Familiar Of Zero Quotes

He tilted his head. “Standard protocol?” “Yup.” “How many times have you done this?” “Zero. But I am familiar with the trope.

Standard protocol?" "Yup." "How many times have you done this?" "Zero. But I'm familiar with the trope." "The...what?" He blinked at her confused.

Our city, these streets, I don't know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty facades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero.

Zero. But I am familiar with the trope.” “The . . . what?” He blinked at her, confused.

Finally—and this is the seventh familiar theme of Venezuelan socialism—there is getting rich off politics. Once again, that does not occur in Scandinavia. There is not a single politician in Norway, Sweden or Denmark who has gone from zero to $10 million—or $200 million—while largely employed in the public sector.

The rules of the game have changed. The number of players has increased. New cartels spring up quickly, devouring territories and entire regions. It’s crazy making, all these new cartels. More flexible structures, faster responses, familiarity with new technology, ostentatiously lurid killings, and obscure, pseudoreligious philosophies. It is altogether a new level of frenzy.

Four years. Four years of sitting side by side on the bus, at lunch, even in classes, and Nathan's voice was only somewhat familiar to me. I liked it that way. For us, there was a camaraderie in the silence. Zero expectations, but all of the comfort of knowing someone else was there for you if needed.

How many times have you done this?” “Zero. But I am familiar with the trope.” “The . . . what?” He blinked at her, confused.

And if you were not trained, the lesser members of the galaxy that had become visible were so many as to drown the familiar constellations. The night was wild with suns.

It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there.

Blair thinks about it for a moment and then says slowly, evenly, “If Cliff slept with Didi, then he must have slept with … Raoul.” “Who’s Raoul?” Alana and Kim ask at the same time. I open my menu and pretend to read it, wondering if I slept with Raoul. Name seems familiar.

Our city, these streets, I don’t know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. [. . .] And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That’s the city. That’s when I remember what the Chinese girl said. This was never any place I was meant to be.

Our city, these streets, I don’t know why it makes me so depressed. That old familiar gloom that befalls the city dweller, regular as due dates, cloudy as mental Jell-O. The dirty façades, the nameless crowds, the unremitting noise, the packed rush-hour trains, the gray skies, the billboards on every square centimeter of available space, the hopes and resignation, irritation and excitement. And everywhere, infinite options, infinite possibilities. An infinity, and at the same time, zero. We try to scoop it all up in our hands, and what we get is a handful of zero. That’s the city. That’s when I remember what that Chinese girl said. This was never any place I was meant to be.

The world is made of fields—substances spread through all of space that we notice through their vibrations, which appear to us as particles. The electric field and the gravitational field might seem familiar, but according to quantum field theory even particles like electrons and quarks are really vibrations in certain kinds of fields. • The Higgs boson is a vibration in the Higgs field, just as a photon of light is a vibration in the electromagnetic field. • The four famous forces of nature arise from symmetries—changes we can make to a situation without changing anything important about what happens. (Yes, it makes no immediate sense that “a change that doesn’t make a difference” leads directly to “a force of nature” . . . but that was one of the startling insights of twentieth-century physics.) • Symmetries are sometimes hidden and therefore invisible to us. Physicists often say that hidden symmetries are “broken,” but they’re still there in the underlying laws of physics—they’re simply disguised in the immediately observable world. • The weak nuclear force, in particular, is based on a certain kind of symmetry. If that symmetry were unbroken, it would be impossible for elementary particles to have mass. They would all zip around at the speed of light. • But most elementary particles do have mass, and they don’t zip around at the speed of light. Therefore, the symmetry of the weak interactions must be broken. • When space is completely empty, most fields are turned off, set to zero. If a field is not zero in empty space, it can break a symmetry. In the case of the weak interactions, that’s the job of the Higgs field. Without it, the universe would be an utterly different place.   Got

THE IRIS OF THE EYE WAS TOO BIG TO HAVE BEEN FABRICATED AS A single rigid object. It had been built, beginning about nine hundred years ago, out of links that had been joined together into a chain; the two ends of the chain then connected to form a loop. The method would have seemed familiar to Rhys Aitken, who had used something like it to construct Izzy’s T3 torus. For him, or anyone else versed in the technological history of Old Earth, an equally useful metaphor would have been that it was a train, 157 kilometers long, made of 720 giant cars, with the nose of the locomotive joined to the tail of the caboose so that it formed a circular construct 50 kilometers in diameter. An even better analogy would have been to a roller coaster, since its purpose was to run loop-the-loops forever. The “track” on which the “train” ran was a circular groove in the iron frame of the Eye, lined with the sensors and magnets needed to supply electrodynamic suspension, so that the whole thing could spin without actually touching the Eye’s stationary frame. This was an essential design requirement given that the Great Chain had to move with a velocity of about five hundred meters per second in order to supply Earth-normal gravity to its inhabitants. Each of the links had approximately the footprint of a Manhattan city block on Old Earth. And their total number of 720 was loosely comparable to the number of such blocks that had once existed in the gridded part of Manhattan, depending on where you drew the boundaries—it was bigger than Midtown but smaller than Manhattan as a whole. Residents of the Great Chain were acutely aware of the comparison, to the point where they were mocked for having a “Manhattan complex” by residents of other habitats. They were forever freeze-framing Old Earth movies or zooming around in virtual-reality simulations of pre-Zero New York for clues as to how street and apartment living had worked in those days. They had taken as their patron saint Luisa, the eighth survivor on Cleft, a Manhattanite who had been too old to found her own race. Implicit in that was that the Great Chain—the GC, Chaintown, Chainhattan—was a place that people might move to when they wanted to separate themselves from the social environments of their home habitats, or indeed of their own races. Mixed-race people were more common there than anywhere else.

Come on, show me what you got” Shelby said throwing a set of gear to wing before pulling on a pair of gloves herself “I'll try not to hurt you too badly” “how reassuring” Wing said pulling on his gloves he had been giving Shelby hand-to-hand combat training for some time back at H.I.V.E And what she lacked in technique she made up for in speed and cunning. “Bring it” Shelby said with a grin raising both gloves in a defensive stance and beckoning him towards her “It will be brought” Wing replied. He feinted to her left and she went to block as he simultaneously swung a low blow into her other side, carefully pulling his punch so that he just tapped her. “Two perhaps three broken ribs” Wing said matter of factly “maintain your guard” Shelby nodded and took a quick jab at his jaw which wing blocked effortlessly “Try not to look where you are striking you betray your intentions” They went on like that for a couple more minutes just as in their previous sparring sessions Wing noticed that once they began Shelby became totally focused. There were none of this smart comments or sarcasm that she'd normally used - she was suddenly deadly serious. “Broken job possible unconsciousness” Wing said calmly as he struck her passed her guard stopping his fist millimetres from her chin. “Oh my God” Shelby gasped suddenly, staring in shock at something over wings shoulder. He spun around, his guard raised. Shelby dropped low swinging her leg out, sweeping Wing's feet out from under him and sending him crashing to the floor. “Wounded pride, possible humiliation” Shelby said with a grin offering her hand to Wing and pulling him up off the floor. “and so ends today's lesson” she said pulling off her head guard. “an unconventional tactic” Wing said with a nod, taking off his own helmet. “but a successful one none the less” “ I kinda like unconventional tactics” Shelby said stepping towards him. “never underestimate the power of surprise” She grabbed the back of his neck and kissed him for a few long seconds. “what was that about maintaining your guard?” she said with a smile as she pulled away from him. “sometimes one should let ones guard down” Wing said staring at her for a moment before drawing her towards him and kissed her back. “Er...guys?” a familiar voice said causing Wing and Shelby to spring apart. “Dr Nero wants you to report to the briefing room” Wing winced slightly as he saw Nigel and Franz standing in the doorway. Nigel was looking pointedly at the floor and Franz was staring at him and Shelby, his mouth hanging open in surprise. “come on big guy - no rest for the wicked” Shelby said to Wing with a grin, taking his hand and dragging him out of the room past Nigel and the stunned looking Franz.

You are familiar with The Decline of the West, in which Oswald Spengler takes note of the current decadence of painting, as well as literature and music, and concludes that the end of our cultural epoch has arrived. He is a philosopher, but one descended from the natural sciences. He arranges observations, he records insights and knowledge. He takes a graphic view of history. And if he sees that a line curves downward, he considers the trend a proven fact, so that zero must be reached at a particular time and place. And that moment represents the end, the decline of the West! "But his graphing has no bearing on any of my ideas and plans as architect and politician. I study the reasons why the line curves downward, and I try to remove the causes. But at the same time, I examine the reasons why at an earlier time the line curved upward! And then I set out to restore the conditions of that day, to awake anew the creative wall of that time, and to bring about a new crest in the constantly fluctuating curve of history. "No doubt about it! Our culture has entered on stagnation, it looks like old age. But the reasons for this state do not lie in the fact that it has genuinely passed its manhood, but rather that the upholders of this culture, the Germanic-European peoples, have neglected it and have turned their attention to material tasks, to technology, industry, to hunger for material possessions, to rapacity, and to an economic egocentrism that overwhelms everything else. All their thinking and striving reaches its only climax in account books and in the outward show of the worldly goods they possess. "I am overcome with disgust, a vexing scorn, when I see the way such people live and behave! [ . . . ] But thank God, it is only the top ten thousand who think along these lines. It is true that the whole of the bourgeoisie is already strongly infected and sickly. But bourgeois youth are still healthy and can be shown the way back to nature, to a higher development, to new cultural will, provided only that they do not become enmeshed in the treadmill of meaningless and wholly materialistic contemporary life, only to drown either in the cupidity of business or in the tedium of the middle-class workaday routine or in the corruption of the big city. “If we succeed in replacing the egocentric cupidity of business with a socialist communal wall and a work-affirming responsibility for the common-weal; in abolishing the tedium of middle-class workaday monotony by substituting for it the potential enjoyment of personal liberty, the beauty of nature, the splendor of our own Fatherland and the thousandfold diversity of the rest of the world; and if we put an end to the corruption of omnipresent degeneracy, bred in the warrens of buildings and on the asphalt streets of the cities of millions - then the road is clear to a new life, to a new creative will, to a new flight of the free, healthy spirit and mind. And then, my dear Herr Roselius, your bricks will form themselves into entirely new shapes all by themselves. Temples of life will be built, cathedrals of a higher cult will be raised, and even thousands of years later, the walls will bear witness to the exalted times out of which even more exalted ones were bom!” When Roselius had left Hitler’s room with me, he took my hand and said: “Wagener, I thank you for having made this hour possible. What a man! And how small we feel, concerned as we are with those things that preoccupy us! But now I know' what I have to do! In spite of my sixty years, I have only one goal: to join in the work of helping the young people and the German Volk to find internal and external freedom!

Of course, it’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

the second derivative conveys just the idea we want—a comparison between the value at x and the average value near x. It is worth noting that if f is linear, then the average of f(x - h) and f(x + h) will be equal to f(x), which fits with the familiar fact that the second derivative of a linear function f is zero.

If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.

Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

Children are enthusiastic. They are naïve. They can take an idea and run with it. And they have zero baggage. They are genuinely unaware that what they are thinking of has been done before, and this is the kind of mindset that allows them to start from somewhere familiar and get somewhere new.

I know that oil is limited, and that every well, whether fracked or not, ultimately decays to zero. But shale is different from every other kind of oil-procurement technique. Shale wells get used up at a rate almost 10 times faster than other oil projects and therefore force shale oil producers into constantly chasing more activity in successively less and less promising acreage, to just stay even. That is entirely unique for shale. In order to actually grow, shale oil companies need an absolutely furious pace of investment and drilling, paying off early investors and bondholders, attracting new investors, and spending ever more capital. That outline for continued success sounds familiar in many ways to me.

Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.

I was frightened out of my wits but I was catching a familiar, addictive adrenaline wave. I was ready to taunt the reaper.

The data team would collect as much information as possible about potential voters, including age, race, ethnicity, voting history, and magazine subscriptions, among other things. Each person was given a score, ranging from zero to one hundred, in each of three categories: probability of voting, probability of voting for Hillary, and probability, if they were undecided, that they could be persuaded to vote for her. These scores determined which voters got contacted by the campaign and in which manner—a television spot, an ad on their favorite website, a knock on their door, or a piece of direct mail. “It’s a grayscale,” said a campaign aide familiar with the operation. “You start with the people who are the best targets and go down until you run out of resources.

Sheridan said, “I think I’m right. That’s why I’m never going to listen to old music. I’m only going to listen to what’s new on the radio.” “You might change your mind when you get older,” Joe said. “Don’t you think you’ll miss the songs you’re familiar with?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the new songs will be better.” “It’s possible. But don’t you find that certain songs remind you of certain things in your life? That when you hear a specific song it takes you back to when you were listening to it?” “Well, yeah,” she said. “But then I’d be thinking backward and not forward. I’d be on the way to geezerhood.

THE SUN CAME UP a baleful smear in the sky, not quite shapeless, in fact able to assume the appearance of a device immediately recognizable yet unnamable, so widely familiar that the inability to name it passed from simple frustration to a felt dread, whose intricacy deepened almost moment to moment . . . its name a word of power, not to be spoken aloud, not even to be remembered in silence. All around lay ambushes of the bad ice, latent presences, haunting all transaction, each like the infinitesimal circle converging toward zero that mathematicians now and then find use for. A silver-gray, odorless, silent exit from the upper world. . . . The sun might be visible from time to time, with or without clouds, but the sky was more neutral-density gray than blue. Out on the promontory grew some even-textured foliage, in this light a blazing, virtually shadowless green, and breaking down at the base of the headland was the sea-green sea, the ice-green, glass-green sea. Hunter

The secret to financial success is to be more familiar with your money and yourself than your own skin color.

When one looks at the numbers, the situation becomes even more perplexing. The effect of lambda grows steadily with respect to the familiar Newtonian force of gravity as the Universe gets bigger. If it is only recently becoming the dominant force, after billions of years of expansion of the Universe, it must have started out enormously smaller than the Newtonian force. The distance of that final minimum energy level in Figure 8.14 from the zero line in order to explain the value of lambda inferred from the supernova observations is bizarre: roughly 10^-120 - that is, 1 divided by 10 followed by 119 zeros! This is the smallest number ever encountered in science. Why is it not zero? How can the minimum level be tuned so precisely? If it were 10 followed by just 117 zeros, then the galaxies could not form. Extraordinary fine tuning is needed to explain such extreme numbers. Extraordinary fine tuning is needed to explain such extreme numbers. And, if this were not bad enough, the vacuum seems to have its own defence mechanism to prevent us finding easy answers to this problem. Even if inflation does have some magical property which we have so far missed that would set the vacuum energy exactly to zero when inflation ends, it would not stay like that. As the Universe keeps on expanding and cooling it passes through several temperatures at which the breaking of a symmetry occurs in a potential landscape, rather like that which occurs in the example of the magnet that we saw at the beginning of the chapter. Every time this happens, a new contribution to the vaccum energy is liberated and contributes to a new lambda term that is always vastly bigger than our observation allows. And, by 'vastly bigger' here, we don't just mean that it is a few times bigger than the value inferred from observations, so that in the future some small correction to the calculations, or change in the trend of the observations, might make theory and observation fit hand in glove. We are talking about an overestimate by a factor of about 10 followed by 120 zeros! You can't get much more wrong than that.

doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar.

To gain any intuitive understanding of the breakdown of this ultimate symmetry through vacuum effects at the critical 10^-44 seconds after the Big Bang, we will have to resort to examples in the space of our experience. Starting at that critical instant, gravity assumes a part of its own, distinct from the other three forces; these remain unified up to another branching point at 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang. Up to it, they are jointly described by what the physicist calls a GUT, a grand unified theory. This theory joins the conjoined electroweak force and the strong force by means of an interaction we know very little of, and which we will call the GUT force. At 10^-36 seconds after the Big Bang, the strong force split off from the unified weak and electromagnetic forces. The range of the GUT force then is miniscule, close to zero, while that of the other forces remains infinite. The theory that describes the development of our universe from the second branch point at 10^-36 seconds to a third one at about 10^-10 seconds after the Big Bang, we know quite well, and it has acquired the familiar name of the standard model of particle interactions. To be more precise, we should specify "of the strong and electroweak interactions." The breaking of GUT symmetry is accompanied by an effect of enormous importance for the development of our universe. This effect, called inflation, describes the unimaginably rapid growth of the universe by a factor of 10^50 in the miniscule time span of 10^-33 seconds. We will discuss this inflation together with the breaking of GUT symmetry. The overall symmetry breaking across the three branch points we mentioned was accomplished by the time our universe had reached the mature age of 10^-10 seconds; by this time, the forces were much as we know them today, with their diverging strengths and ranges. Of the present forces, only gravity, electromagnetism, and the color force retain infinite range, just like the unified force prior to the first branch point. It is the Higgs field that must be held responsible for the fact that the weak force and the GUT force lost infinite range when it pervaded our space. To visualize this, recall from Chapter 7 how the Higgs field gives masses to the particles that interact with it, including the exchange particles of the weak and the GUT interaction. The larger the mass of an exchange particle, the smaller the range of the force it transmits. Conversely, infinite range can be realized only by forces that are carried by massless field particles.

In India, as in other poor countries, we have a line that is invisible and abstract and yet more powerful and pervasive than anything the West or the Japanese have invented. It is called the poverty line. Above the poverty line are three meals a day. Below it is a spectrum that stretches all the way from 2.99 to zero meals. As familiar as a clothes-line, most people in India spend their entire lives trying to reach out beyond it. It is their greatest aspiration. If you are fortunate, if the gods smile and you are lucky, you may get a glimpse of it. You can’t see the line, you can’t touch it, and five hundred million people are trying to get to it.

But because we need to quantify exactly how confused we are, and at what moment that confusion sets in, we call this the Planck Time,XIII and it encompasses the time from zero to about 10-43 seconds. If you’re not familiar with the notation, 10-43 seconds is equal to one second divided by 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (that’s 1 followed by 43 zeros). Suffice it to say, this is an unimaginably small amount of time. And, to be clear, it’s not that we necessarily can explain everything from the Planck Time on, but that we currently definitely cannot explain anything before it.

Nate used his left foot to block a determined Zero from escaping before closing his door with the intention to begin the next step in his own plan. His Plan B if you're keeping track ‒ once again hoping that Twitch had stayed put ‒ and which first required that he be granted his second out of the afternoon. Upon hearing the customary creak of a more tangible step ‒ the second from the bottom on the wooden staircase, which had become gradually loosened from the risers above and below it over time ‒ his mother did an about face from the bar, where she was making last minute modifications to her shopping list. The sound by then had become oddly comforting to each family member ‒ for separate but similar reasons. The step itself been repaired in just minutes, years prior when Dr. Lansing added five nails to the tread. But one evening many months ago it just as abruptly reappeared. Nate was the first to notice when, as Natalie bounded up the stairs ‒ which she so often did en route to his room ‒ it matter-of-factly announced its return. He pondered for the briefest moment if he hadn't simply imagined it, recalling several prior occasions when he'd become temporarily convinced that the faint but familiar cries of X-Ray were whispering to him from directly below his window ‒ though leading to anticlimax in each instance. Before knocking however, Natalie placated his incredulity. "It's back!” she exclaimed with typical unfettered enthusiasm, while smiling unseen from just beyond his closed door. Although he failed to demonstrate even a remotely comparable level of excitement, it turned into a pleasant reunification for Nate nonetheless, and this time ‒ due perhaps in equal parts to its' lesser prioritization and his greater procrastination ‒ their father had left well enough alone. During its previous incarnation it had been labeled by Ms. Lansing as the Cat's Bell due to its function as an auditory cue of the comings and goings in the home, although the cats themselves sauntered about far too lightly to bring about any noticeable effect.. Nate had become so attuned to its mildly disquieting creaks and more subtle wooden groans as to discern ‒ even when his door was closed ‒ whether Natalie had been specifically intent on visiting him, or was instead merely passing by along the way to her own room. A distinction which was due primarily to an initial amplified vibration that he decided brought to mind the recoil of a springboard, then followed by a sequence of forward gliding leaps rather than her usual evenly paced yet swift footsteps.

Tell me, Morrac,” Celene said, and paused to sip her tea. “You study mathematics. Are you familiar with the number zero?” “Yes, Your Radiance,” Morrac said after a moment of silence, when it became clear that the question was not rhetorical. He took the teacup Celene’s servant offered him with scarcely concealed irritation. “Excellent. That is the number of students at your university who do not come from noble blood. I confess to some disappointment in that matter, Chancelier Morrac, as I had hoped to see some improvement since our last talk.

we instinctively zero in on dangers that are unusual or immediate, while paying much less attention to hazards that unfold more slowly or in a more familiar way.

He imagined light-years grand in scale, across swells, plumes of regions eaten by nebula, phosphorous like drifts of sight wielding star formations take on familiar shapes that carve themselves into an elegance of primordial absolute and fundamental gasses, decaying time to near zero where gravitational densities near infinity. He imagined that a silent cosmos isn't silent nor is empty space empty at all, yet is filled with energies immensurable. And how orchestrations of temperatures created centuries in seconds. Plasma bursts off of exotic stars threading to theories non-existent. Fabric waves of elementary particles with direct ties to quantum fields, slices into the shifts of dimensions, Sam would think staring out into the darkness of space.

It’s your other heart,” a familiar voice said from the door.  “Your groundteam harvested it for you.  In the middle of Dayut.  During happy hour.  It was on the news.

have spoken to you before about the ocean of consciousness. About its sublime immensity, about how terrifying it is to behold. It is the eyes, laden with an entire world trapped in a moment of perspective, which express the terrifying consciousness of the other. To suffer the infernal gaze of the other is to witness another consciousness recognizing you. Not the frozen eyes of the dead or the sheathed daggers of the dreaming, but the waking, attentive other. It is to have this terrific alien consciousness confront you and elude you with its mysteries; with its secret history, which it will not reveal to you; with its endlessness, which you shall never capture. Conversely, when you gaze into the mirror and look yourself in the eyes, you see nothing but a blank appearance. You feel nothing but the pacific and neutral zero of totality. You do not feel the same apprehension, the same sense of mystery or unpredictability. Everything behind those familiar eyes is already clarified. Your reflected gaze is, in fact, mute, because it signifies nothing except the very act constituting it. Yet the closest you will come to seeing the other— not merely her corpse, but her and her existence —is by looking her in the eyes. When you return her gaze, you are struck by the possibility of her history, of her present being like an immortal’s never-finished painting covered in centuries of layers. What would otherwise be just an animated object in the world, no different to the wind or an earthquake, instead presents itself, like you as you know yourself, as an embodied soul. An immaterial subject, somehow present in the flesh. And what is love except the ceaseless attempt at capturing this subjectivity of the other without simultaneously compromising her autonomy? This autonomy, which she requires in order to return your love and therefore complete it. It envelops the patience of long marriage; the unity of welded lives, tastes, preferences, and ambitions. I looked at Sophia; I looked in her eyes. I looked at her and I loved her; I looked at her and I loved; I tried to look at her and I tried to love her.

The tax-deferred accounts with which Americans are most familiar are 401(k)s and Individual Retirement Accounts (more commonly known as IRAs). Other tax-deferred accounts, such as 403(b)s, 457s, SIMPLES, SEPs, and Keoghs, have different rules that apply to them, but they all generally have two things in common: Contributions are tax-deductible. Generally, when you put money into this bucket, you get a tax deduction. For example, if you make $100,000 this year, and you put $10,000 into your 401(k), your new taxable income is $90,000. Distributions are treated as ordinary income. When you divert a portion of your income to a tax-deferred investment, all you’re really doing is postponing the receipt of that income until a point in time much further down the road. When you take the money out, you pay taxes at whatever the rate happens to be in the year you make the distribution. For that reason, the IRS calls these distributions ordinary income and taxes them accordingly.

In general, though, new leaders are perceived as more credible when they display these characteristics: Demanding but able to be satisfied. Effective leaders get people to make realistic commitments and then hold them responsible for achieving results. But if you’re never satisfied, you’ll sap people’s motivation. Know when to celebrate success and when to push for more. Accessible but not too familiar. Being accessible does not mean making yourself available indiscriminately. It means being approachable, but in a way that preserves your authority. Decisive but judicious. New leaders communicate their capacity to take charge, perhaps by rapidly making some low-consequence decisions, without jumping too quickly into decisions that they aren’t ready to make. Early in your transition, you want to project decisiveness but defer some decisions until you know enough to make the right calls. Focused but flexible. Avoid setting up a vicious cycle and alienating others by coming across as rigid and unwilling to consider multiple solutions. Effective new leaders establish authority by zeroing in on issues but consulting others and encouraging input. They also know when to give people the flexibility to achieve results in their own ways. Active without causing commotion. There’s a fine line between building momentum and overwhelming your group or unit. Make things happen, but avoid pushing people to the point of burnout. Learn to pay attention to stress levels and pace yourself and others. Willing to make tough calls but humane. You may have to make tough calls right away, including letting go of marginal performers. Effective new leaders do what needs to be done, but they do it in ways that preserve people’s dignity and that others perceive as fair.

Why You Should Build a Personal Skin Health care Ritual One of the main items that anyone should learn in personal life is how to properly manage their epidermis. Our epidermis can be the major organ and is normally linked to our important organs in our human body. For this cause only, we should twin the treatment it desires for an improved personal life. The ideal way of doing this is normally to build a very good personal pores and skin treatment routine - the one which you can absolutely use for your long-term skin area goals. Why is this important? For one, we all have distinct skin area types and we also live in several circumstances. What performs for one person might not do the job that very well to another. It can be as well not really about how precisely pricey your items will be. No matter how magnificent your epidermis care products happen to be, your epidermis is usually not really heading to glimpse the approach you prefer it to if you don’t commit to applying it constantly. Actually if you possess all the know-how about epidermis attention and products, it takes determination to basically execute what you find out. Setting up the personal skin care and attention habit is certainly likewise crucial since in cases where you simply adhere to what you see in other folks, it is normally certainly not heading to get a personal experience and it will not indicate a issue anyhow. When you adhere to your very own skin area health care routine, it is usually hence many better to do it in the long-term. This is definitely because you in my opinion select to do it and it can be something you will be heading to conveniently familiarize yourself. Zero one else can create a good great personal epidermis good care instruction for yourself other than you. You know your skin and you personally really know what it demands. You simply demand to religiously follow your pores and skin care and attention guidebook and carry out your skin care habit. In no period, you can achieve a particular skin area target that you possess usually needed.

When the clock is ticking, the best thin-slicers tap into a personal database of experience that allows them to spot familiar patterns, pitfalls, and possibilities in a problem. While novices get bogged down gathering and parsing irrelevant information, running up blind alleys and analyzing doomed courses of action, experts cut straight to the chase, zeroing in on the key data and then leaping to the best solution.

Familiar with the commonplace male disdain for women who enjoyed an adventurous sex life that either excluded or no longer included them, Strike continued asking questions that were designed purely to assess how much credence should be given to any information Saxon had to offer. He had a feeling the answer might be zero.

I promised myself that I would not treat anyone the way you treated me. I sure as heck know how it felt first hand, so how could I ever do this to another soul? Yet after freeing myself, I found myself attracted to the same old familiar patterns just with new faces. After finally awakening from this nightmare that was stuck on repeat, I was amazed at how easy it was to slip and stay in old behaviors. Wasn't I worth more than the zero effort to change? Yes I am and I will.

single or index variables. As an example, consider the dependent variable “high school violence,” discussed in Chapter 2. We ask: “What are the most important, distinct factors affecting or causing high school violence?” Some plausible factors are (1) student access to weapons, (2) student isolation from others, (3) peer groups that are prone to violence, (4) lack of enforcement of school nonviolence policies, (5) participation in anger management programs, and (6) familiarity with warning signals (among teachers and staff). Perhaps you can think of other factors. Then, following the strategies discussed in Chapter 3—conceptualization, operationalization, and index variable construction—we use either single variables or index measures as independent variables to measure each of these factors. This approach provides for the inclusion of programs or policies as independent variables, as well as variables that measure salient rival hypotheses. The strategy of full model specification requires that analysts not overlook important factors. Thus, analysts do well to carefully justify their model and to consult past studies and interview those who have direct experience with, or other opinions about, the research subject. Doing so might lead analysts to include additional variables, such as the socioeconomic status of students’ parents. Then, after a fully specified model has been identified, analysts often include additional variables of interest. These may be variables of lesser relevance, speculative consequences, or variables that analysts want to test for their lack of impact, such as rival hypotheses. Demographic variables, such as the age of students, might be added. When additional variables are included, analysts should identify which independent variables constitute the nomothetic explanation, and which serve some other purpose. Remember, all variables included in models must be theoretically justified. Analysts must argue how each variable could plausibly affect their dependent variable. The second part of “all of the variables that affect the dependent variable” acknowledges all of the other variables that are not identified (or included) in the model. They are omitted; these variables are not among “the most important factors” that affect the dependent variable. The cumulative effect of these other variables is, by definition, contained in the error term, described later in this chapter. The assumption of full model specification is that these other variables are justifiably omitted only when their cumulative effect on the dependent variable is zero. This approach is plausible because each of these many unknown variables may have a different magnitude, thus making it possible that their effects cancel each other out. The argument, quite clearly, is not that each of these other factors has no impact on the dependent variable—but only that their cumulative effect is zero. The validity of multiple regression models centers on examining the behavior of the error term in this regard. If the cumulative effect of all the other variables is not zero, then additional independent variables may have to be considered. The specification of the multiple regression model is as follows:

Slowly, I turned around. There were people on the floor. They were the things that were withering. Things. Insignificant. Moaning. Trying to sit up. Annoying. I walked toward them, each step purposeful. Something moved to the right of me. I looked. It was big and reaching out to me. Hercules. Gods, I did not like him. Lifting my hand, I sent him flying backward. My attention zeroed on the dark-haired pure-blood with silvery eyes. He was shielding someone. Blood trickled from his nose. Oh, yeah, I really did not like him. Couldn’t quite grasp why, but I knew I’d be thoroughly pleased if I made him go splat. I lifted my hand. “Seth! No,” a female shouted. The voice was familiar. It did something to me. Distracted me. “Seth!” A stinging sensation shot across my left forearm, and I spun around, lifting my arm as I summoned akasha. It coiled, rushing down my arm. “Seth,” she whispered. Her voice stopped me, reached in and shook me. The whitish-amber light fizzled out. I looked down and saw blue eyes—Josie. My Josie. And then I saw what she held in her hand. That soft hand trembled, but it was not empty. She clutched the blade. I opened my mouth, but no sound came out. My legs gave out below me, and Josie dropped the stake. I heard it clang off the floor and then I heard nothing. There was nothing.

Context had reinforced familiarity, and familiarity had blinded them to new possibilities.

Presently, when the million dial was at zero, I slackened speed. I began to recognize our own petty and familiar architecture, the thousands hand ran back to the starting-point, the night and day flapped slower and slower. Then the old walls of the laboratory came round me. Very gently, now, I slowed the mechanism down.