and had to pay $700 for replacements. That got them thinking: Could there be a better way? Neil had previously worked for a nonprofit, VisionSpring, that trained poor women in the developing world to start businesses offering eye exams and selling glasses that were affordable to people making less than four dollars a day. He had helped expand the nonprofit’s presence to ten countries, supporting thousands of female entrepreneurs and boosting the organization’s staff from two to thirty. At the time, it hadn’t occurred to Neil that an idea birthed in the nonprofit sector could be transferred to the private sector. But later at Wharton, as he and David considered entering the eyeglass business, after being shocked by the high cost of replacing David’s glasses, they decided they were out to build more than a company—they were on a social mission as well. They asked a simple question: Why had no one ever sold eyeglasses online? Well, because some believed it was impossible. For one thing, the eyeglass industry operated under a near monopoly that controlled the sales pipeline and price points. That these high prices would be passed on to consumers went unquestioned, even if that meant some people would go without glasses altogether. For another, people didn’t really want to buy a product as carefully calibrated and individualized as glasses online. Besides, how could an online company even work? David and Neil would have to be able to offer stylish frames, a perfect fit, and various options for prescriptions. With a $2,500 seed investment from Wharton’s Venture Initiation Program, David and Neil launched their company in 2010 with a selection of styles, a low price of $95, and a hip marketing program. (They named the company Warby Parker after two characters in a Jack Kerouac novel.) Within a month, they’d sold out all their stock and had a 20,000-person waiting list. Within a year, they’d received serious funding. They kept perfecting their concept, offering an innovative home try-on program, a collection of boutique retail outlets, and an eye test app for distance vision. Today Warby Parker is valued at $1.75 billion, with 1,400 employees and 65 retail stores. It’s no surprise that Neil and David continued to use Warby Parker’s success to deliver eyeglasses to those in need. The company’s Buy a Pair, Give a Pair program is unique: instead of simply providing free eyeglasses, Warby Parker trains and equips entrepreneurs in developing countries to sell the glasses they’re given. To date, 4 million pairs of glasses have been distributed through Warby Parker’s program. This dual commitment to inexpensive eyewear for all, paired with a program to improve access to eyewear for the global poor, makes Warby Parker an exemplary assumption-busting social enterprise.
Jean Case (Be Fearless: 5 Principles for a Life of Breakthroughs and Purpose)
Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.
Lawrence Bransby (Two Fingers On The Jugular)
The Germans found out where the camp of our partisan unit was. They cordoned off the forest and the approaches to it on all sides. We hid in the wild thickets, we were saved by the swamps where the punitive forces didn’t go. A quagmire. It sucked in equipment and people for good. For days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. Our radio operator was a woman who had recently given birth. The baby was hungry…It had to be nursed…But the mother herself was hungry and had no milk. The baby cried. The punitive forces were close…With dogs…If the dogs heard it, we’d all be killed. The whole group—thirty of us…You understand? The commander makes a decision… Nobody can bring himself to give the mother his order, but she figures it out herself. She lowers the swaddled baby into the water and holds it there for a long time…The baby doesn’t cry anymore…Not a sound…And we can’t raise our eyes. Neither to the mother nor to each other…
Svetlana Alexievich (War's Unwomanly Face)
Welcome To ROCHESTER NY Kitchen Remodel. We offer a great service at an affordable price. We are a family owned and operated business that has been serving Rochester and the surrounding area for over 10 years. We use state of the art equipment and provide outstanding service and customer satisfaction. We are committed to 100% customer satisfaction!
ROCHESTER NY Kitchen Remodel
Abnormality departed with a leisurely step. First there was the dry beach, ten days of vacuum. Then the period of the beach and the waves. Then there was Something, that heavy hand of urgent hunches. Then the four- or five-day period when Something demonstrated its frightening and profitable talent for extending. Then the novel-writing days, strangest of all, perhaps, when words from nowhere somehow reached my fingers, ignoring the dry beach altogether. And the pictures, flashing like bright telegrams. The three months of unusual phenomena were as weird in their way as the voices of the Operators. But the anchor remained solidly hooked and, except for a few days when Something seemed to be showing off what it could do in the way of telepathy and precognition if it really tried, I wandered calmly from one stage to another, undisturbed by what was happening, undisturbed by what might lie around the corner. And then abruptly, overnight, the strange equipment was put away in storage, the regular machinery was hauled onto the dry beach and connected. Reason, as I had known reason, returned.
Barbara O'Brien (Operators and things: The inner life of a schizophrenic)
Apollo was having a difficult time finding candidates for the top spot, and Frissora would have had a hard time finding any job at any other public company. In September 2014, he had left as CEO at Hertz Global citing “personal reasons.” In fact, Hertz was in the middle of a massive accounting scandal where the rental car and equipment company was facing accusations of inflating profits. Carl Icahn had taken a near 10 percent stake and was making noise. Another hedge fund said Frissora had “lost all credibility.” To his surprise, Frissora got a call from an executive search firm just two weeks after leaving Hertz. They asked if he had interest in the Caesars job. He met with Rowan, Sambur, and Bonderman. Apollo claimed it would be a brief six-month bankruptcy, and the job would be fun. Frissora had been the CEO of two public companies, Hertz and auto parts maker Tenneco, and was new to gaming. But Hertz had gone private in a $15 billion LBO in 2006, so he had experience working with private equity. Until the accounting scandal, Hertz had prospered under Frissora. Rowan and Sambur were hoping an experienced operator could impose business discipline they believed Loveman had not.
Sujeet Indap (The Caesars Palace Coup: How a Billionaire Brawl Over the Famous Casino Exposed the Power and Greed of Wall Street)
a slender vinyl attaché case; the kind carried by State Department clerks, computer salesmen, and executive trainees. This, which she opened on her lap, had proved to contain such serious businesslike material as yellow-lined legal pads, ballpoint pens, graph paper, loose-leaf filler books, a cassette recorder, sharpened yellow pencils, and a slide rule. (I have always envied people who know what a slide rule is for. It’s not even the question of how you use it, it’s more basic than that; I am convinced there have been moments in my life which would have been made easier if I had been equipped with a handy slide rule and the mastery of its operation, but I’m so ignorant I don’t even know which moments those were. Never have I said, “Oh, if only I had a slide rule!” though surely there have been times when it was the appropriate thing to say.) But not at the moment for Ms. Scott. She’d taken from the attaché case only one legal pad and one ballpoint pen, then closed
Donald E. Westlake (Call Me A Cab)
My computer had been equipped with a slightly different program which M.I.T. called Colossus IIA; it was aptly named. I felt flea-sized in its presence, and punched the computer keys with a good deal of reverence, as I availed myself of the services of this giant. That is, until it and I started to disagree and it refused to give me the answers I sought. Then I lost my temper. Flash an “operator error” light at me, will you, you stupid goddamned computer, and I would sputter and stammer until the soothing voice of Tom Wilson14 or one of the other instructors came over the earphones and unctuously explained how I had offended their precocious brat.
Michael Collins (Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journey)
Both suppliers and buyers tend to be powerful if: They are large and concentrated relative to a fragmented industry (think Goliath versus many Davids). What percentage of an industry’s purchases/sales does a supplier/buyer represent? Look at the data and map out how it is trending. How painful would it be to lose that supplier or that customer? Industries with high fixed costs (e.g., telecommunications equipment and offshore drilling) are especially vulnerable to large buyers. The industry needs them more than they need the industry. In some cases, there may be no alternative suppliers, at least in the short term. Doctors and airline pilots, to cite two examples, have historically exercised tremendous bargaining power because their skills have been both essential and in short supply. China produces 95 percent of the world’s supply of neodymium, a rare earth metal needed by Toyota and other automakers for electric motors. Neodymium prices quadrupled in just one year (2010), as the Chinese restricted supply. Toyota is working hard to develop a new motor that will end its dependence on rare earth metals. Switching costs work in their favor. This occurs for a supplier when an industry is tied to it, as for example, the PC industry has been to Microsoft, its dominant supplier of operating systems and software. Switching costs work in the buyer’s favor when the buyer can easily drop one vendor for another. The ease with which customers can switch from one airline to another on popular routes makes it hard for airlines to raise prices or cut service levels. Frequent flyer programs were intended to raise switching costs, but they have not been effective. Differentiation works in their favor.
Joan Magretta (Understanding Michael Porter: The Essential Guide to Competition and Strategy)
Senior Wal-Mart officials concentrated on setting goals, measuring progress, and maintaining communication lines with employees at the front lines and with official agencies when they could. In other words, to handle this complex situation, they did not issue instructions. Conditions were too unpredictable and constantly changing. They worked on making sure people talked. Wal-Mart’s emergency operations team even included a member of the Red Cross. (The federal government declined Wal-Mart’s invitation to participate.) The team also opened a twenty-four-hour call center for employees, which started with eight operators but rapidly expanded to eighty to cope with the load. Along the way, the team discovered that, given common goals to do what they could to help and to coordinate with one another, Wal-Mart’s employees were able to fashion some extraordinary solutions. They set up three temporary mobile pharmacies in the city and adopted a plan to provide medications for free at all of their stores for evacuees with emergency needs—even without a prescription. They set up free check cashing for payroll and other checks in disaster-area stores. They opened temporary clinics to provide emergency personnel with inoculations against flood-borne illnesses. And most prominently, within just two days of Katrina’s landfall, the company’s logistics teams managed to contrive ways to get tractor trailers with food, water, and emergency equipment past roadblocks and into the dying city. They were able to supply water and food to refugees and even to the National Guard a day before the government appeared on the scene. By the end Wal-Mart had sent in a total of 2,498 trailer loads of emergency supplies and donated $3.5 million in merchandise to area shelters and command centers. “If the American government had responded like Wal-Mart has responded, we wouldn’t be in this crisis,” Jefferson Parish’s top official, Aaron Broussard, said in a network television interview at the time.
Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right)
He had been on operations alongside his British counterparts and said that although American special forces teams had access to more resources, such as equipment, planes and satellites, the British were especially good because they endlessly ran through war-game scenarios. They practised, over and over. They prepared. ‘Then when it all goes south,’ said the American admiringly, ‘they really know what to do.
Simon Reeve (Journeys to Impossible Places: By the presenter of BBC TV's WILDERNESS)
A scientific discovery in our time is likely to be not the work of a solitary researcher or a small team working with improvised equipment, but the product of a big team in an expensive lab operating with government funds. In such conditions the scientist is less and less likely to speak out against government policies. Today, for example, there is scarcely a physicist who thinks the Strategic Defense Initiative or its successor, National Missile Defense, can be made to work in anything like the way the Defense Department claims. Some disbelievers, however, accept government funds for the project in hopes of making an ancillary contribution to science, and cover their doubts with silence. The public has been lied to as a result, and billions of dollars have been wasted on an illusion.
Priscilla Johnson McMillan (The Ruin of J. Robert Oppenheimer & the Birth of the Modern Arms Race)
The Royal Navy had no fleet oilers, only tankers, which were not equipped with replenishment gear to refuel at sea.
William H. Garzke Jr. (Battleship Bismarck: A Design and Operational History)
The Pacific Fleet had four oilers equipped for underway replenishment of warships, but needed 25 for extended operations.
Alan Zimm (The Attack on Pearl Harbor: Strategy, Combat, Myths, Deceptions)
Which company is best for using construction Project work? The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project is a significant endeavor that encompasses the establishment and operation of a modern and advanced steel manufacturing facility. This project represents a fusion of innovation, cutting-edge technology, and industrial expertise, aimed at delivering high-quality steel products to meet the growing demands of various sectors. Key Features: State-of-the-Art Manufacturing Plant: The project involves the construction and operation of a state-of-the-art manufacturing plant equipped with the latest machinery, automation systems, and environmentally friendly processes. This allows for efficient production and reduced environmental impact. Diverse Product Range: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels aims to offer a diverse range of steel products to cater to different industries such as construction, automotive, infrastructure, and manufacturing. This versatility enables the company to meet the varying needs of clients and partners. Quality Assurance: A cornerstone of the project is its commitment to delivering high-quality steel products. The facility adheres to strict quality control measures and follows international standards to ensure that the end products are durable, reliable, and meet or exceed industry specifications. Sustainability Focus: The project places a strong emphasis on sustainability and environmentally conscious practices. Energy-efficient processes, recycling initiatives, and waste reduction strategies are integrated into the manufacturing process to minimize the ecological footprint. Employment Opportunities: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels contributes to local economies by creating employment opportunities across various skill levels, from skilled labor to technical experts. This helps stimulate economic growth in the region surrounding the manufacturing facility. Collaboration and Partnerships: The project fosters collaborations with suppliers, distributors, and clients, establishing strong relationships within the steel industry. This network facilitates efficient supply chain management and enables the company to provide tailored solutions to its customers. Innovation and Research: The project invests in research and development to constantly improve manufacturing processes, product quality, and the development of new steel products. This dedication to innovation positions the company at the forefront of the steel industry. Community Engagement: Shree Siva Balaaji Steels is committed to engaging with local communities and implementing corporate social responsibility initiatives. These efforts include supporting education, healthcare, and other community-centric projects, fostering goodwill and positive impact. Vision: The Shree Siva Balaaji Steels project envisions becoming a leading name in the steel manufacturing sector, renowned for its exceptional quality, technological innovation, and sustainability practices. By adhering to its core values of integrity, excellence, and environmental responsibility, the project strives to contribute positively to the industry and the communities it operates within.
shree sivabalaaji steels
Capital Expenditures A capital expenditure is the purchase of an item that’s considered a long-term investment, such as computer systems and equipment. Most companies follow the rule that any purchase over a certain dollar amount counts as a capital expenditure, while anything less is an operating expense. Operating expenses show up on the income statement, and thus reduce profit. Capital expenditures show up on the balance sheet; only the depreciation of a piece of capital equipment appears on the income statement. More on this in chapters 5 and 11
Karen Berman (Financial Intelligence: A Manager's Guide to Knowing What the Numbers Really Mean)
The Battle of Stalingrad during World War II was the largest battle in history. With it came equally staggering stories of how people dealt with risk. One came in late 1942, when a German tank unit sat in reserve on grasslands outside the city. When tanks were desperately needed on the front lines, something happened that surprised everyone: Almost none of them worked. Out of 104 tanks in the unit, fewer than 20 were operable. Engineers quickly found the issue. Historian William Craig writes: “During the weeks of inactivity behind the front lines, field mice had nested inside the vehicles and eaten away insulation covering the electrical systems.” The Germans had the most sophisticated equipment in the world. Yet there they were, defeated by mice.
Morgan Housel (The Psychology of Money)
your home or business is equipped to handle sudden outages provides immeasurable peace of mind. Emergency generators offer stability in uncertain times—allowing you to focus on taking care of loved ones or continuing your business operations without the added stress over power disruption. Staying one step ahead with appropriate preparation for various weather scenarios cannot be overstated the importance of installing quality emergency generators before disaster strikes cannot be underestimated either. Businesses like Long Island Emergency Power provide expertise in selecting and installing the right generator system tailored for specific needs ensuring that when lights go off across the island, yours stay on. Address: 2 Ocean Ave, Deer Park, NY, 11729 Hours: 8am - 5pm M-F Phone: (631) 586-7513 Company Email: joann@longislandemergencypower.com
Long Island Emergency Power
But that didn’t happen. Instead, a unit of about thirty1 Ukrainian soldiers wearing night vision goggles rode quad bikes through the forests around the capital that evening. They dismounted near the column’s head and launched jerry-rigged drones equipped with small explosives. These took out a handful of lead vehicles. Those disabled vehicles then clogged up the central road. Surrounding fields were muddy and impassable. The column, facing freezing weather and faltering supply lines, ground to a halt. Then the same small unit of drone operators managed to blow up a critical supply base using the same tactics, depriving the Russian army of fuel and food.
Mustafa Suleyman (The Coming Wave)
IRCC Announces Eligible Programs for PGWPs Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) has updated its guidelines regarding the programs eligible for a Post-Graduation Work Permit (PGWP). As of November 1, international graduates applying for a PGWP must meet additional field of study requirements to qualify for this essential work permit. Eligible Fields of Study for PGWPs The eligible fields of study for the PGWP correspond to the occupation-based Express Entry categories introduced by IRCC in 2023. These categories are aligned with national labor market demands and include the following: • Agriculture and Agri-Food • Healthcare • Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) • Trade • Transport Eligible programs in these fields are classified using the Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), a systematic approach to describing and categorizing educational programs in Canada, akin to the National Occupation Classification (NOC) system used for job classification. Below is a summary of selected instructional programs eligible for the PGWP, along with their respective CIP codes: CIP 2021 Title CIP 2021 Code Field of Study Category Agricultural business and management, general 01.0101 Agriculture and agri-food Animal/livestock husbandry and production 01.0302 Agriculture and agri-food Plant nursery operations and management 01.0606 Agriculture and agri-food Animal health 01.0903 Agriculture and agri-food Agronomy and crop science 01.1102 Agriculture and agri-food Special education and teaching, general 13.1001 Healthcare Exercise physiology 26.0908 Healthcare Physical therapy assistant 51.0806 Healthcare Polysomnography 51.0917 Healthcare Cytotechnology/cytotechnologist 51.1002 Healthcare Computer programming/programmer, general 11.0201 STEM Chemical engineering 14.0701 STEM Engineering mechanics 14.1101 STEM Water, wetlands and marine resources management 03.0205 STEM Computer graphics 11.0803 STEM Electrician 46.0302 Trade Heating, air conditioning, ventilation and refrigeration maintenance technology/technician 47.0201 Trade Machine tool technology/machinist 48.0501 Trade Insulator 46.0414 Trade Plumbing technology/plumber 46.0503 Trade Heavy equipment maintenance technology/technician 47.0302 Transport Air traffic controller 49.0105 Transport Truck and bus driver/commercial vehicle operator and instructor 49.0205 Transport Flight instructor 49.0108 Transport Transportation and materials moving, other 49.9999 Transport
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We hired security.” Dad glanced at Javi. “Viper Operations has been tracking you night and day, ensuring your safety. If you left the house, their monitoring equipment alerted them. You were never without a set of eyes protecting you, aside from your time at school.” Viper 10k weekly. The note in my father’s desk. Viper was Javier. Dad had been paying them to keep me safe. I gaped at Javier and Santino. “The party. You were there watching Reyna. And the dance …” Santino’s head moved side to side. “No, I was there watching you.
Jill Ramsower (Perfect Enemies (The Five Families, #6))
Now the equipment, organization, and tactics of an army were not achieved overnight: one must allow for a period of transition before a large mass of men could be trained to operate under unified command. Until towns arose and population was sufficiently concentrated, the prelude to war was an organized but one-sided display of power and bellicosity in raiding expeditions for wood, malachite, gold, slaves.
Lewis Mumford (Technics and Human Development (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 1))
Cedar Capital Group Tokyo: Owning vs Renting Heavy Equipment You have some projects underway. It is either you gear up and buy your own equipment, extend your company’s capabilities and add them these equipment to your business’ asset or you just need to rent a unit and cut the cost. How do you decide when to buy and rent the equipment anyway? We have learned a lot of pros and cons of renting and buying. It is important to evaluate your company’s current situation and capabilities including your financial plans to carefully consider which method you will use in acquiring the equipment. Here is a review of the things which you should bear in mind before deciding when to buy and when to rent equipment: 1. Budget The budget is one of the most important factors in any start of the business. Do you have enough capital to buy a new equipment? If so, will it be practical to use that money to buy or is it more rational to rent and save the cost? You should not look only on the first few months of operation but foresee the future need of the equipment to be used. Although buying may be a larger one-time financial outlay, the cost of renting can add up quickly, and over a long period of time can end up costing you more – especially if the equipment isn’t being used for the entire rental period. And don’t forget: when you own, you can see a return on your investment when you sell. 2. Duration of Project Time frame is important to know how long you will need the equipment. It is more practical to rent the machine if you are only using it for a short period of time. Renting also makes more sense if you are using the equipment for only a specific task. The risk, of course, is the increasing cost of rental when the equipment is not used the entire time. Fortunately, many rental companies in Singapore, Tokyo, Japan and Seoul South Korea only require payment for the actual time the machine is being used. On the other hand, if you are working on a long project and would be using the machine frequently, it is more advisable to buy your own equipment. The complaints on damage on the parts of the equipment can still be charged on you if you are renting it. It becomes worse if you wear the machine out so it would be better if you purchase your own.
Alana Barnet
This proposal for genetic control exposes the idea of control itself in its ultimate absurdity: the arrogant notion that finite minds, operating with the limited equipment of their particular culture and historic moment, will ever be qualified to exercise absolute control over the infinite future possibilities of human development.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
Oasis at Ground Zero Salvation Army representatives would certainly counsel you and pray with you if you wanted, and at Ground Zero the Salvationists in the shiny red “Chaplain” jackets were sought after for just that reason. Mainly, though, they were there to assist with more basic human needs: to wash out eyes stinging from smoke, and provide Blistex for parched lips and foot inserts for boots walking across hot metal. They operated hydration stations and snack canteens. They offered a place to rest, and freshly cooked chicken courtesy of Tyson’s. The day I arrived, they distributed 1500 phone cards for the workers to use in calling home. Every day they served 7500 meals. They offered an oasis of compassion in a wilderness of rubble. I had studied the maps in newspapers, but no two-dimensional representation could capture the scale of destruction. For about eight square blocks, buildings were deserted, their windows broken, jagged pieces of steel jutting out from floors high above the street. Thousands of offices equipped with faxes, phones, and computers, sat vacant, coated in debris. On September 11, people were sitting there punching keys, making phone calls, grabbing a cup of coffee to start the day, and suddenly it must have seemed like the world was coming to an end. I studied the faces of the workers, uniformly grim. I didn’t see a single smile at Ground Zero. How could you smile in such a place? It had nothing to offer but death and destruction, a monument to the worst that human beings can do to each other. I saw three booths set up in a vacant building across from the WTC site: Police Officers for Christ, Firemen for Christ, and Sanitation Workers for Christ. (That last one is a charity I’d like to support.) Salvation Army chaplains had told me that the police and fire had asked for two prayer services a day, conducted on the site. The Red Cross, a nonsectarian organization, had asked if the Salvationists would mind staffing it. “Are you kidding? That’s what we’re here for!” Finding God in Unexpected Places
Philip Yancey (Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey)
The men got off and started to unload their equipment. Most carried AK-47 or Pakistani G-3 rifles. The luggage consisted of ammunition boxes, radio sets and the feared RPG rocket launchers. The Heckler & Koch G-3s had been captured in a firefight from the Pakistani Frontier Corps last month. A tall man with a military bearing walked over and joined the Tajik officer.
Siddhartha Thorat (Operation 'Fox-Hunt')
Cedar Capital Group Tokyo Review of Stats Shows Decrease in Mortality Rate in Construction Sites Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan construction industry is one of the riskiest industries to work with. Not only do they have to deal with falling debris but workers also have to be aware of faulty wirings, defective equipment and weather warnings. Workers even sometimes have to lose their lives in the midst of construction. These circumstances are inevitable and precautions were already implemented even at the start of training. Yet, it cannot be denied that construction is one of the most lucrative businesses in the world today. Everywhere we go, we see buildings being built and establishments being constructed. We see new structures in developed nations. New York, America, Tokyo, Japan, Beijing, China and Seoul, South Korea are some of the leading cities which feature new construction projects almost everyday. Singapore is also not left behind. Considered as one of the most flourishing countries in the world, the little island-city has prided itself with new infrastructure projects and promise a thousand more to come. It came no surprise that the country’s journey towards urbanization was held liable for the deaths of hundreds of construction workers in the previous years. Just recently, though, Singapore has declared their concern on the number of fatalities there are in a construction project. If not of deaths, accidents resulting to fractures and minor and major injuries are also experienced in other neighboring countries. Cedar Capital Group in Tokyo Japan, one the distributor of heavy capital equipment in the country, reports to have dozens of death in the last 4 years of their operation. This, as they claim, is one of the reasons why there is a large scarcity in job application related to construction. Many companies are also faced with numerous complaints because of these deaths and injuries. According to further review, approximately one-quarter of the deaths result from exposure to hazardous substances which cause such disabling illnesses as cancer and cardiovascular, respiratory and nervous-system disorders. Analysts even warn that work-related diseases are expected to double by the year 2020 and that if improvements are not implemented now, exposures today will kill people by the year 2020. Surprisingly, though, while people are being troubled with the number of casualties in the construction sector, recent studies and statistics show fewer deaths in construction sector in the first half of the year. Specifically in Singapore, Manpower Ministry has announced only 8 death reports compared to the 17 deaths in 2014. Although this is not a reason to celebrate since there are still fatalities, Singapore’s Contractual Association stated that this is an improvement as it shows the effectiveness of the recent awareness programs and training seminars conducted across the island-city. The country aims to clear all fatalities for the next succeeding years.
Jackie Legaspi
For All in the Family and the many shows it spawned, the generation gap merged with class distinctions as the new generation seemed less held back by class than by culture. Mature white working-class men in popular culture, therefore, would be hard-pressed to have values in any enviable sense. This came to the fore in August 1974, when actor Carroll O’Connor refused to show up on the set while replacement workers did the jobs of striking electrical equipment operators at CBS. His nearly month-long show of solidarity single-handedly halted production of All in the Family, earning him the wrath of the producers, television critics, and fans alike. Meantime, his otherwise politically progressive co-stars saw little wrong with going to work in the midst of a strike and treated O’Connor as a bit of an oddity. “I don’t think he has any support anywhere,” remarked Jean Stapleton who played Edith; “It was very noble-sounding, but not, uh, wise.
Jefferson R. Cowie (Stayin’ Alive: The 1970s and the Last Days of the Working Class)
So my approach to troubleshooting is I go into the plant. The first thing I do before we change anything on the equipment is make the people operate it correctly. Stop screaming, stop poking all the animals with electric prods, bring up smaller groups. And then I see how it works. Then I go, “Okay. He’s balking at seeing a lady standing there writing down cattle IDs. All right, get a big piece of cardboard, I'll cover her up. He’ll balking at the restrainer. I'll turn a light on the restrainer entrance. 'So I just do a lot of little things, a lot of modifications with lights and cardboard to see if I can get it to work. And then after I’ve done that I go, “Well this is hopeless. You're going to have to build a new system, or we can fix it with these changes.” There’s an awful lot of systems where it’s certainly not a system I would want to copy, but I can make it work. The plant can live with it.
Robert Greene (Interviews with the Masters: A Companion to Robert Greene's Mastery)