Gas Law Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Gas Law. Here they are! All 100 of them:

Résumé Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acids stain you, And drugs cause cramp. Guns aren't lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful. You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker (Enough Rope)
Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
The rain that fell on the city runs down the dark gutters and empties into the sea without even soaking the ground
Haruki Murakami (Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche)
It is the camp law: people going to their death must be deceived to the very end.
Tadeusz Borowski (This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen)
Psycho? The woman's senile. We had to stop at about thirty gas stations on the way over here. Finally I got tired of getting out of the car and showing her which was the Men's and which was the Women's, so I let her pick them herself. I worked out a system. The law of averages. I laid money on her and she came out about fifty-fifty.
John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)
Trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy or bouncing like a rubber ball from now to then to back again. ... In the traumatic universe the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas.
David J. Morris (The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
Suicide was against the law. Johnny had wondered why. It meant that if you missed, or the gas ran out, or the rope broke, you could get locked up in prison to show you that life was really very jolly and throughly worth living.
Terry Pratchett
The gas-law of learning: . . . any amount of information no matter how small will fill any intellectual void no matter how large.
Hugh Nibley (Of all things!: A Nibley quote book)
We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas.
Milton Friedman
Contrary to the common belief, the regular course of events, governed by the laws of physics, is never the consequence of one well-ordered configuration of atoms – not unless that configuration of atoms repeats itself a great number of times, either as in the periodic crystal or as in a liquid or in a gas composed of a great number of identical molecules.
Erwin Schrödinger (What is Life? (Canto Classics))
Holocaust deniers will always come up with pathetic lies and red herrings aimed at deceiving and leading the gullible astray. Be it death toll anomalies, gas chamber debates, criticizing Holocaust denial laws, repeating the ancient myth that the “Joooz control the world,” blaming Israel, claiming Anne Frank’s diary is fabricated etc…etc…yada…yada…yawn…the list goes on. Why do the deniers persist? Because they have an agenda – and it isn't a nice agenda.
James Morcan (Debunking Holocaust Denial Theories)
I can’t believe you would represent a killer like that Jake. I thought you were one of us. xxx ‘Gotta have a lawyer, Helen. You can’t put the boy in the gas chamber if he doesn’t have a lawyer. Surely, you understand.’ xxx ‘...I can’t imagine doing that for a living, representing killers and child rapists and such.’ ‘How often do you read the Constitution?’ ‘...the Constitution, as interpreted by the Supreme Court, says that a person accused of a serious crime must have a lawyer. And that’s the law of the land.
John Grisham (A Time for Mercy (Jake Brigance, #3))
He knew nothing about Texas trailer law but he suspected that there was no really effective way of removing a person from a trailer in the Rio Grande Valley without the use of firearms or tear gas.
Charles Portis (Masters of Atlantis)
Intel engineers did a rough calculation of what would happen had a 1971 Volkswagen Beetle improved at the same rate as microchips did under Moore’s law. These are the numbers: Today, that Beetle would be able to go about three hundred thousand miles per hour. It would get two million miles per gallon of gas, and it would cost four cents! Intel engineers also estimated that if automobile fuel efficiency improved at the same rate as Moore’s law, you could, roughly speaking, drive a car your whole life on one tank of gasoline. What
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
I once visited a place where they killed people by putting them in a chair. Not torture — that was common enough; beds and chairs were very much the par when it came to getting people helpless and confined, to inflict pain upon them — but actually set it up to kill them while they sat. They — get this — they either gassed them or they passed very high electric currents through them. A pellet dropped into a container beneath the seat, like some obscene image of a commode, producing a fatal gas; or a cap over their head, and their hands dipped in some conducting fluid, to fry their brains. You want to know the punch line? Yeah, [...] give us the punch line. This same state had a law that forbade — and I quote — “cruel and unusual punishments!” Can you believe that?
Iain M. Banks (Use of Weapons (Culture, #3))
What has Capitalism resolved? It has solved no problems. It has looted the world. It has left us with all this poverty. It has created lifestyles and models of consumerism that are incompatible with reality. It has poisoned the waterways. Oceans, Rivers, Lakes, Seas, the Atmosphere, the Earth. It has produced an incredible waste of resources. I always cite one example; imagine every person in China owned a Car, or aspired to own a Car. Everyone of the 1.1 Billion people in China, or that everyone of the 800 million people in India wished to own a Car, this method, this lifestyle, and Africa did the same, and nearly 450 million Latin Americans did the same. How long would Oil last? How long would Natural Gas last? How long would natural resources last? What would be left of the Ozone layer? What would be left of Oxygen on Earth? What would happen with Carbon Dioxide? And all these phenomenon that are changing the ecology of our world, they are changing Earth, they are making life on our Planet more and more difficult all the time. What model has Capitalism given the world to follow? An example for societies to emulate? Shouldn’t we focus on more rational things, like the education of the whole population? Nutrition, health, a respectable lodging, an elevated culture? Would you say capitalism, with it’s blind laws, it’s selfishness as a fundamental principle, has given us something to emulate? Has it shown us a path forward? Is humanity going to travel on the course charted thus far? There may be talk of a crisis in socialism, but, today, there is an even greater crises in capitalism, with no end in sight.
Fidel Castro
These are lines from my asteroid-impact novel, Regolith: Just because there are no laws against stupidity doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be punished. I haven’t faced rejection this brutal since I was single. He smelled trouble like a fart in the shower. If this was a kiss of gratitude, then she must have been very grateful. Not since Bush and Cheney have so few spent so much so fast for so long for so little. As a nympho for mind-fucks, Lisa took to politics like a pig to mud. She began paying men compliments as if she expected a receipt. Like the Aerosmith song, his get-up-and-go just got-up-and-went. “You couldn’t beat the crap out of a dirty diaper!” He embraced his only daughter as if she was deploying to Iraq. She was hotter than a Class 4 solar flare! If sex was a weapon, then Monique possessed WMD I haven’t felt this alive since I lost my virginity. He once read that 95% of women fake organism, and the rest are gay. Beauty may be in the eyes of the beholder, but ugly is universal. Why do wives fart, but not girlfriends? Adultery is sex that is wrong, but not necessarily bad. The dinosaurs stayed drugged out, drooling like Jonas Brothers fans. Silence filled the room like tear gas. The told him a fraction of the truth and hoped it would take just a fraction of the time. Happiness is the best cosmetic, He was a whale of a catch, and there were a lot of fish in the sea eager to nibble on his bait. Cheap hookers are less buck for the bang, Men cannot fall in love with women they don’t find attractive, and women cannot fall in love with men they do not respect. During sex, men want feedback while women expect mind-reading. Cooper looked like a cow about to be tipped over. His father warned him to never do anything he couldn’t justify on Oprah. The poor are not free -- they’re just not enslaved. Only those with money are free. Sperm wasn’t something he would choose on a menu, but it still tasted better than asparagus. The crater looked alive, like Godzilla was about to leap out and mess up Tokyo. Bush follows the Bible until it gets to Jesus. When Bush talks to God, it’s prayer; when God talks to Bush, it’s policy. Cheney called the new Miss America a traitor – apparently she wished for world peace. Cheney was so unpopular that Bush almost replaced him when running for re-election, changing his campaign slogan to, ‘Ain’t Got Dick.’ Bush fought a war on poverty – and the poor lost. Bush thinks we should strengthen the dollar by making it two-ply. Hurricane Katrina got rid of so many Democratic voters that Republicans have started calling her Kathleen Harris. America and Iraq fought a war and Iran won. Bush hasn’t choked this much since his last pretzel. Some wars are unpopular; the rest are victorious. So many conservatives hate the GOP that they are thinking of changing their name to the Dixie Chicks. If Saddam had any WMD, he would have used them when we invaded. If Bush had any brains, he would have used them when we invaded. It’s hard for Bush to win hearts and minds since he has neither. In Iraq, you are a coward if you leave and a fool if you stay. Bush believes it’s not a sin to kill Muslims since they are going to Hell anyway. And, with Bush’s help, soon. In Iraq, those who make their constitution subservient to their religion are called Muslims. In America they’re called Republicans. With great power comes great responsibility – unless you’re Republican.
Brent Reilly
Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
What is it that makes a seemingly rational man set out on a perilous journey knowing full well that the odds of success are quite remote and the consequences of failure are likely to be devastating? Is it pride, stubbornness, a yearning for adventure, or just a reckless disregard of reality?
Stan Turner
Conclusion: What I needed was a shower helmet. I was fairly certain a shower helmet didn’t exist. I’d have to make one. Biting the inside of my bottom lip, I searched the kitchen drawers closest to the gas range and found what I sought: aluminum foil, parchment paper, tape, scissors, and plastic wrap.
Penny Reid (Motion (Laws of Physics, #1; Hypothesis, #2.1))
I hope there’s more in it for the woman rolling on the ground, outstretched hands joined in supplication, struggling to finish a lap of the considerable temple perimeter. A grim matronly figure, either mother or mother-in-law I surmise, gives her a hefty shove now and then as if she were a gas cylinder.
Srinath Perur (If It's Monday It Must Be Madurai: A Conducted Tour of India)
This is how a rocket works. At first it is standing still, say, in empty space, and then it shoots some gas out of the back, and the rocket goes forward. The point is that of all the stuff in the world, the centre of mass, the average of all the mass, is still right where it was before. The interesting part has moved on, and an uninteresting part that we do not care about has moved back. There
Richard P. Feynman (The Character of Physical Law (Penguin Press Science))
Skip Notes *1 Protocol for the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare Signed at Geneva June 17, 1925 Entered into force February 8, 1928 Ratification advised by the U.S. Senate December 16, 1974 Ratified by U.S. President January 22, 1975 U.S. ratification deposited with the Government of France April 10, 1975 Proclaimed by U.S. President April 29, 1975 The Undersigned Plenipotentiaries, in the name of their respective Governments: Whereas the use in war of asphyxiating, poisonous or other gases, and of all analogous liquids, materials or devices, has been justly condemned by the general opinion of the civilized world; and Whereas the prohibition of such use has been declared in Treaties to which the majority of Powers of the World are Parties; and To the end that this prohibition shall be universally accepted as a part of International Law, binding alike the conscience and the practice of nations. Tear gas has been deemed a “riot control agent,” which exempts it from chemical weapons law. As such, it is regularly used by police on citizens in city streets, while still being prohibited from war zones.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars)
You can read all the books in the world on the Nazi concentration camps and the gas chambers, and yet reality will draw upon you only when you are put through that yourself. It is a law of God, or nature, if you prefer, that pain, suffering and grief cannot be transferred or known by proxy. Neither empathy nor sympathy but experience alone is a valid currency of affliction. It alone makes you a card-holding member all allows you to join the club of the wretched of the earth. All else is counterfeit.
Kiran Nagarkar
Later, I interviewed a prominent psychoanalyst, who told me that trauma destroys the fabric of time. In normal time, you move from one moment to the next, sunrise to sunset, birth to death. After trauma, you may move in circles, find yourself being sucked backwards into an eddy, or bouncing about like a rubber ball from now to then and back again. August is June, June is December. What time is it? Guess again. In the traumatic universe, the basic laws of matter are suspended: ceiling fans can be helicopters, car exhaust can be mustard gas. Another odd feature of traumatic time is that it doesn’t just destroy the flow of the present into the future, it corrodes everything that came before, eating at moments and people from your previous life, until you can’t remember why any of them mattered. What I previously found inconceivable is now inescapable: I have been blown up so many times in my mind that it is impossible to imagine a version of myself that has not been blown up. The man on the other side of the soldier’s question is not me. In fact, he never existed. The war is gone now, but the event remains, the happening that nearly erased the life to come and thus erased the life that came before. The soldier’s question hangs in the air the way it always has. The way it always will.   Have you ever been blown up before, sir?
David J. Morris (The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder)
IN THE 1960S, WHEN I became a beat cop in San Diego, manufacturing, selling, possessing, or using “dangerous drugs” or “controlled substances” were all violations of the law. But there was no “war,” per se, on drug-law violators. We made the occasional pot bust, less frequently a heroin or cocaine pinch. Drug enforcement was viewed by many of us almost as an ancillary duty. You’d stumble across an offender on a traffic stop or at a loud-party call. Mostly, you were on the prowl for non-drug-related crime: a gas station or liquor store stickup series, a burglary-fencing ring, an auto theft “chop shop” operation. Undercover narcs, of course, worked dope full time, chasing users and dealers. They played their snitches, sat on open-air markets, interrupted hand-to-hand dealing, and squeezed small-time street dealers in the climb up the chain to “Mister Big.” But because most local police forces devoted only a small percentage of personnel to French Connection–worthy cases, and because there were no “mandatory minimum” sentences (passed by Congress in 1986 to strip “soft on crime” judges of sentencing discretion on a host of drug offenses), and because street gangs fought over, well, streets—as in neighborhood turf (and cars and girlfriends)—not drug markets, most of our jails and prisons still had plenty of room for violent, predatory criminals. The point is, although they certainly did not turn their backs on drug offenses, the country’s police were not at “war” with users and dealers. And though their government-issued photos may have adorned the wall behind the police chief’s desk, a long succession of US presidents stayed out of the local picture.
Norm Stamper (To Protect and Serve: How to Fix America's Police)
Gilbert (1540–1603) published his great book on the magnet in 1600. Harvey (1578–1657) discovered the circulation of the blood, and published his discovery in 1628. Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) discovered spermatozoa, though another man, Stephen Hamm, had discovered them, apparently, a few months earlier; Leeuwenhoek also discovered protozoa or unicellular organisms, and even bacteria. Robert Boyle (1627–91) was, as children were taught when I was young, 'the father of chemistry and son of the Earl of Cork'; he is now chiefly remembered on account of 'Boyle's Law', that in a given quantity of gas at a given temperature, pressure is inversely proportional to volume.
Bertrand Russell (A History of Western Philosophy)
What those two young physicists did remains the most important step yet made in the search for quantum gravity. They gave us two general and simple laws, which were the first physical predictions to come from the study of quantum gravity. They are: Unruh's law. Accelerating observers see themselves as embedded in a gas of hot photons at a temperature proportional to their acceleration. Bekenstein's law With every horizon that forms a boundary separating an observer from a region which is hidden from them, there is associated an entropy which measures the amount of information which is hidden behind it. This entropy is always proportional to the area of the horizon.
Lee Smolin (Three Roads To Quantum Gravity)
Our public lands contain a wealth of natural resources—trees, oil, gas, coal, gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, and many other minerals, onshore and off. We own these lands. Yet under current law the corporations control their extraction and pay very little to Uncle Sam for what revenues and profits they reap. Sometimes, in fact, they pay just about nothing.
Ralph Nader (The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future)
Bill Clinton told the story in 2015, he had to ask his girlfriend to marry him, and come to Arkansas where he was pursuing a political career, three times before she said yes. He recalled telling Hillary Rodham, “I want you to marry me, but you shouldn’t do it.” Instead, he urged her to go to Chicago or New York to begin a political career of her own. “Oh, my God,” he remembered Hillary responding at one point. “I’ll never run for office. I’m too aggressive, and nobody will ever vote for me.” She moved to Arkansas and married him, working as a lawyer, law professor, and for the Children’s Defense Fund. She didn’t put the gas on her own political career until after her husband left the White House and their daughter was in college. Today,
Rebecca Traister (All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation)
For more than two hundred years, on the topic of human population, a disturbingly vicious thread has run through Western history, basing itself on biology and justifying cruelty on an almost unimaginable scale. When I began researching this book I thought of Malthusian theory, eugenics, Nazi genocide and modern population control as separate and distinct episodes in human history. I am no longer so sure. I think there is some persuasive evidence that a direct, if meandering, intellectual thread links the Poor Laws, the Irish famine, the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the one-child policies of Beijing. In all cases, cruelty as policy, based on faulty logic, sprang from a belief that those in power knew best what was good for the vulnerable and weak.
Matt Ridley (The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge)
The first break in the case came on day six. A college student named Beatrice Arnold called the FBI hotline to report she’d sold Suzanne Lombard snacks at the gas station where she worked in Breezewood, Pennsylvania. “The Breezewood tape caused a seismic shift in the investigation and completely scrambled the assumptions of law enforcement. Suzanne Lombard hadn’t been snatched; she had run away. She had somehow traveled three hundred fifty miles from the Virginia shore to the Pennsylvania line without drawing attention to herself. From the surveillance tape, three unassailable facts emerged: First, Suzanne was actively trying to conceal her identity. Second, she was waiting for someone. And third, in Suzanne’s mind at least, that someone was a friend.
Matthew FitzSimmons (The Short Drop (Gibson Vaughn, #1))
Hey! One of Edilio’s soldiers just came staggering in from the gas station. He says someone attacked, took the place over.” That silenced the argument. Sam, with exquisite contempt, turned to his girlfriend and said, “You want to go deal with it, Astrid?” Astrid flushed red. “No? I didn’t think so. Guess it will be up to me then.” He left silence in his wake. “Maybe we better pass some laws real quick so Sam can save our butts legally,” Howard said. “Howard, go get Orc,” Albert said. “Now you’re giving me orders, Albert?” Howard shook his head. “I don’t think so. Not you or her,” he said, jerking a thumb at Astrid. “You may not think much of me, you two, but at least I know who saves our butts. And if I got to take orders from someone, it’ll be the someone who just walked out of here.
Michael Grant (Lies (Gone, #3))
Local Girl Missing, Feared Dead. Beneath it was a photo of me-my most recent school photo. “Oh, no.” My heart filling with dread, I took the paper from Mr. Smith’s hands. “Couldn’t they have found a better picture?” Mr. Smith looked at me sharply. “Miss Oliviera,” he said, his gray eyebrows lowered. “I realize it’s all the rage with you young people today to toss off flippant one-liners so you can get your own reality television shows. But I highly doubt MTV will be coming down to Isla Huesos to film you in the Underworld. So that can’t be all you have to say about this.” He was right, of course. Though I couldn’t say what I really wanted to, because John was in the room, and I didn’t want to make him feel worse than he already did. But what I wanted to do was burst into tears. “Is that about Pierce?” John looked uneasy. Outside, thunder rumbled again. This time, it sounded even closer than before. “Yes, of course, it is, John,” Mr. Smith said. There was something strange about his voice. He sounded almost as if he were mad at John. Only why would he be? John had done the right thing. He’d explained about the Furies. “What did you expect? Have you gotten to the part about the reward your father is offering for information leading to your safe return, Miss Oliviera?” My gaze flicked down the page. I wanted to throw up. “One million dollars?” My dad’s company, one of the largest providers in the world of products and services to the oil, gas, and military industries, was valued at several hundred times that. “That cheapskate.” This was all so very, very bad. “One million dollars is a lot of money to most people.” Mr. Smith said, with a strong emphasis on most people. He still had that odd note in his voice. “Though I recognize that money may mean little to a resident of the Underworld. So I’d caution you to use judiciousness, wherever it is that you’re going, as there are many people on this island who’ll be more than willing to turn you in for only a small portion of that reward money. I don’t suppose I might ask where you’re going? Or suggest that you pay a call on your mother, who is beside herself with worry?” “That’s a good idea,” I said. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I felt much better already. I could straighten out this whole thing with a single conversation. “I should call my mom-“ Both Mr. Smith’s cry of alarm and the fact that John grabbed me by the wrist as I was reaching into my book bag for my cell phone stopped me from making calls of any sort. “You can’t use you phone,” Mr. Smith said. “The police-and your father-are surely waiting for you to do just that. They’ll triangulate on the signal from the closest cell tower, and find you.” When I stared at him for his use of the word triangulate, Mr. Smith shook his head and said, “My partner, Patrick, is obsessed with Law & Order reruns.
Meg Cabot (Underworld (Abandon, #2))
All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty educated States involved conceived-not without reason-that their very existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed which they thought could help them win. Germany, having let Hell loose, kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals-often of a greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility.
Winston S. Churchill (The World Crisis, 1911-1918)
This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit your white ball, and it is travelling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted, and his plane is diving straight at that billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lighting is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table Then what has happed to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss cording to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the law governing the progress of this train, and of you to your destination are also not the only laws in this particular game.
Ian Fleming (From Russia with Love)
Neither do I express well nor do I know how to write perfectly charming like writers do yet here I sit every night under the stars hoping one to break away so I could wish for the missing peace of my puzzle of life .. * Selfish isn't it wishing something to break so we can join ourselves  maybe thats the law of nature. One always has to give up for something to live. Tree dies  leaving the seed for a new bud behind.  Crazy! The sacrifice for one becomes the breath for the other one without even  him realizing what suffering something went through for its precious life * It gets cold fast once you decide to swim deep into your thoughts . Every thing from a star to even the buzzing of bees tell you a story about what your existence might be for but the city's lights and sound never let you realize how small yet how fascinating your existence is . We tend to forget the meaning of life even after preaching the same for others ourselves. . It feels good and at peace with nobody to bother you anymore . You can think and imagine stuff that might never be but this wonderful brain imagines  it . If not forever Atleast for sometime   you can feel the feeling you forever lust for.  Sure the usual disturbances try to lure my mind away from things but I'm used to it now . The gloominess  inside doesn't let them affect inside anymore. * The sky gets dark it really does . Maybe like the night sky's supposed to be so are my thoughts with a beating heart to support them and keep the flame of fight lit like the moon lights up the sky even if that means reflecting the harsh rays of sun. * The time flies and so do the body shivers for warmth but I feel like staying. Sure the exposed sky gives peace but it comes at a cost so I try to bargain with  it every night. She's a good at negotiating though only gives me some hours before she signal that time's over. * Hesitantly I move my numb body using the last remaining gas in  the dying  shell known as body. How much i try it won't let me stay so here I leave heartbroken once again like every other night.
PANKAJ SARPAL
Technically, according to the ancient enigma of quantum physics, I am now neither dead nor alive. I am in the suspended state of overlapping probability waves once reserved for the cat in Schrödinger’s thought experiment. Because the hull of the cat box is little more than position-fused energy ready to explode at the slightest intrusion, no one will ever look inside to see if I am dead or alive. Theoretically, no one is directly responsible for my execution, since the immutable laws of quantum theory pardon or condemn me from each microsecond to the next. There are no observers. But I am an observer. I am waiting for this particular collapse of probability waves with something more than detached interest. In the instant after the hissing of cyanide gas begins, but before it reaches my lungs and heart and brain, I will know which way the universe has chosen to sort itself out. At least, I will know so far as I am concerned. Which, when it comes right down to it, is the only aspect of the universe’s resolution with which most of us are concerned.
Dan Simmons (Endymion (Hyperion Cantos, #3))
It is a well known phenomenon in many branches of the exact and physical sciences that very great numbers are often easier to handle than those of medium size. An almost exact theory of a gas, containing about 1025 freely moving particles, is incomparably easier than that of the solar system, made up of 9 major bodies; and still more than that of a multiple star of three or four objects of about the same size. This is, of course, due to the excellent possibility of applying the laws of statistics and probabilities in the first case.
John von Neumann (Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (Princeton Classic Editions))
The Lawrence Sherman who went to Kansas City is the same Larry Sherman who had worked with David Weisburd in Minneapolis a few years earlier, establishing the Law of Crime Concentration. They were friends. They taught together for a time at Rutgers, where their department chairman was none other than Ronald Clarke, who had done the pioneering work on suicide. Clarke, Weisburd, and Sherman—with their separate interests in English town gas, the crime map of Minneapolis, and guns in Kansas City—were all pursuing the same revolutionary idea of coupling.
Malcolm Gladwell (Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know)
per hour. Handbrake knew that he could keep up with the best of them. Ambassadors might look old-fashioned and slow, but the latest models had Japanese engines. But he soon learned to keep it under seventy. Time and again, as his competitors raced up behind him and made their impatience known by the use of their horns and flashing high beams, he grudgingly gave way, pulling into the slow lane among the trucks, tractors and bullock carts. Soon, the lush mustard and sugarcane fields of Haryana gave way to the scrub and desert of Rajasthan. Four hours later, they reached the rocky hills surrounding the Pink City, passing in the shadow of the Amber Fort with its soaring ramparts and towering gatehouse. The road led past the Jal Mahal palace, beached on a sandy lake bed, into Jaipur’s ancient quarter. It was almost noon and the bazaars along the city’s crenellated walls were stirring into life. Beneath faded, dusty awnings, cobblers crouched, sewing sequins and gold thread onto leather slippers with curled-up toes. Spice merchants sat surrounded by heaps of lal mirch, haldi and ground jeera, their colours as clean and sharp as new watercolor paints. Sweets sellers lit the gas under blackened woks of oil and prepared sticky jalebis. Lassi vendors chipped away at great blocks of ice delivered by camel cart. In front of a few of the shops, small boys, who by law should have been at school, swept the pavements, sprinkling them with water to keep down the dust. One dragged a doormat into the road where the wheels of passing vehicles ran over it, doing the job of carpet beaters. Handbrake honked his way through the light traffic as they neared the Ajmeri Gate, watching the faces that passed by his window: skinny bicycle rickshaw drivers, straining against the weight of fat aunties; wild-eyed Rajasthani men with long handlebar moustaches and sun-baked faces almost as bright as their turbans; sinewy peasant women wearing gold nose rings and red glass bangles on their arms; a couple of pink-faced goras straining under their backpacks; a naked sadhu, his body half covered in ash like a caveman. Handbrake turned into the old British Civil Lines, where the roads were wide and straight and the houses and gardens were set well apart. Ajay Kasliwal’s residence was number
Tarquin Hall (The Case of the Missing Servant (Vish Puri, #1))
We have written the equations of water flow. From experiment, we find a set of concepts and approximations to use to discuss the solution--vortex streets, turbulent wakes, boundary layers. When we have similar equations in a less familiar situation, and one for which we cannot yet experiment, we try to solve the equations in a primitive, halting, and confused way to try to determine what new qualitatitive features may come out, or what new qualitative forms are a consequence of the equations. Our equations for the sun, for example, as a ball of hydrogen gas, describe a sun without sunspots, without the rice-grain structure of the surface, without prominences, without coronas. Yet, all of these are really in the equations; we just haven't found the way to get them out. ...The test of science is its ability to predict. Had you never visited the earth, could you predict the thunderstorms, the volcanoes, the ocean waves, the auroras, and the colourful sunset? A salutary lesson it will be when we learn of all that goes on on each of those dead planets--those eight or ten balls, each agglomerated from the same dust clouds and each obeying exactly the same laws of physics. The next great era of awakening of human intellect may well produce a method of understanding the qualitative content of equations. Today we cannot. Today we cannot see that the water flow equations contain such things as the barber pole structure of turbulence that one sees between rotating cylinders. Today we cannot see whether Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers, or morality--or whether it does not. We cannot say whether something beyond it like God is needed, or not. And so we can all hold strong opinions either way.
Richard P. Feynman
Israel is not just any small country. It is the only small country - the only country, period - whose neighbors publicly declare its very existence an affront to law, morality and religion and make its extinction an explicit , paramount national goal. Iran, Libya, and Iraq conduct foreign policies designed for the killing of Israelis and the destruction of their state. They choose their allies (Hamas, Hezbollah) and develop their weapons (suicide bombs, poison gas, anthrax, nuclear missiles) accordingly. Countries as far away as Malaysia will not allow a representative of Israel on their soil or even permit the showing of 'Schindler's List' lest it engender sympathy for Zion.
Charles Krauthammer (Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics)
In Bohr’s model of the atom, electrons could change their orbits (or, more precisely, their stable standing wave patterns) only by certain quantum leaps. De Broglie’s thesis helped explain this by conceiving of electrons not just as particles but also as waves. Those waves are strung out over the circular path around the nucleus. This works only if the circle accommodates a whole number—such as 2 or 3 or 4—of the particle’s wavelengths; it won’t neatly fit in the prescribed circle if there’s a fraction of a wavelength left over. De Broglie made three typed copies of his thesis and sent one to his adviser, Paul Langevin, who was Einstein’s friend (and Madame Curie’s). Langevin, somewhat baffled, asked for another copy to send along to Einstein, who praised the work effusively. It had, Einstein said, “lifted a corner of the great veil.” As de Broglie proudly noted, “This made Langevin accept my work.”47 Einstein made his own contribution when he received in June of that year a paper in English from a young physicist from India named Satyendra Nath Bose. It derived Planck’s blackbody radiation law by treating radiation as if it were a cloud of gas and then applying a statistical method of analyzing it. But there was a twist: Bose said that any two photons that had the same energy state were absolutely indistinguishable, in theory as well as fact, and should not be treated separately in the statistical calculations.
Walter Isaacson (Einstein: His Life and Universe)
In broad terms, the Second Law asserts that things get worse. A bit more specifically, it acknowledges that matter and energy tend to disperse in disorder. Left to itself, matter crumbles and energy spreads. The chaotic motion of molecules of a gas results in them spreading through the container the gas occupies. The vigorous jostling of atoms in a hot lump of metal jostles the atoms in its cooler surroundings, the energy spreads away, and the metal cools. That’s all there is to natural change: spreading in disorder. The astonishing thing, though, is that this natural spreading can result in the emergence of exquisite form. If the spreading is captured in an engine, then bricks may be hoisted to build a cathedral. If the spreading occurs in a seed, then molecules may be hoisted to build an orchid. If the spreading occurs in your body, then random electrical and molecular currents in your brain may be organized into an opinion. The spreading of matter and energy is the root of all change. Wherever change occurs, be it corrosion, corruption, growth, decay, flowering, artistic creation, exquisite creation, understanding, reproduction, cancer, fun, accident, quiet or boisterous enjoyment, travel, or just simple pointless motion it is an outward manifestation of this inner spring, the purposeless spreading of matter and energy in ever greater disorder. Like it or not, purposeless decay into disorder is the spring of all change, even when that change is exquisite or results in seemingly purposeful action.
Peter Atkins (On Being: A Scientist's Exploration of the Great Questions of Existence)
We tend to cling to what we know and resist what is new—even when the new brings tremendous benefits. Opposition to onshore wind turbines in the UK is a good example. Even though onshore wind is now the cheapest form of energy6 (cheaper than coal, oil, gas, and other renewable sources), rural landowners have significantly resisted it, keen to preserve the appearance of the countryside. When the Conservative Party (which derives much of its support from these rural communities) came to power in 2015, it slashed subsidies and changed planning laws for onshore wind—leading to an 80 percent reduction in new capacity.7 Only now, with climate change awareness rapidly rising among the UK public, is support for onshore wind starting to outweigh an attachment to yesterday’s aesthetics.
Christiana Figueres (The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis)
BLUE pencils, blue noses, blue movies, laws, blue legs and stockings, the language of birds, bees, and flowers as sung by longshoremen, that lead-like look the skin has when affected by cold, contusion, sickness, fear; the rotten rum or gin they call blue ruin and the blue devils of its delirium; Russian cats and oysters, a withheld or imprisoned breath, the blue they say that diamonds have, deep holes in the ocean and the blazers which English athletes earn that gentlemen may wear; afflictions of the spirit—dumps, mopes, Mondays—all that’s dismal—low-down gloomy music, Nova Scotians, cyanosis, hair rinse, bluing, bleach; the rare blue dahlia like that blue moon shrewd things happen only once in, or the call for trumps in whist (but who remembers whist or what the death of unplayed games is like?), and correspondingly the flag, Blue Peter, which is our signal for getting under way; a swift pitch, Confederate money, the shaded slopes of clouds and mountains, and so the constantly increasing absentness of Heaven (ins Blaue hinein, the Germans say), consequently the color of everything that’s empty: blue bottles, bank accounts, and compliments, for instance, or, when the sky’s turned turtle, the blue-green bleat of ocean (both the same), and, when in Hell, its neatly landscaped rows of concrete huts and gas-blue flames; social registers, examination booklets, blue bloods, balls, and bonnets, beards, coats, collars, chips, and cheese . . . the pedantic, indecent and censorious . . . watered twilight, sour sea: through a scrambling of accidents, blue has become their color, just as it’s stood for fidelity.
William H. Gass (On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry (New York Review Books (Paperback)))
The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are now so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote. Nevertheless, it has been found that there are apparent exceptions to most of these laws, and this is particularly true when the observations are pushed to a limit, i.e., whenever the circumstances of experiment are such that extreme cases can be examined. Such examination almost surely leads, not to the overthrow of the law, but to the discovery of other facts and laws whose action produces the apparent exceptions. As instances of such discoveries, which are in most cases due to the increasing order of accuracy made possible by improvements in measuring instruments, may be mentioned: first, the departure of actual gases from the simple laws of the so-called perfect gas, one of the practical results being the liquefaction of air and all known gases; second, the discovery of the velocity of light by astronomical means, depending on the accuracy of telescopes and of astronomical clocks; third, the determination of distances of stars and the orbits of double stars, which depend on measurements of the order of accuracy of one-tenth of a second-an angle which may be represented as that which a pin's head subtends at a distance of a mile. But perhaps the most striking of such instances are the discovery of a new planet or observations of the small irregularities noticed by Leverrier in the motions of the planet Uranus, and the more recent brilliant discovery by Lord Rayleigh of a new element in the atmosphere through the minute but unexplained anomalies found in weighing a given volume of nitrogen. Many other instances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that 'our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.
Albert Abraham Michelson
Of the laws we can deduce from the external world, one stands above all: the Law of Transience. Nothing is intended to last. The trees fall year by year, the mountains tumble, the galaxies burn out like tall tallow candles. Nothing is intended to last — except time. The blanket of the universe wears thin, but time endures. Time is a tower, an endless mine; time is monstrous. Time is the hero. Human and inhuman characters are pinned to time like butterflies to a card; yes, though the wings stay bright, flight is forgotten. Time, like an element which can be solid, liquid or gas, has three states. In the present, it is a flux we cannot seize. In the future, it is a veiling mist. In the past, it has solidified and become glazed; then we call it history. Then it can show us nothing but our own solemn faces; it is a treacherous mirror, reflecting only our limited truths. So much is it a part of man that objectivity is impossible; so neutral is it that it appears hostile.
Brian W. Aldiss (Galaxies Like Grains of Sand)
When the time comes, & I hope it comes soon, to bury this era of moral rot & the defiling of our communal, social, & democratic norms, the perfect epitaph for the gravestone of this age of unreason should be Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley's already infamous quote: "I think not having the estate tax recognizes the people that are investing... as opposed to those that are just spending every darn penny they have, whether it’s on booze or women or movies.” Grassley's vision of America, quite frankly, is one I do not recognize. I thought the heart of this great nation was not limited to the ranks of the plutocrats who are whisked through life in chauffeured cars & private jets, whose often inherited riches are passed along to children, many of whom no sacrifice or service is asked. I do not begrudge wealth, but it must come with a humility that money never is completely free of luck. And more importantly, wealth can never be a measure of worth. I have seen the waitress working the overnight shift at a diner to give her children a better life, & yes maybe even take them to a movie once in awhile - and in her, I see America. I have seen the public school teachers spending extra time with students who need help & who get no extra pay for their efforts, & in them I see America. I have seen parents sitting around kitchen tables with stacks of pressing bills & wondering if they can afford a Christmas gift for their children, & in them I see America. I have seen the young diplomat in a distant foreign capital & the young soldier in a battlefield foxhole, & in them I see America. I have seen the brilliant graduates of the best law schools who forgo the riches of a corporate firm for the often thankless slog of a district attorney or public defender's office, & in them I see America. I have seen the librarian reshelving books, the firefighter, police officer, & paramedic in service in trying times, the social worker helping the elderly & infirm, the youth sports coaches, the PTA presidents, & in them I see America. I have seen the immigrants working a cash register at a gas station or trimming hedges in the frost of an early fall morning, or driving a cab through rush hour traffic to make better lives for their families, & in them I see America. I have seen the science students unlocking the mysteries of life late at night in university laboratories for little or no pay, & in them I see America. I have seen the families struggling with a cancer diagnosis, or dementia in a parent or spouse. Amid the struggles of mortality & dignity, in them I see America. These, & so many other Americans, have every bit as much claim to a government working for them as the lobbyists & moneyed classes. And yet, the power brokers in Washington today seem deaf to these voices. It is a national disgrace of historic proportions. And finally, what is so wrong about those who must worry about the cost of a drink with friends, or a date, or a little entertainment, to rephrase Senator Grassley's demeaning phrasings? Those who can't afford not to worry about food, shelter, healthcare, education for their children, & all the other costs of modern life, surely they too deserve to be able to spend some of their “darn pennies” on the simple joys of life. Never mind that almost every reputable economist has called this tax bill a sham of handouts for the rich at the expense of the vast majority of Americans & the future economic health of this nation. Never mind that it is filled with loopholes written by lobbyists. Never mind that the wealthiest already speak with the loudest voices in Washington, & always have. Grassley’s comments open a window to the soul of the current national Republican Party & it it is not pretty. This is not a view of America that I think President Ronald Reagan let alone President Dwight Eisenhower or Teddy Roosevelt would have recognized. This is unadulterated cynicism & a version of top-down class warfare run amok. ~Facebook 12/4/17
Dan Rather
Professor Joseph Stiglitz, former Chief Economist of the World Bank, and former Chairman of President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, goes public over the World Bank’s, “Four Step Strategy,” which is designed to enslave nations to the bankers. I summarise this below, 1. Privatisation. This is actually where national leaders are offered 10% commissions to their secret Swiss bank accounts in exchange for them trimming a few billion dollars off the sale price of national assets. Bribery and corruption, pure and simple. 2. Capital Market Liberalization. This is the repealing any laws that taxes money going over its borders. Stiglitz calls this the, “hot money,” cycle. Initially cash comes in from abroad to speculate in real estate and currency, then when the economy in that country starts to look promising, this outside wealth is pulled straight out again, causing the economy to collapse. The nation then requires International Monetary Fund (IMF) help and the IMF provides it under the pretext that they raise interest rates anywhere from 30% to 80%. This happened in Indonesia and Brazil, also in other Asian and Latin American nations. These higher interest rates consequently impoverish a country, demolishing property values, savaging industrial production and draining national treasuries. 3. Market Based Pricing. This is where the prices of food, water and domestic gas are raised which predictably leads to social unrest in the respective nation, now more commonly referred to as, “IMF Riots.” These riots cause the flight of capital and government bankruptcies. This benefits the foreign corporations as the nations remaining assets can be purchased at rock bottom prices. 4. Free Trade. This is where international corporations burst into Asia, Latin America and Africa, whilst at the same time Europe and America barricade their own markets against third world agriculture. They also impose extortionate tariffs which these countries have to pay for branded pharmaceuticals, causing soaring rates in death and disease.
Anonymous
When a federal court upholds a law that literally makes it a crime to give a child a cup of water in the desert; when Immigrants and Customs Enforcement abducts a child at an airport in order to force the (undocumented) parents to turn themselves in; when Border Patrol shoots people at the Mexican border with tear gas; that's the reactionary response to a warming world. It is a much simpler and more satisfying response than regulating energy companies or taxing carbon. It only has two problems. It is evil, and it will result in, if nothing else, the end of this country. People who want to live in such a world are already too querulous to make a society, even with each other, even if they get everything they want. Picture them trying to manage a baking earth, an evaporating Lake Superior riddled with Asian carp, a countryside full of feral bacteria and reeking of CAFOs that produce less food every year. It won't work. A fully achieved Fortress America would just be the Donner Party a day or two before the cannibalism starts.
Phil Christman (Midwest Futures)
Amongst human beings the state of the case is as follows: There exist all sorts of intermediate conditions between male and female — sexual transitional forms. In physical inquiries an ideal gas is assumed, that is to say, a gas, the behaviour of which follows the law of Boyle-Guy-Lussac exactly, although, in fact, no such gas exists, and laws are deduced from this so that the deviations from the ideal laws may be established in the case of actually existing gases. In the same fashion we may suppose the existence of an ideal man, M, and of an ideal woman, W, as sexual types although these types do not actually exist. Such types not only can be constructed, but must be constructed. As in art so in science, the real purpose is to reach the type, the Platonic Idea. The science of physics investigates the behaviour of bodies that are absolutely rigid or absolutely elastic, in the full knowledge that neither the one nor the other actually exists. The intermediate conditions actually existing between the two absolute states of matter serve merely as a starting-point for investigation of the types and in the practical application of the theory are treated as mixtures and exhaustively analysed. So also there exist only the intermediate stages between absolute males and females, the absolute conditions never presenting themselves. Let it be noted clearly that I am discussing the existence not merely of embryonic sexual neutrality, but of a permanent bisexual condition. Nor am I taking into consideration merely those intermediate sexual conditions, those bodily or psychical hermaphrodites upon which, up to the present, attention has been concentrated. In another respect my conception is new. Until now, in dealing with sexual intermediates, only hermaphrodites were considered; as if, to use a physical analogy, there were in between the two extremes a single group of intermediate forms, and not an intervening tract equally beset with stages in different degrees of transition. The fact is that males and females are like two substances combined in different proportions, but with either element never wholly missing. We find, so to speak, never either a man or a woman, but only the male condition and the female condition.
Otto Weininger (Sex and Character: An Investigation of Fundamental Principles)
In 1853, Haussmann began the incredible transformation of Paris, reconfiguring the city into 20 manageable arrondissements, all linked with grand, gas-lit boulevards and new arteries of running water to feed large public parks and beautiful gardens influenced greatly by London’s Kew Gardens. In every quarter, the indefatigable prefect, in concert with engineer Jean-Charles Alphand, refurbished neglected estates such as Parc Monceau and the Jardin du Luxembourg, and transformed royal hunting enclaves into new parks such as enormous Bois de Boulogne and Bois de Vincennes. They added romantic Parc des Buttes Chaumont and Parc Montsouris in areas that were formerly inhospitable quarries, as well as dozens of smaller neighborhood gardens that Alphand described as "green and flowering salons." Thanks to hothouses that sprang up in Paris, inspired by England’s prefabricated cast iron and glass factory buildings and huge exhibition halls such as the Crystal Palace, exotic blooms became readily available for small Parisian gardens. For example, nineteenth-century metal and glass conservatories added by Charles Rohault de Fleury to the Jardin des Plantes, Louis XIII’s 1626 royal botanical garden for medicinal plants, provided ideal conditions for orchids, tulips, and other plant species from around the globe. Other steel structures, such as Victor Baltard’s 12 metal and glass market stalls at Les Halles in the 1850s, also heralded the coming of Paris’s most enduring symbol, Gustave Eiffel’s 1889 Universal Exposition tower, and the installation of steel viaducts for trains to all parts of France. Word of this new Paris brought about emulative City Beautiful movements in most European capitals, and in the United States, Bois de Boulogne and Parc des Buttes Chaumont became models for Frederick Law Olmsted’s Central Park in New York. Meanwhile, for Parisians fascinated by the lakes, cascades, grottoes, lawns, flowerbeds, and trees that transformed their city from just another ancient capital into a lyrical, magical garden city, the new Paris became a textbook for cross-pollinating garden ideas at any scale. Royal gardens and exotic public pleasure grounds of the Second Empire became springboards for gardens such as Bernard Tschumi’s vast, conceptual Parc de La Villette, with its modern follies, and “wild” jardins en mouvement at the Fondation Cartier and the Musée du Quai Branly. In turn, allées of trees in some classic formal gardens were allowed to grow freely or were interleaved with wildflower meadows and wild grasses for their unsung beauty. Private gardens hidden behind hôtel particulier walls, gardens in spacious suburbs, city courtyards, and minuscule rooftop terraces, became expressions of old and very new gardens that synthesized nature, art, and outdoors living.
Zahid Sardar (In & Out of Paris: Gardens of Secret Delights)
A school bus is many things. A school bus is a substitute for a limousine. More class. A school bus is a classroom with a substitute teacher. A school bus is the students' version of a teachers' lounge. A school bus is the principal's desk. A school bus is the nurse's cot. A school bus is an office with all the phones ringing. A school bus is a command center. A school bus is a pillow fort that rolls. A school bus is a tank reshaped- hot dogs and baloney are the same meat. A school bus is a science lab- hot dogs and baloney are the same meat. A school bus is a safe zone. A school bus is a war zone. A school bus is a concert hall. A school bus is a food court. A school bus is a court of law, all judges, all jury. A school bus is a magic show full of disappearing acts. Saw someone in half. Pick a card, any card. Pass it on to the person next to you. He like you. She like you. K-i-s-s-i . . . s-s-i-p-p-i is only funny on a school bus. A school bus is a stage. A school bus is a stage play. A school bus is a spelling bee. A speaking bee. A get your hand out of my face bee. A your breath smell like sour turnips bee. A you don't even know what a turnip bee is. A maybe not, but I know what a turn up is and your breath smell all the way turnt up bee. A school bus is a bumblebee, buzzing around with a bunch of stingers on the inside of it. Windows for wings that flutter up and down like the windows inside Chinese restaurants and post offices in neighborhoods where school bus is a book of stamps. Passing mail through windows. Notes in the form of candy wrappers telling the street something sweet came by. Notes in the form of sneaky middle fingers. Notes in the form of fingers pointing at the world zooming by. A school bus is a paintbrush painting the world a blurry brushstroke. A school bus is also wet paint. Good for adding an extra coat, but it will dirty you if you lean against it, if you get too comfortable. A school bus is a reclining chair. In the kitchen. Nothing cool about it but makes perfect sense. A school bus is a dirty fridge. A school bus is cheese. A school bus is a ketchup packet with a tiny hole in it. Left on the seat. A plastic fork-knife-spoon. A paper tube around a straw. That straw will puncture the lid on things, make the world drink something with some fizz and fight. Something delightful and uncomfortable. Something that will stain. And cause gas. A school bus is a fast food joint with extra value and no food. Order taken. Take a number. Send a text to the person sitting next to you. There is so much trouble to get into. Have you ever thought about opening the back door? My mother not home till five thirty. I can't. I got dance practice at four. A school bus is a talent show. I got dance practice right now. On this bus. A school bus is a microphone. A beat machine. A recording booth. A school bus is a horn section. A rhythm section. An orchestra pit. A balcony to shot paper ball three-pointers from. A school bus is a basketball court. A football stadium. A soccer field. Sometimes a boxing ring. A school bus is a movie set. Actors, directors, producers, script. Scenes. Settings. Motivations. Action! Cut. Your fake tears look real. These are real tears. But I thought we were making a comedy. A school bus is a misunderstanding. A school bus is a masterpiece that everyone pretends to understand. A school bus is the mountain range behind Mona Lisa. The Sphinx's nose. An unknown wonder of the world. An unknown wonder to Canton Post, who heard bus riders talk about their journeys to and from school. But to Canton, a school bus is also a cannonball. A thing that almost destroyed him. Almost made him motherless.
Jason Reynolds (Look Both Ways: A Tale Told in Ten Blocks)
But the limp tent sputtering to life transfixes Thaddeus. It morphs and undulates like a lava flow. Forms rise in the fabric only to collapse as the gas reaches toward equilibrium. "It's just the wind," Cheryl says, but he ignores her. His home is turmoil. Right now poison pours over Cheryl's clothes and into Stevie's old room. Next will be the garage, or would that have been first? Ultimately, the order matters little to him. Gas will eventually coil around everything like a cat settling down for a nap: his law books in the attic, the photograph in the family room of Stevie leaning over the rail at Niagara Falls pretending to slip, the Hawaiian leis from a family vacation he can't quite remember, entire drawers full of odd knickknacks and fading memorabilia that attest to a life well lived, tangible proof of memories made even if the memories themselves rise more sluggishly and infrequently than they used to—all of it, ultimately, choking on gas. But how many of the termites?
Dan Lopez (The Show House)
EPA] has offered a laundry list of reasons not to regulate [that] have nothing to do with whether greenhouse gas emissions contribute to climate change.
Mary Christina Wood (Nature's Trust: Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age)
The theoretical understanding of what was going on was developed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century using statistical mechanics –an approach to thermodynamics that is based on applying the laws of statistics to the behaviour of large numbers of particles, such as the huge number of atoms or molecules present in a box of gas, each of them acting in accordance with Newton’s laws.
John Gribbin (The Time Illusion (Kindle Single))
The problem is that three of the neighboring farms leased their land to Frazer Gas for fracking. Under Pennsylvania law, if three contiguous farms lease to frackers, the gas company can drill underneath your parcel, whether you leased or not.
Lisa Scottoline (One Perfect Lie)
REFUTATION OF DELUSIVE AND PREJUDICED (DOCTRINE)[FN#292] According to Confucianism[FN#293] and Taoism all sorts of beings, such as men and beasts, were born out of and brought up by the (so-called) Great Path of Emptiness.[FN#294] That is to say, the Path by the operation of its own law gave rise naturally to the primordial Gas, and that Gas produced Heaven and Earth, which (in their turn) brought forth thousands of things. Accordingly the wise and the unwise, the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the happy and the miserable, are predestined to be so by the heavenly flat, and are at the mercy of Time and Providence. Therefore they (must) come back after death to Heaven and Earth, from which (in turn) they return to the (Path) of Emptiness. The main purpose of these[FN#295] (two) outside teachings is simply to establish morals with regard to bodily actions, but not to trace life to its First Cause. They tell of nothing beyond the phenomenal universe in their explanation of thousands of things. Though they point out the Great Path as the origin, yet they never explain in detail (what is) the direct, and (what) the indirect cause of the phenomenal universe, or how it was created, or how it will be destroyed, how life came forth, whither it will go, (what is) good, (what) evil. Therefore the followers of these doctrines adhere to them as the perfect teachings without knowing that they are merely temporary. [FN#292]
Kaiten Nukariya (The Religion of the Samurai A Study of Zen Philosophy and Discipline in China and Japan)
The new law that he predicted seemed to defy common sense. It was that the viscosity of a gas-the internal frictional that causes drag on a body moved through it-is independent of its pressure. One might expect a more compressed gas to exert a greater drag; even James was surprised at first that the theory said otherwise. But further thought showed that, at higher pressure, the effect on a moving body of being surrounded by more molecules is exactly counteracted by the screening effect they provide: each molecule travels, on average, a shorter distance before it collides with another one. A few years later, James and Katherine themselves did the experiment which showed the prediction to be correct.
Basil Mahon (The Man Who Changed Everything: The Life of James Clerk Maxwell)
I would tell you a tale, brother. Early in the clan's history, many centuries past, there arose, like a breath of gas from the deep, a new cult. Chosen as its representative god was the most remote, most distant of gods among the pantheon. A god that was, in truth, indifferent to the clans of my kind. A god that spoke naught to any mortal, that intervened never in mortal affairs. Morbid. The leaders of the cult proclaimed themselves the voice of that god. They wrote down laws, prohibitions, ascribances, propitiations, blasphemies, punishments for nonconformity, for dispute and derivations. This was but rumour, said details maintained in vague fugue, until such time as the cult achieved domination and with domination, absolute power. Terrible enforcement, terrible crimes committed in the name of the silent god. Leaders came and went, each further twisting words already twisted by mundane ambition and the zeal for unity. Entire pools were poisoned. Others drained and the silts seeded with salt. Eggs were crushed. Mothers dismembered. And our people were plunged into a paradise of fear, the laws made manifest and spilled blood the tears of necessity. False regret with chilling gleam in the centre eye. No relief awaited, and each generation suffered more than the last." "What happened?" "Seven great warrios from seven clans set out to find the Silent God, set out to see for themselves if this god had indeed blessed all that had come to pass in its name." "And did they find the silent god?" "Yes, and too, they found the reason for its silence. The god was dead. It had died with the first drop of blood spilled in its name." "I see, and what is the relevance of this tale of yours, however modest?" "Perhaps this. The existence of many gods conveys true complexity of mortal life. Conversely, the assertion of but one god leads to a denial of complexity, and encourages the need to make the world simple. Not the fault of the god, but a crime committed by its believers.
Steven Erikson (The Bonehunters (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #6))
I'm not convinced," Dodds said. It was Thursday morning, just six hours after Bosch and Chu had ended their surveillance of Chang, with the suspect going to an apartment in Monterey Park and apparently retiring for the night. "Well, Cap, you shouldn't be convinced yet," Bosch said. "That's why we want to continue the surveillance and get the wire." "What I mean is, I'm not convinced it's the way to go," Dodds said, "Surveillance is fine. But a wire is a lot of work and effort for long-shot results." Bosch understood. Dodds had an excellent repu tation as a detective, but he was now an administrator and about as far removed from the detective work in his division as a Houston oil executive is from the gas pump, He now worked with personnel numbers and budgets, He had to find ways of doing more with less and never allowing a dip in the statistics of arrests made and cases closed. That made him a realist and the reality was that electronic surveillance was very expensive. Not only did it take double-digit man hours to carefully draft a fifty plus-page affidavit secking court permission, but once permission was granted, a wiretap room had to be staffed twenty-four hours a day with a detective monitoring the line. Often a single-number tap led to other numbers needing to be tapped and under the law each line had to have its own monitor. Such an operation quickly sucked up overtime like a giant sponge. With the RHD's OT budget seriously down because of economic constraints on the department, Dodds was reluctant to give any of it up for what amounted to an investigation of the mur der of a South Side liquor store clerk. He would rather save it for a rainy day-a big-time media case that might come up and that would demand it.
Michael Connelly (Nine Dragons (Harry Bosch, #14; Harry Bosch Universe, #21))
This is a billiard table. An easy, flat, green billiard table. And you have hit your white ball and it is travelling easily and quietly towards the red. The pocket is alongside. Fatally, inevitably, you are going to hit the red and the red is going into that pocket. It is the law of the billiard table, the law of the billiard room. But, outside the orbit of these things, a jet pilot has fainted and his plane is diving straight at that billiard room, or a gas main is about to explode, or lightning is about to strike. And the building collapses on top of you and on top of the billiard table. Then what has happened to that white ball that could not miss the red ball, and to the red ball that could not miss the pocket? The white ball could not miss according to the laws of the billiard table. But the laws of the billiard table are not the only laws, and the laws governing the progress of this train, and of you to your destination, are also not the only laws in this particular game.
Ian Fleming (From Russia with Love (James Bond, #5))
You see, life will never operate the way we want it to. People will not submit to the laws of our kingdoms for long. God will not get up and give us his holy throne. Our reality is irrational and our hope is hopeless. Our dreams are gas (see Psalm 73:18–20). The more we work to fill our hearts, the emptier they become. The more we work to achieve our dreams, the more they vaporize in our hands. The more we live for ourselves, the more envious we become. It is socially acceptable madness. It cannot and will not ever work. This is not the way the world was created, and this is not who we were designed to be. We were designed to live with both King and kingdom consciousness, because we were designed to live for God. The architecture of our lives was to be shaped by all of the plans, purposes, words, and actions that would flow out of these words: “Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:10). It is only inside of the boundaries of these words that true and lasting life and peace of heart will ever be found. Inside these boundaries, real wisdom and real love live. Inside of this moral structure, life lives in gorgeous beauty. Outside are frustration, discouragement, anger, disappointment, and doubt. Sure, the temporary pleasures of here and now are enjoyable, but their shelf life is short. Creation has no capacity whatsoever to truly satisfy your heart. Your heart has been wired to find its hope, peace, and rest in God alone. What is spiritual death? It is living as if God doesn’t exist. It is putting yourself where God is supposed to be.
Paul David Tripp (Forever: Why You Can't Live Without It)
Regardless of who “owned” Gazprom, Vyakhirev controlled it. In the absence of effective law enforcement and with powerful allies in the Kremlin, Vyakhirev and other Gazprom executives bought shares in the company through rigged auctions. They exported gas through intermediaries owned by their relatives, selling gas to shell companies at below-market prices and allowing the company to resell gas at the full price, pocketing the difference. In theory, the company was partially private and partially state-controlled.
Chris Miller (Putinomics: Power and Money in Resurgent Russia)
So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate gold, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.
Mary Roach (Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law)
So I’m curious, how far does the Pope think we should go in the direction of respecting and correcting the natural world and it’s wild inhabitants. Before I arrived the PIL media manager sent me a copy of Francis’s rather beautiful and cyclical ‘On Care For Our Common Home’. “Each creature has its own purpose” he writes “none is superfluous." He describes how Saint Francis would burst into song when he gazed at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals. I read these passages to Father Carlo. He listens, nodding. “Saint Francis began a new relationship between nature and humanity. If you read his poems you find the expressions ‘Sister Water’, ‘Brother Sun’, ‘Sister Moon’.” “Would Saint Francis include brother rat?” I ask “Sister Boll Weevil, Uncle Blackbird who devours 2% of the North Dakota sunflower crop?”. Father Carlo says "Yes, Yes he would. He includes even death” he says.“Did saint Francis say anything specifically about rodents?”I hear myself say. “No, he didn’t. but the point is, brotherhood is not a simple relationship. with your brothers and sisters, normally you fight. You cannot think that there is an idillic way of being in a relationship with someone. Every relationship among humans and the earth is not only connotated with positive aspects. At the same time you also have negative aspects. The point is how do you deal with those aspects?” He’s good, this guy. “Yes” I say, “and how should we deal? It’s well and good to say these things, but how do we act in a way that serves both human and animal fairly? Let’s take the example of Canada Geese on gold courses. What is their crime? Befouling the turf, littering. For this should we be allowed to call someone in to round them up and gas them? Do they deserve to die because a few well-heeled humans want to hit a ball into hole and they need an obsessively tidy playing surface the size of the holy sea? Think of all the Sister Water that gets wasted watering the greens. Maybe it’s time to eliminate golf, not geese.” Father Carlos collects his thoughts. Among them, surely, ‘who let her in?’.
Mary Roach (Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law)
Razors pain you, Rivers are damp, Acids stain you And drugs cause cramp; Guns aren’t lawful, Nooses give, Gas smells awful – You might as well live.
Lawrence Block (Even The Wicked (Matthew Scudder Mysteries Series Book 13))
Tear gas has been deemed a “riot control agent,” which exempts it from chemical weapons law. As such, it is regularly used by police on citizens in city streets, while still being prohibited from war zones.
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah (Chain-Gang All-Stars)
Hoping to defuse the community’s anger, Black leaders in Selma planned a march. They would walk the fifty-four miles from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and to voter suppression. On March 7, 1965, the marchers set out. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator who stood against Black rights, state troopers and other law enforcement officers met the unarmed marchers with billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. They fractured the skull of young activist John Lewis and beat voting rights leader Amelia Boynton unconscious.
Heather Cox Richardson (Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America)
The problem is not covenant theology in general, but covenantal nomism in particular. Wright's primary objection to the imputation of Christ's active obedience is that it's a category mistake: "If we use the language of the law-court, it make no sense whatever to say that the judge imputes, imparts, bequeaths, conveys or otherwise transfers his righteousness to either the plaintiff or the defendant. Righteousness is not an object, a substance or gas which can be passed across the courtroom....To imagine the defendant somehow receiving the judge's righteousness is simply a category mistake." P.25
Michael Scott Horton (Justified: Modern Reformation Essays on the Doctrine of Justification)
The finding that real networks are rapidly evolving dynamical systems had catapulted the study of complex networks into the arms of physicists as well. Perhaps we are in for yet another such cultural shift. Indeed, Bianconi's mapping indicated that in terms of the laws governing their behavior, networks and a Bose gas are identical. Some feature of complex networks bridges the micro- and macroworld, with consequences as intriguing as the bridge's very existence. The most important prediction resulting from this mapping is that some networks can undergo Bose-Einstein condensation. The consequences of this prediction can be understood without knowing anything about quantum mechanics: It is, simply, that in some networks the winner can take all. Just as in a Bose-Einstein condensate all particles crowd into the lowest energy level, leaving the rest of the energy levels unpopulated, in some networks the fittest node could theoretically grab all the links, leaving none for the rest of the nodes. The winner takes all.
Albert-László Barabási (Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life)
Poincare took Laplace’s argument to its logical conclusion. He proved, using the full rigour of mathematics, that if you have a box of gas containing a definite number of particles (as many as you like, as long as it is not actually infinite) and the particles strictly obey Newton’s laws of motion, then after a sufficiently long interval of time the distribution of the particles in the box must return to its original state, with each particle moving in the same direction and at the same speed that it was moving to start with.
John Gribbin (Deep Simplicity: Chaos, Complexity and the Emergence of Life (Penguin Press Science))
It is not a matter of me marrying either you or a gas pumper. It is a matter of marrying a man. I do not much care what he does, so long as he is a man. You are 21,” she said, “and under the law you are a man, and your height and weight is that of a man. In the bed you are a man,” and she smiled a little. “But you are losing your manhood faster then hell. Pretty soon in bed will be the only place you are a man. But that is not manhood. Dogs and bulls and tomcats do the same. Yes, you are losing your manhood and becoming simply an island in the empire of Moors.
Mark Harris (The Southpaw)
You good?” “Yeah. Okay. Good.” “Now, I’m going to be right here to tell you what to do, and I’ll help you steer if you start running us off the road.” I revved the gas pedal and then placed her foot on it and let her do the same. I could tell she was trying not to bail off of my lap—her body was practically vibrating with nerves—but she didn’t. She stayed, listening intently. I gave her basic instructions, and then I helped her ease onto the road, going about five miles per hour. She didn’t move her hands from two and ten o’clock, and I had to tug at the wheel slightly to straighten us out. And then we picked up speed, just a bit. “How does that feel?” “Like falling,” she whispered, her body rigid, her arms locked on the wheel. “Relax. Falling is easier if you don’t fight it.” “And driving?” “That too. Everything is easier if you don’t fight it.” “What if someone sees us?” “Then I’ll tell you when to wave." She giggled and relaxed slightly against me. I kissed her temple where it rested against my cheek, and she was immediately stiff as a board once more. Shit. I hadn’t thought. I’d just reacted. “I would have patted you on the back, but your forehead was closer,” I drawled. “You’re doin’ it. You’re drivin’.” “How fast are we going?” she said breathlessly. I hoped it was fear and not that kiss. “Oh you’re flyin’, baby. Eight miles an hour. At this rate, we will reach Salt Lake in two days, my legs will be numb, and Henry will want a turn. Give it a little gas. Let’s see if we can push it up to ten.” She pressed her foot down suddenly and we shot forward with a lurch. “Whoa!” I cried, my arms shooting up to brace hers on the wheel. I saw Henry stir from the corner of my eye. “Danika Patrick is the first female NASCAR driver to ever win a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series pole,” he said woodenly, before slumping back down in his seat. I spared him a quick glance, only to see his eyes were closed once more. Millie obviously heard him and she hooted and pressed the gas pedal down a little harder. “Henry just compared you to Danika Patrick. And he obviously isn’t alarmed that you’re driving because he’s already asleep again.” “That’s because Henry knows I’m badass.” “Oh yeah. Badass, Silly Millie. ‘Goin’ ninety miles an hour down a dead-end street,’” I sang a little Bob Dylan, enjoying myself thoroughly.
Amy Harmon (The Song of David (The Law of Moses, #2))
It is a maxim among carnivore biologists that the main reason big predators now die is because people kill them. People run them over with speeding cars, they shoot them, trap them, gas them, poison them, and torture them. Laws notwithstanding, they kill them out of sheer spite, then bury the evidence—a practice so routine it has become a barstool commandment in certain rural cultures: Shoot, shovel, and shut up.
William Stolzenburg (Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators)
The important point is that the singular object that is the balloon strictly obeys the gas law because the orderly motion of its single continuous elastic surface arises from the disorderly motions of very large numbers of particles, generating, as Schrödinger put it, order from disorder.
Johnjoe McFadden (Life on the Edge: The Coming of Age of Quantum Biology)
One might think that the exposure of unsanitary conditions and animal cruelty in the corporate farming and food-processing industries would provoke lawmakers to punish the perpetrators and tighten laws protecting the safety of our food supply. But no, in several states they have instead directed their fury against the citizen-activists who exposed the wrongdoing by levying heavy penalties against the surreptitious photographing of inhumane outrages. 6 Republican legislators in North Carolina introduced a bill to make it a felony to disclose the chemicals (some of which are toxic to humans and animals) employed in fracking for natural gas. The bill also authorized drilling companies to oblige emergency responders cleaning up chemical spills to sign a confidentiality agreement promising not to disclose the names of the chemicals in their proprietary stew to the public—or their toxicity.
Mike Lofgren (The Deep State: The Fall of the Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government)
Another federal law makes it a felony for any person “knowingly to deliver or cause to be delivered for transmission through the mails or interstate commerce by telegraph, telephone, wireless, or other means of communication false or misleading or knowingly inaccurate reports concerning crop or market information or conditions that affect or tend to affect the price of any commodity in interstate commerce.”21 For this “crime,” you can be fined up to one million dollars and imprisoned for up to ten years. If you are ever prosecuted for a violation of this law, the way it is written, all the government needs to do to put you behind bars is to prove that you sent anybody a single bit of inaccurate information that somehow concerned crop or commodity market information or conditions. It does not matter whether you sent that message by telephone or mail or telegraph. It does not matter who you sent that letter to. It does not matter whether the information was actually false, or merely misleading. It does not matter whether your note actually had any effect on market prices anywhere, or even whether you intended for it to have that effect. The way this law was written by the morons in Congress, you are guilty of a felony if you send a postcard to your grandmother in a nursing home, trying to make her feel better by lying about how nice the weather has been in Florida, or how low the gas prices have been. And you will not find this law in Title 18 either; this one is buried in the bowels of Title 7 (sec. 13), which lists the laws supposedly regulating “Agriculture”.
James Duane (You Have the Right to Remain Innocent)
The grandfather of this brilliant madness was Austrian physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, whose proof that gas molecules disperse in proportion to their temperature was foundational to all that followed. Boltzmann showed that molecular movement is simply determined by probability, which results in concentrations of molecules dispersing until they reach equilibrium with their environment. If you pour a potful of boiling water into a cold bath, hot water molecules spread out until they are evenly distributed and have slightly raised the overall bath temperature. Time cannot go backward for the same reason that boiling water can’t re-form in one corner of a cold bath and the dead cannot return to life: random probability will never re-concentrate those molecules back into their original form. The branch of physics pioneered by Boltzmann was called statistical mechanics, and it explained one of the fundamental laws of nature: the Second Law of Thermodynamics, also known as entropy.
Sebastian Junger (In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife)
Noah and a few like him perceived that the continent was in fact finite, and that venal office-holders, legislators in particular, could be persuaded to toss up great hunks of it for grabs, and to toss them in such a way as to have them land where Noah and his kind were standing Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun. E
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater)
Computer chips are an outlier. They get better because we figure out how to cram more transistors on each one, but there’s no equivalent breakthrough to make cars use a million times less gas. Consider that the first Model T that rolled off Henry Ford’s production line in 1908 got no better than 21 miles to the gallon. As I write this, the top hybrid on the market gets 58 miles to the gallon. In more than a century, fuel economy has improved by less than a factor of three. Nor have solar panels become a million times better. When crystalline silicon solar cells were introduced in the 1970s, they converted about 15 percent of the sunlight that hit them into electricity. Today they convert around 25 percent. That’s good progress, but it’s hardly in line with Moore’s Law.
Bill Gates (How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need)
All the sovereignty issues stem from the same desires and fears – the desire to safeguard routes for military and commercial shipping, the desire to own the natural riches of the region, and the fear that others may gain where you lose. Until recently the riches were theoretical, but the melting ice has made the theoretical probable, and in some cases certain. The hunger for energy suggests the race is inevitable in what some Arctic specialists have called the ‘New Great Game’. There are going to be a lot more ships in the High North, a lot more oil rigs and gas platforms – in fact, a lot more of everything. However, there are differences between this situation and the ‘Scramble for Africa’ in the nineteenth century or the machinations of the great powers in the Middle East, India and Afghanistan in the original Great Game. This race has rules, a formula and a forum for decision-making. The Arctic Council is composed of mature countries, most of them democratic to a greater or lesser degree. The international laws regulating territorial disputes, environmental pollution, laws of the sea and treatment of minority peoples are in place.
Tim Marshall (Prisoners of Geography)
MITI, far from being a uniquely brilliant leader of government/industrial partnership, has been wrong so often that the Japanese themselves will concede that much of their growth derives from industry's rejection of MITI’s guidance. MITI, incredibly, opposed the development of the very areas where Japan has been successful: cars, electronics and cameras. MITI has, moreover, poured vast funds into desperately wasteful projects. Thanks to MITI, Japan has a huge overcapacity in steel - no less than three times the national requirement. This, probably the most expensive mistake Japan ever made in peacetime, was a mistake of genius, because Japan has no natural resources: it has to import everything; the iron ore, the coal, the gas, the limestone and the oil to make its unwanted steel. Undaunted, MITI then invested in giant, loss-making (£400 million losses by 1992) 5th generation supercomputers at the precise moment that the market opened for the small personal computer; and MITI' s attempts at dominating the world's pharmaceutical and telecommunications industries have each failed. Nor is this just anecdote. In a meticulous study of MITI’s interventions into the Japanese economy between 1955 and 1990, Richard Beason of Alberta University and David Weinterin of Harvard showed that, across the 13 major sectors of the economy, surveying hundreds of different companies, Japan's bureaucrats almost invariably picked and supported the losers.
Terence Kealey (The Economic Laws of Scientific Research)
Law enforcement officers sometimes feel that no action in a crisis situation means we are not making progress and that we should do something to elicit a response—for example, to break a window or deploy gas. In fact, what’s most important to understand about the negotiation process is that sometimes we may talk for hours with no response, but that doesn’t always mean that the subject on the other end is not listening and that the process is not working, when indeed it may be. It’s a bit of a cliché, but in negotiating, patience really is a virtue.
Patrick R Doering (Crisis Cops: The Evolution of Hostage Negotiations in America)
One reason why the fracking boom caught everyone by surprise was that fracking had been around since the 1970s. The technology failed to deliver any meaningful results for forty years. It was simply too expensive to be economically viable. Fracking, in fact, was only kept alive thanks to repeated government intervention. The fracking industry was essentially a ward of the state for decades, kept alive by lavish government subsidies, tax breaks, and government-funded research. In 1980, a federal law called the Crude Oil Windfall Profits Tax Act included a tax break for natural gas supplies produced in unconventional ways, like fracking. The purpose of the tax break was to nurture new energy sources. The tax break was stupendously generous, providing 50 cents for every thousand cubic feet of gas. The so-called Section 29 tax break remained in place for decades. The National Bureau of Economic Research estimated in 2007 that the tax break would cost the federal government $3.4 billion between 2007 and 2011 alone. The federal government also stepped in to support the frackers with long-term, expensive, experimental research. It was the kind of research that private companies were reluctant to provide for risky technologies. The government-run Sandia National Laboratories developed the three-dimensional microseismic imaging that made fracking possible. A federal project called the Morgantown Energy Research Center, or MERC, partnered with companies to set up experimental drilling operations to put fracking to the test. It was two engineers with MERC who patented the vital technology to drill horizontally—or directional drilling, as the industry called it. In 1986, a Department of Energy program, partnered with private companies, was the first to demonstrate a multistage, horizontal fracture in the Devonian Shale. In
Christopher Leonard (Kochland: The Secret History of Koch Industries and Corporate Power in America)
I kept up with my work for the legal firm, continuing the transcription of the audio notes of one of the firm’s partners, presently engaged by a multinational oil and gas corporation to pursue every possible course of action against a certain individual, who happened also to be a member of the legal profession, and who had sought to prove, indeed had proven in law in certain countries though not his own, gross malfeasance on the part of the multinational’s leaders that had resulted in the poisoning of a number of water courses, the destruction of ancient woodland, the decimation of at least two protected species of birds, the kidnapping of activists and the corruption of public officials, as well as tax fraud, racketeering, stock-market manipulation and other crimes besides. The firm for which I worked, in representing this multinational oil and gas corporation, had already succeeded in having the attorney in question disbarred in several states, provinces, unincorporated territories and crown dependencies; in some but not in all places he could no longer practice law, the only profession he had ever dreamed of pursuing, he explained in a podcast interview from his home, where he was at present under house arrest.
Sarah Bernstein (Study for Obedience)
is intriguing to note that the same power-law regularities apply to the scaling of man-made objects: to the mechanical equivalents of organisms that “metabolize” (convert) fossil fuels or electricity into kinetic energy. Perhaps the best choice for examining these inanimate scalings is to look at internal combustion engines—the machines that, together with electric motors, are the dominant energy converters and mechanical sustainers of modern civilization.28 Their two main categories are reciprocating engines with fuel combustion taking place inside pistons, and gas turbines (jet engines) with fuel combustion taking place in a chamber supplied with compressed air.
Vaclav Smil (Size: How It Explains the World)
It is against the law for a car to run out of gas
Manik Joshi (Weird Laws from Around the World)
It was a regular Nazi technique, and the Soviets have taken it over. Any time they give out reports that Americans have been violating the laws of war, using poison gas, germ warfare, or what have you, you may be sure the Soviets are doing it or getting ready to do it’.
Upton Sinclair (The Return of Lanny Budd (The Lanny Budd Novels #11))
registered email address and went global in 2007. Twitter split off onto its own platform and went global in 2007. Airbnb was born in 2007. In 2007, VMware—the technology that enabled any operating system to work on any computer, which enabled cloud computing—went public, which is why the cloud really only took off in 2007. Hadoop software—which enabled a million computers to work together as if they were one, giving us “Big Data”—was launched in 2007. Amazon launched the Kindle e-book reader in 2007. IBM launched Watson, the world's first cognitive computer, in 2007. The essay launching Bitcoin was written in 2006. Netflix streamed its first video in 2007. IBM introduced nonsilicon materials into its microchips to extend Moore's Law in 2007. The Internet crossed one billion users in late 2006, which seems to have been a tipping point. The price of sequencing a human genome collapsed in 2007. Solar energy took off in 2007, as did a process for extracting natural gas from tight shale, called fracking. Github, the world's largest repository of open source software, was launched in 2007. Lyft, the first ride-sharing site, delivered its first passenger in 2007. Michael Dell, the founder of Dell, retired in 2005. In 2007, he decided he'd better come back to work—because in 2007, the world started to get really fast. It was a real turning point. Today, we have taken another
Heather McGowan (The Adaptation Advantage: Let Go, Learn Fast, and Thrive in the Future of Work)
What you believe about climate change doesn’t reflect what you know,” said Dan Kahan, a professor at Yale Law School who studies risk perception. “It expresses who you are." To illustrate this point, Kahan cited the results of yet another survey by the Pew Research Center. This survey was designed to test basic scientific knowledge and it posed questions like “What is the main function of red blood cells?” When respondents were asked what gas “most scientists believe causes temperatures in the atmosphere to rise,” 58 percent chose the correct answer: “carbon dioxide.” There was little difference in the proportion of Democrats and Republicans who gave the right response; among the former it was 56 percent, among the latter 58 percent. (Among Independents, 63 percent chose correctly.) But polls that ask Americans about their own beliefs about global warming show a significant partisan divide; in another Pew survey, 66 percent of Democrats said they believed that human activity was the “main cause” of global warming, while only 24 percent of Republicans did. This suggests there are many Democrats who don’t know what’s causing climate change but still believe humans are responsible for it and many Republicans who do know, yet still deny that humans play a role. And what this shows, according to Kahan, is that people’s views on climate change are shaped less by their knowledge of the science than by their sense of group identity. To break the political logjam, he argues, Americans need to find ways of talking about climate change that don’t require members of one group or the other to renounce their cultural identity. “If you show people there is some way of responding to the problem that’s consistent with who they are, then they’re more likely to see the problem,” Kahan told me. Kari Marie Norgaard is a sociologist at the University of Oregon who has studied how people talk about climate change. She, too, believes there’s a strong cultural component to Americans’ attitudes, but she sees the problem as reflecting the strategies people use to avoid painful subjects. Norgaard argues that it’s difficult even for people who are privately worried about climate change to discuss the issue in public because on the one hand they feel guilty about the situation and on the other they feel helpless to change it. “We have a need to think of ourselves as good people,” she told me. Meanwhile, the very lack of discussion about the issue feeds itself: people feel that if it really were a serious problem, others would be dealing with it: “It’s difficult for people to feel that climate change is really happening in part because we’re embedded in a world where no one else around us is talking about it.” “It becomes a vicious cycle between the political gridlock and the cultural and individual gridlock,” Norgaard went on. What could possibly break this cycle? Norgaard argues that if the nation’s political leaders would candidly discuss the issue “it could be very powerful. It could free up a lot of the hopelessness people feel and allow them to mobilize.” “I think there are probably multiple levels at which we could break this cycle,” she went on. And though, after more than thirty years of ignored warnings, the challenge has grown all the more daunting, she said, “I don’t believe we get to give up.
Elizabeth Kolbert (Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change)
Over the last two decades, unconventional oil and natural gas wells have emerged as the dominant source of energy production in the United States. Despite the complexity of drilling these wells and forecasting production volumes, investors in such assets can take advantage of several mathematical principles to reduce the risk in their portfolios. This article dives into the practical application of the Central Limit Theorem and Law of Large Numbers within the energy sector and explores how the characteristics of unconventional reservoirs and diversified assets can work together to reduce production volatility for investors.
Oil & Gas Moneyball: Why Statistical Independence is Beneficial
The Gaza Sonnet, 1264 (All Free or None Free) Al-Shams to Alpha Centauri, All occupied lands will be free. Till there is smile on every face, All happiness is blasphemy. Happiness is not an imperial merch, Freedom is no colonizer's heirloom. Joy is no bigot's ancestral bequest, Earth is not a zionist hand-me-down. Divide and rule is the law of animals, Unite and integrate is law of humanity. One human life is worth more, than all the gas reserves underneath. Gaza is not a place, Gaza is a wake up call, to the peace-crying humanity. Awake, Arise, O Citizens of Earth - Till all of us are free, none of us are free!
Abhijit Naskar (Yaralardan Yangın Doğar: Explorers of Night are Emperors of Dawn)
was only a secondary armory, it just held a few weapons, but they were good stuff. There were several pump-action Mossberg shotguns. There were three Colt Law Enforcement Only M4s that looked similar to what Ford was carrying now but with one significant difference. They had a selector switch instead of a safety, allowing the weapon to be in Fire, Safe, or three-shot burst modes. One had a 40mm grenade launcher for tear gas. There was a suppressed H&K MP5 that ran full-auto as well as two FN SCAR Subcompacts that were select fire. Additionally, ammo cans stacked in the bottom of the cage held thousands of rounds for each weapon. Ford knew there was no way he could leave any of it.
Franklin Horton (Switched On (The Borrowed World #6))
The form of argument used by Farjoun and Machover is rather alien to the tradition of political economy. The later has tended, from its inception, to look for explanations in terms of the actions of rational profit maximising individuals directing the economy towards some sort of equilibrium. Instead Farjoun and Machover, who were mathematicians not economists, imported the form of reasoning that had been used in thermodynamics or statistical mechanics. This branch of physics deals with the behaviour of large complex systems with huge numbers of degrees of freedom. The classical example of this type of system is gas composed of huge numbers of randomly moving molecules. In such a system it is fruitless to try and form a deterministic and microscopic picture of the interaction of individual molecules. But you can make a number of useful deductions about the statistical properties of the whole collection of molecules. It was from the statistical properties of such collections that Boltzmann was able to derive the laws of thermodynamics[Bol95]. What Farjoun and Machover did was apply this form of reasoning to another chaotic system with a large number of degrees of freedom : the market economy. In doing this they initiated a new discipline of study : econophysics. This, in a very radical way, views the economy as a process without a subject. It assumes nothing about knowing subjects, instead it attempts to apply the principle of parsimony. It assumes nothing about the individual economic actors. Instead it theorises the aggregate constraints and and statistical distributions of the system that arise from the assumption of maximal disorder. A such this approach is anathema to the subjectivist Austrian school9.
Paul Cockshott Dave Zachariah (Arguments for socialism)
By enforcing laws which forbid men to trade peacefully as they please, the police create a social environment which breeds crime. The small-time burglar who is frightened away by the police is far outweighed by the Mafia boss who makes millions off the black market in prostitution and gambling, which activities are fraught with violence because of government prohibitions. Not only do governmental police make possible more crime than they discourage, they enforce a whole host of invasive laws designed to make everyone behave in a manner which the lawmakers considered morally proper. They see to it that you’re not permitted to foul your mind with pornography (whatever that is—even the courts aren’t too sure) or other people’s minds by appearing in public too scantily clad. They try to prevent you from experiencing the imaginary dangers of marijuana (in the ‘20s they protected you from liquor, but that’s not a no-no any more). They even have rules about marriage, divorce, and your sex life. No, the police don’t offer the citizen any protection from such invasions of privacy ... they’re too busy enforcing the invasive laws! Nor do they protect him from the many governmental violations of his rights—if you try to evade being enslaved by the draft, the police will help the army, not you. The police prevent the establishment of an effective, private enterprise defense system which could offer its customers real protection (including protection from governments). In fact, they often prevent you from protecting yourself, as in New York City, where women, even in the most crime-ridden areas, are forbidden to carry effective self-defense devices. Guns, switch-blade knives, tear gas sprayers, etc., are illegal. Of course, the criminals ignore these laws, but the peaceful citizens are effectively disarmed and left at the mercy of hoodlums. In addition to failing to protect citizens from either private criminals or the government, making it almost impossible for the citizens to protect themselves, encouraging crime by creating black markets, and invading privacy with stupid and useless “moral” laws, the police compel citizens to pay taxes to support them! If a citizen requests to be relieved of police “protection” and protests by refusing to pay taxes for the upkeep of the government and its police, the police will initiate force by picking him up and the government will fine and/or imprison him (unless he attempts to defend himself against the police’s initiated violence, in which case his survivors will be forced to bury him at their expense). With the entire weight of the law behind them, this gives the police the safest protection racket ever devised. If the police in a democracy don’t exist to protect the citizens, what is their function? It is essentially the same as that of the police in a dictatorship—to protect the government.
Morris Tannehill (Market for Liberty)
Crime should be in essence a deed, not an intention or feeling. The policeman catches the villain who has committed a crime: the criminal has done something wrong. But, once the category of “Thoughtcrime” is introduced, then respect for the law will soon be replaced by fear of law enforcement. If Jews have collectively a self-perception of their ancestors being put into gas chambers, and if they “feel” that they do not like people pointing out that this perception is untrue, then that is regrettable – but, it has no business being a crime. Citizens need to demand that the laws of their nation are just and fair.
Kollerstrom
The parallels to The Lone Ranger continued. The Green Hornet would ride in a sleek modern automobile, the ’30s equivalent of “the great horse Silver.” Like the Ranger, the Hornet would fight for the law but operate outside it and usually be mistaken by police for one of the criminals. And there would be a faithful sidekick: as the Lone Ranger had his Tonto (brave and stoic, man of a different race, with a simple name of two syllables, ending in o), Britt Reid’s Filipino valet, Kato, would be “the only living man to know him as the Green Hornet.” Kato was a master chemist who created the gas guns and smokescreens that became part of the Green Hornet’s arsenal. He was an expert in the secrets of Oriental combat, and he was blessed with keen intelligence. A college graduate, he could cook, care for a house, and drive with the skills of a racecar professional. The car too had a name: Black Beauty. It whirred distinctively as Reid and Kato went into action in the abandoned-looking building that was reached “through a secret panel in Britt Reid’s bedroom … along a narrow passage built within the wall itself … down narrow, creaking steps that led around a corner” to the structure “on a little-used dead-end side street.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)