Fav Place Quotes

But as the weeks rolled on, I realized it wasn’t a lack of glamour that was bothering me. Instead, I kept thinking back to a line Valerie liked to include in her commencements: “Put yourself in the path of lightning.” For just one night, a seventeen-minute comedy monologue was the center of political attention. It was the place to address controversies, to take shots at opponents, to project confidence to the public we served. Now, however, lightning was once again striking the campaign trail. More and more speeches—for both the president and senior staff—were the ones I could not legally write. I kind of liked having job security. I kind of loved drinking Kennedy Center beer. But nothing was as intoxicating as being part of the action. Not long after the dinner, I asked Favs if I could leave the White House for the campaign. He agreed, but proposed a plan that kept me in Washington: I would work on political speeches for POTUS, but from the Democratic National Committee in D.C. Which is how I found myself, a few weeks later, standing beside a conference table covered in turkey pinwheels and cheap champagne. Straut said something generous. Coworkers wrapped leftovers in paper napkins. I turned in my blue badge and BlackBerry. Just like that, I was no longer a government employee.

Zero has had a long history. The Babylonians invented the concept of zero; the ancient Greeks debated it in lofty terms (how could something be nothing?); the ancient Indian scholar Pingala paired Zero with the numeral 1 to get double digits; and both the Mayans and the Romans made Zero a part of their numeral systems. But Zero finally found its place around AD 498, when the Indian astronomer Aryabhatta sat up in bed one morning and exclaimed, "Sthanam sthanam dasa gunam" — which translates, roughly as, "place to place in ten times in value". With that, the idea of decimal based place value notion was born. Now Zero was on a roll: It spread to the Arab world, where it flourished; crossed the Iberian Peninsula to Europe (thanks to the Spanish Moors); got some tweaking from the Italians; and eventually sailed the Atlantic to the New World, where zero ultimately found plenty of employment (together with the digit 1) in a place called Silicon Valley.