High Voltage Quotes

The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief.

Love doesn't build cages. It builds stairways to the stars.

The old, slow, creaking descriptions are a thing of the past; today the rule is brevity - but every word must be supercharged, high-voltage.

A flock of sheep near the airport or a high voltage generator beside the orchard: these combinations open up my life like a wound, but they also heal it. That's why my feelings always come in twos.

I’ll be playing with high-voltage power tomorrow. Can’t imagine anything going wrong with that!

I’d rather be fearless and criticized than fearful and approved of. That’s the bloody choice sometimes.

They are in contact on a high-voltage wavelength of hate...

He said love is the willingness to put the happiness and evolution of the person you love before your own. Even if it means giving them up.

Because I know a priceless truth: when someone has done everything in their power to mangle your wings beyond recognition, to slice them to shreds so that they can never be used, there is only one way to win. Fly.

At fourteen, I’d vowed, one day, I’d be the woman making him laugh, making joy blaze from his face, so tangible it seemed I might catch it in my hands.

Christ. Women. I don't get you. I protect you, you get pissy. I don't protect you, you get pissy. I open doors, I'm patronizing. I don't open doors, I'm a caveman, wich by the way, I am. What the bipolar fuck? Beginning to think you babes don't have any clue what you want, or change your mind constantly just to dick with us.

Love is funny. Even though you don't have that person anymore, you still have the feeling. You didn't lose your LOVE. You lost the tangible, tactile, sense-sational ability to experience the person or animal you lost.

You don't grieve love; you celebrate that you had it.

Furthermore, if I lost my soul, I’d adapt. I always do. Adaptation is my specialty. I practically invented the word.

Tonight, the sea was a shiver of dark glass, harboring secrets untold in her depths while on her tranquil surface stars glittered like diamonds.

Choose the men you take to your bed by these criteria: they see the finest in you, enhance and defend it. When you fuck a man you are giving him A. Motherfucking. Gift. Be certain he deserves it. And bloody hell, don't have one-night stands. Commit to the action. Make it matter. Feel it and ride it all the way through.

   If someone is counting on children to bring them peace of mind, self-confidence, or a steady sense of happiness, they are in for a bad shock. What children do is complicate, implicate, give plot lines to the story, color to the picture, darken everything, bring fear as never before, suggest the holy, explain the ferocity of the human mind, undo or redo some of the past while casting shadows into the future. There is no boredom with children in the home. The risks are high. The voltage crackling. —Anne Roiphe, Married

People had to want to stay, choose to be with you, or it meant nothing. There were physical cages and there were emotional ones. Holding onto someone too tightly made it hard for them to breathe, and eventually, inevitably, they’d do one of two things: suffocate or run, leaving you feeling like hell either way.

Did he think I would beg him to stay? Never. People had to want to stay, choose to be with you, or it meant nothing.

If I were a character in a novel, I'd snipe the bitch who wrote my life this way.

He'd have to turn on his high-voltage charm with these people. Should work. They were only used to 12V battery power after all-he'd dazzle them.

Life-giving, life-stealing, beautiful, a challenge to handle, worth learning to ride, full of fresh wonders every day—if he’d had a woman like the ocean in his bed, he’d still be there.

I learned young that moments of comedy during the horror show can be a life raft, enough to keep you bobbing in a violent, killing sea.

So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

I think that's what love is; holding someone sacred, honoring them, protecting them, living up to the very best of them.

That had taken enormous courage. To love someone you knew wanted someone else, too, but had, for whatever reason, chosen you.

Women belong in all places where... F*** it! Women belong. Period.

All knowledge that takes special training to acquire is the province of the Magician energy. Whether you are an apprentice training to become a master electrician and unraveling the mysteries of high voltage; or a medical student, grinding away night and day, studying the secrets of the human body and using available technologies to help your patients; or a would-be stockbroker or a student of high finance; or a trainee in one of the psychoanalytic schools, you are in exactly the same position as the apprentice shaman or witch doctor in tribal societies. You are spending large amounts of time, energy, and money in order to be initiated into rarefied realms of secret power. You are undergoing an ordeal testing your capacities to become a master of this power. And, as is true in all initiations, there is no guarantee of success. [Magician energy]

It occured to me that adaptability was more than survivability; it was the foundation of love. We were all changing, every day, and those relationships that endured were the ones that rode the waves together, grew and allowed each other to evolve. Encouraged it, even when it was frightening. Adaptability in relationships was the polar opposite of a cage. It was necessary commitment wed to necessary freedom.

Because I know a priceless truth: when someone has done everything in their power to mangle your wings beyond recognition, to slice them to shreds so that they can never be used, there is only one way to win. Fly.

Argue for your limitations, you make them yours. Together, we’re going to argue for your possibilities

SWIMMING. DANGER! LIVE WIRES. THIS PROPERTY CONDEMNED. HIGH VOLTAGE. THIRD RAIL. DANGER OF

The heart has its own mind, measures its own time, and if it consults with the brain, doesn’t always heed the advice. My brain was screaming—stop hurting already. To a deaf audience.

You crazy, beautiful, maddening woman, that's because you trained yourself to live that way. And wisely so. It's what kept you alive. It's been your saving grace. You learned young the necessity of leaving the pain behind and embracing the next good thing. Few people ever achieve that clarity. Prolonged grief is self-mutilation; a blade you turn on yourself. It doesn't bring them back and only keeps you trapped in misery. You were healing the way people should heal but they punish themselves instead. For what—being the one who lived? Those we love will die. And die. And die. Life goes on. You choose how: badly or well.

I refilled the wineglass and took it with me for a nice long bubble bath, where I settled in with Ambrose's guide for low-voltage outdoor lighting. It wasn't thrilling bubble-bath reading material, but I was impressed by his imagination. You wouldn't know from the writing that he'd never actually seen a low-voltage lighting system in someone's yard, much less installed one himself. His descriptions were clear, colorful, and written with authority. The inscription wasn't bad either: To Natalie, You're a high-voltage system as far as I am concerned.

The Wild Man can only come to full life inside when the man has gone through the serious disciplines suggested by taking the first wound, doing kitchen and ashes work, creating a garden, bringing wild flowers to the Holy Woman, experiencing the warrior, riding the red, the white, and the black horses, learning to create art, and receiving the second heart. The Wild Man doesn’t come to full life through being “natural,” going with the flow, smoking weed, reading nothing, and being generally groovy. Ecstasy amounts to living within reach of the high voltage of the golden gifts. The ecstasy comes after thought, after discipline imposed on ourselves, after grief.

Cages were funny things. Although I'd escaped with my body long ago, only recently had my heart finally broken free. Healed by the love of a man who'd been willing to sacrifice everything, even give me up if he had to, just to see me rise.

That's why I remember every single thing I've done, stare at myself in a mirror and meet those eyes that have screwed up, fully aware of my failings, because the day I let myself forget them is the day I could start doing them all over again.

When you refuse to think about an issue, it remains unchanged, in precisely the same state as you tucked it away." "Precisely the point of boxing it. The issue dies. Can no longer affect you. It's a damned effective tactic." "Short-term yes. Long-term, a recipe for disaster. When you next encounter whatever you boxed your feeling about, you're ambushed by repressed, unresolved emotion.

And now, indeed, everything began to look new, unexpected, full of surprises. I had a book in my hands to while away the time, and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book--a compilation of pages that overlap without any two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires: for a geologist the compilation opens at one page, for a boatman at another, and still another for a ship's pilot, a painter and so on. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.

I had a book in my hands to while away the time and it occurred to me that in a way a landscape is not unlike a book - a compilation of pages that overlap without two ever being the same. People open the book according to their taste and training, their memories and desires. On occasion these pages are ruled with lines that are invisible to some people, while being for others, as real, as charged and as volatile as high-voltage cables.

Tesla cocked her head to the side. "Hey," she said. "Do you hear something?" Nick cocked his head just as his sister had, though he wondered why anyone bother doing that. Does lifting one ear at an approximately thirty-degree angle really increase one's ability to detect faint noises? he thought. Because he was that sort of kid.

Hi Mega. “Hi Dancer,” I whispered. I love you. “I love you, too.

When you treated things badly, things behaved badly.

Powerful, often brilliant beyond comprehension, most of the time he was a wildly emotional hot mess.

How can anybody be okay, when some pompous, puffed-up, maladjusted, addlepated, blowhards keep impeding efforts of equality and assimilation, as if it's not 2022 AD, but 2022 BC!

Woman empowered is civilization empowered.

In a world of shallowness and narcissism motivation is yet another commodity that can be gift-wrapped and sold to all those suckers who are just begging to be ripped off.

Acts done by my body against my will are not my acts.

High-voltage wires stretched between steel towers like giants holding jump ropes into the distance.

Aim for their power lines! They're the devil's veins and electricity is his blood."   – Futurama

The kiss lights you up with the same electricity that it always does—victory as charged as a lightning storm and high-voltage love.

A mom empowered is a world empowered.

Choose the men you take to your bed by these criteria: they see the finest in you, enhance and defend it.

Theories are a fluid road map for solving a mystery and, if broached with an open mind and scrupulous attention to detail, they grant the answers you seek.

I’m not a woman who often looks back. I measure actions by results, and peering into the past rarely yields any.

Fearless people are outsiders. The fearful have many places to belong.

I’m not afraid of Hell. I lived there once. And if I have to go back again, I’ll swagger through those gates with fire in my blood and war in my heart. And I’ll. Take. No. Prisoners.

I'd keep an open mind, consider all possibilities. That's all any of us can do. Life is a box you don't get to open all at once. You can touch it, pick it up, shake it even, but you can only guess at the contents. There's a hole in the top of the box where things come out, on their own timetable, on their own terms. You think you have things figured out" he said, with a note of bitterness in his voice, "only to find you saw everything completely wrong, didn't understand a bloody bit of it. So, you wait to see what pops out next. And you go on living in the meantime.

No judgment, no mockery, no grudge, no assumption - just fall. Fall head over heels for the world, like you did for your first love. Remember the loss of appetite, remember the sleeplessness, remember the constant desire to see them - once you feel that kind of intense attachment to the world, that day the world will have a true lover - that day the society will have a high voltage human.

He stood and slipped into his jeans, leaving the waist unsnapped as he made his way to the plane in that loose, lanky stride that had her mouth watering. She loved the look of him, like a cowboy in some Madison Avenue ad. Except that he was the real thing, with big,work-roughened hands and scuffed boots and a high-voltage smile that could reduce her to puddles when it was directed her way.

Love is funny. Even though you don’t have that person anymore, you still have the feeling. You didn’t lose your love. You lost the tangible, tactile, sense-sational ability to experience the person or animal you lost. Grief is all about not being able to touch anymore. Not being able to use your senses to experience them on a physical level. They’ve moved beyond an impenetrable veil, beyond your hands and mouth and eyes.

Most of the time, that is what it feels like here, far away from the war, in the still heart of the tornado. So peaceful, the streets; so tranquil, so orderly; yet underneath the deceptively placid surfaces, a tremor, like that near a high-voltage power line. We’re stretched thin, all of us; we vibrate; we quiver, we’re always on the alert. Reign of terror, they used to say, but terror does not exactly reign. Instead it paralyzes. Hence the unnatural quiet.

A homeless guy lifts a bread out of hunger, it's called burglary, but a cool-looking guy rips off an entire population, while spreading disparities wider than ever, it's called entrepreneurship. What a world! What a pathetic world!

Reflecting on something that hurts you only prolongs your pain, and when death is involved, the pain is often compounded by a relentless sense of guilt that attacks the moment you start to heal, as if duration of grief somehow proves the depth of your love for the person you lost.

Thing is, we love the game we play, the way we provoke each other, we thrive on it. And that was a trait I couldn’t wait to explore in bed with him. People say opposites attract and that’s true, they do—combustively, and short-term. I think it’s those with like minds and hearts that succeed long-term.

People worry about artificial intelligence, for they don't understand it. As a behaviorist, I worry about human intelligence, for the potential of artificial intelligence is nothing compared to that of human intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is not the problem – heartless, senseless, reckless human intelligence is.

The thunder god stared for a while, broken only by bouts of acute blinking. Chester A. Arthur XVII scratched his shoulder. Catrina scratched the back of her neck. “Is he OK?” Timmy wondered. “He’s just thinking,” explained Catrina. “Oh god,” said Queen Victoria XXX. “Should we help him?” “Give him a second. I think he can do it.

People waste so much time mulling over things they’ve done when all the mulling in the world neither undoes nor changes one iota of what you did. The only thing that alters the unsatisfying state in which you’ve left things is future action. Either never see the person again, or see them and do something to set the record straight.

In my thirty years of existence I've come to the realization that all talk of truth is nonsense. Because even though we assume truth to be absolute and universal, in reality, in our human world no one truth is universal or absolute, it's all relative. The only force absolute and universal is love - there's nothing higher, braver or wiser.

We've a bit of a problem, Kat. Have you someone to watch the wee lass?" His second use of the word "lass" finally penetrated a brain of concrete. Kat blinked, as slow comprehension dawned. "Christian?" she exploded softly. "Is that YOU?" His lips drew back in a silent snarl. Then "Och, Christ, tell you didn't think I was Cruce! Do I look that bad?" She nodded vehemently, "Yes." "Bloody hell," he growled.

At the very least, such superconductors could reduce the waste found in high-voltage electrical cables, thereby reducing the cost of electricity. One of the reasons an electrical plant has to be so close to a city is because of losses in the transmission lines. That is why nuclear power plants are so close to cities, which poses a health hazard, and why wind power plants cannot be placed in areas with the maximum wind.

I am no Gandhi, that I would rather let people be tortured by imperialist morons than raise my hand in their defense. I am no Guevara either, that I would accept the loss of innocent lives in my fight for freedom. I am a whole, accountable, thinking human being living in a world still infested with and run by cruelty and biases. Where the situation demands silence, I'll keep quiet, but if and where it demands a bulldozer, believe you me, no gun, no grenade, my bare hands will cause a riot.

Sonnet of Single Mother There is no greater superpower, In the world than a single mother. Far superior to the world leaders, Is the resolve of a single mother. Wanna learn to build a society? Wanna become a nation builder? Spend a couple of months as pupil, At the feet of a single mother. Want there to be peace and progress? Hand social reins to single mothers. Stand by them as aide with commitment, Lo and behold, the healing appears. A mom empowered is a world empowered. A single mom empowered is creation empowered.

What would you do, if you were me?” “I’d keep an open mind, consider all possibilities. That’s all any of us can do. Life is a box you don’t get to open all at once. You can touch it, pick it up, shake it even, but you can only guess at the contents. There’s a hole in the top of the box where things come out, on their own timetable, on their own terms. You think you have things figured out,” he said, with a note of bitterness in his voice, “only to find you saw everything completely wrong, didn’t understand a bloody bit of it. So, you wait to see what pops out next. And you go on living in the meantime.

Then he'd checked the meters to see where the high consumption was coming from. ‘Totally impossible. Impossible. It's the most incredible thing I've ever seen. Inexplicable.' He'd turned off the electricity at the mains supply, yet the meters were still going around. 'An awful lot of voltage is being drained from this house,' he had said, looking very bewildered, 'but where it's going to, and how it's going, I couldn't tell you...’ Billy hadn't believed it at the time. He'd insisted on having the whole place rewired, especially because the electrician had speculated that they were living in a force field

All this fantastic effort—giant machines, road networks, strip mines, conveyor belt, pipelines, slurry lines, loading towers, railway and electric train, hundred-million-dollar coal-burning power plant; ten thousand miles of high-tension towers and high-voltage power lines; the devastation of the landscape, the destruction of Indian homes and Indian grazing lands, Indian shrines and Indian burial grounds; the poisoning of the last big clean-air reservoir in the forty-eight contiguous United States, the exhaustion of precious water supplies—all that ball-breaking labor and all that backbreaking expense and all that heartbreaking insult to land and sky and human heart, for what? All that for what? Why, to light the lamps of Phoenix suburbs not yet built, to run the air conditioners of San Diego and Los Angeles, to illuminate shopping-center parking lots at two in the morning, to power aluminum plants, magnesium plants, vinyl-chloride factories and copper smelters, to charge the neon tubing that makes the meaning (all the meaning there is) of Las Vegas, Albuquerque, Tucson, Salt Lake City, the amalgamated metropoli of southern California, to keep alive that phosphorescent putrefying glory (all the glory there is left) called Down Town, Night Time, Wonderville, U.S.A. They

Soneto de Desdoctrinamiento Si les enseñamos historia a los niños, Dicen que los estamos adoctrinando. Si los inmunizamos contra enfermedades, Dicen que les estamos colocando un microchip. Si les enseñamos ciencia a los niños, Dicen que estamos practicando la blasfemia. Si les enseñamos biología a los niños, Dicen que estamos jugando con su identidad. Con tal mentalidad de hombre de las cavernas, ¿Cómo diablos te las arreglaste para concebir? Supongo que para criar a un ser humano hace falta sentido común, Pero para hacer un bebé solo hace falta una ruptura genital. De ahí que sea más razón para que la razón persevere. No hay forma de que podamos dejar que la edad de piedra reaparezca.

True genius is the one of the heart, not of intellect. Because intellect-less heart, though exploited a lot, still does good, whereas heartless intellect, with or without the awareness of it, ends up only exploiting others. But here's the thing, even true genius of intellect is not without its fare sense of responsibility towards the society. It's only the genius of halfbaked intellect that has absolutely no sense of service towards society - the only sense they have towards society, is that of domination or control. That is why one of the guardians of nuclear physics, Albert Einstein though initially encouraged the US government in a letter, to develop a nuclear weapon of their own against the Nazi nuclear program, ended up being an outspoken activist of nuclear-disarmament, and called his letter to Roosevelt "one great mistake of life". That is why the mother of radioactivity, Marie Curie never made a dime out of her discovery of radium, because to her, even amidst obscurity, science was service, unlike most so-called scientists of the modern world. That is why the man who literally electrified the world with his invention of alternating current, Nikola Tesla embraced happily other people stealing his inventions, and died a poor man in his apartment. You see, it's easy to make billions out of other people's pioneering work, the sign of true genius is an uncorrupted sense of service.

Three Moonie 65-megaton hydrogen bombs exploded nearly simultaneously at very high altitude. With no air around the bombs to absorb the initial blast of the explosions, and convert the energy into mechanical shock waves——all the nuclear energy blasted out in its electromagnetic form. It was a brutally intense pulse of Compton recoil electrons and photoelectrons that created huge electric and magnetic fields that were MURDER on sensitive electronic equipment at tremendous distances. The electro-magnetic fields, coupled with electric and computer systems, producing huge voltage spikes in the circuits and damaging current surges along all signal paths, fusing precision engineered memory and micro-boards and virtual drives and CPUs into fried silicon laced junk! Nanobots to Nanoscrap in Nanoseconds!

Así es su memoria. No como la de esos hombres que espontáneamente fijan cada detalle y años después son capaces de contar cómo iba vestida su esposa el día que la conoció, su peinado, sus zapatos, su maquillaje. Recuerdan las frases que dijeron y lo que ella les respondió y, desde entonces, se supieron enamorados como en las novelas románticas, y cada aniversario recordar aquel día se convierte en un ritual, a menudo en una exhibición social de la felicidad. Son personas que leen una vez un poema y pueden recitarlo sin acudir al libro, para las que, quizá, la fidelidad de los recuerdos tenga una particular importancia.... Sin embargo, ¿la verdadera emoción no deja a un lado esas fotografías?, ¿no debe la auténtica memoria ser recreada con esfuerzo, al modo proustiano, tirando de las frágiles hebras de telaraña donde se encuentran adheridas nuestras asociaciones, ¿no ocultan esos retratos fieles el verdadero instante que, de todos modos, se ha ido, y con el que lo único que podemos hacer es reconstruir nuestro presente?

And then, with a shock like high-voltage coursing through me, the phone beside me started pealing thinly. I just stood there and stared at it, blood draining from my face. A call to a tollbooth? It must, it must be a wrong number, somebody wanted the Information Booth or-! It must have been audible outside, with all I had the slide partly closed. One of the redcaps passing by turned, looked over, then started coming across toward where I was. To get rid of him I picked up the receiver, put it to my ear. 'You'd better come out now, time's up,' a flat, deadly voice said. 'They're calling your train, but you're not getting on that one - or any other.' 'Wh-where are talking from?' 'The next booth to yours,' the voice jeered. 'You forgot the glass inserts only reach halfway down.' The connection broke and a man's looming figure was shadowing the glass in front of my eyes, before I could even get the receiver back on the hook. I dropped it full-length, tensed my right arm to pound it through his face as soon as I shoved the glass aside. He had a revolver-bore for a top vest-button, trained on me. Two more had shown up behind him, from which direction I hadn't noticed. It was very dark in the booth now, their collective silhouettes shut out all the daylight. The station and all its friendly bustle was blotted out, had receded into the far background, a thousand miles away for all the help it could give me. I slapped the glass wearily aside, came slowly out. One of them flashed a badge - maybe Crow had loaned him his for the occasion. 'You're being arrested for putting slugs in that phone. It won't do any good to raise your voice and shriek for help, try to tell people different. But suit yourself.' I knew that as well as he; heads turned to stare after us by the dozens as they started with me in their midst through the station's main-level. But not one in all that crowd would have dared interfere with what they mistook for a legitimate arrest in the line of duty. The one with the badge kept it conspicuously tilted in his upturned palm, at sight of which the frozen onlookers slowly parted, made way for us through their midst. I was being led to my doom in full view of scores of people. ("Graves For The Living")

In 1769, lightning struck the steeple of the church of San Nazaro in Brescia, an ancient Roman city built at the foot of the Alps. The massive high-voltage pulse was conducted through the walls of the sanctuary to the basement, where the Venetian army had inconveniently stored one hundred tons of gunpowder. The resulting blast killed three thousand people, knocking one-sixth of the city flat.

The world ferrets out your faults often enough, I see little point in lending a hand.

[On Trotsky, at the Comintern's Sixth Congress:] . . . is this just ultra-revolutionary high-voltage subjectivism of a petty-bourgeois gone wild—or what?

This does not mean that the knowledge of the world, church history, theology, philosophy, and the Scriptures is without value. Such knowledge can be very useful.[105] But it is not central. Theological competence and a high-voltage intellect alone do not qualify a person to serve in God’s house.

Oh,” he said, stopping in the doorway. “I should probably warn you. Your beds might take a little getting used to.” “Why?” Tesla asked. “What’s wrong with them?” When Uncle Newt had shown them their room earlier, the beds had looked normal enough. Not that Nick and Tesla had paid much attention to them. They’d been distracted—and horrified—by the posters haphazardly stapled to the wall: Teletubbies, Elmo, Smurfs, Albert Einstein, and the periodic table. (Nick and Tesla had quickly agreed that the first three would “fall down” and “accidentally” “get ripped” at the first opportunity.) “There’s nothing wrong with your beds, and everything right!” Uncle Newt declared. “I’m telling you, kids. You haven’t slept till you’ve slept on compost!” “What?” Nick and Tesla said together. Even Uncle Newt couldn’t miss the disgust on their faces. “Maybe I’d better come up and explain,” he said. Uncle Newt pulled the comforter off Nick’s bed and revealed something that didn’t look like a bed at all. It was more like a lumpy black sleeping bag with tubes and wires poking out of one end. “Behold!” Uncle Newt said. “The biomass thermal conversion station!” Nick reluctantly gave it a test-sit. It felt like he was lowering himself onto a garbage bag stuffed with rotten old food. Because he was. “As you sleep,” Uncle Newt explained, “your body heat will help decompose food scraps pumped into the unit, which will in turn produce more heat that the convertor will turn into electricity. So, by the time you wake up in the morning, you’ll have enough power to—ta da!” Uncle Newt waved his hands at a coffeemaker sitting on the floor nearby. “Brew coffee?” Tesla said. Uncle Newt gave her a gleeful nod. “We don’t drink coffee,” said Nick. “Then you can have a hot cup of invigorating fresh-brewed water.” “Great,” Nick said. He experimented with a little bounce on his “bed.” He could feel slimy things squishing and squashing beneath his butt. “Comfy?” Uncle Newt asked. “Uhh … kind of,” Nick said. Uncle Newt beamed at his invention. “Patent pending,” he said. Uncle Newt was a gangly man with graying hair, but at that moment he looked like a five-year-old thinking about Christmas. Tesla gave the room a tentative sniff. “Shouldn’t the compost stink?” “Oh, no, no, no, no, no! Each biomass thermal conversion station is completely airtight!” Uncle Newt’s smile wavered just the teeniest bit. “In theory.” Nick opened his mouth to ask another question, but Uncle Newt didn’t seem to notice. “Well,” he said, slapping his hands together, “I guess you two should wash your teeth and brush your faces and all that. Good night!

Whoever had been driving that SUV was still out there somewhere. Their first enemy. Not the “She said my hair looked stupid” or “He cut in front of me in the lunch line” kind. A real enemy. The kind who wants to hurt you … or worse. Nick wondered if he should be mad at his mom and dad for shipping him off into this mess. After a while, he decided it wasn’t their fault. But he’d hate soybeans till the day he died.

Vince stayed behind, blocking the doorway to the girl’s room. He blocked it well. He wasn’t as muscle-bound as Frank, but he wasn’t small either, and there was an intensity about him that seemed to buzz and crackle like an electric current. To Nick, he seemed like the sort of person you could hang signs on. HIGH VOLTAGE DANGER BEWARE OF PSYCHO

too.

Nick and Tesla went looking for Uncle Newt. They found him in the same place he’d been the last time they’d looked for him: the master bathroom on the second floor. They’d dragged him out of the shower for help with the rocket—even Tesla, bold as she could be, knew better than to try her luck with a power drill—and he must’ve jumped right back in the second he could. It was understandable, actually. His hair had still been half orange. The bathroom had what looked like a submarine airlock instead of a normal door, and unlike before it was now closed up tightly. When Nick and Tesla pressed their ears to the metal, they could dimly hear the sound of running water and Uncle Newt crooning “Winter Wonderland.” Outside, it was sunny and seventy degrees. “Gone awaaaaaaay is the something! Here to staaaaaaaay is the something! We da-da-da daaaaaa, la-la-la la laaaaaaa! Something in a something booby baaaaaaaa!” “Uncle Newt!” Tesla yelled. “Uncle Newt!” Nick yelled. “Uncle Newt!” they yelled together. “In the meadow we can something-something!” Uncle Newt sang. “And da-something something la-la-laaaaaa! We’ll have something something with the something! Until the who-who ha-has jooby jaaaaaaaa!” “Great,” Nick sighed. “He’s ignoring us now.” “I guess I can’t blame him,” said Tesla. “His hair was still half orange the last time we pulled him out of there.” “Well, I’m starving. Can we go see if the cat left us some cake?” Tesla thought it over, weighing her hunger against the chance of eating cake a cat had licked. She was very, very hungry. “Good idea,” she said.

I’m just glad you planned to have your honeymoon away from the castle,” he replied as he smirked knowingly. “Gods know when you two go at it, the entire power grid and magical field around the castle is high voltage.” “You can feel it?” I gasped. “What did you expect, Flower? You’re a Goddess of Faery; your mother is a fertility Goddess. When you two fuck, even the flowers feel it. Last night, they bloomed. You know, the ones that only open once a year were awakened by the power you two gave off.

dashing around Dublin having grand adventures. Ryodan

Don’t worry about it,” said Joe. His conscience was yelling at him not to abandon a couple of kids outside a run-down house with an exploding lawn mower. He needed to leave quick or he might actually listen.

What in the—? My begonias!” he heard someone say behind him. Nick looked over his shoulder. A small but muscular woman in sweaty workout clothes was stepping out of a big shiny car in the neighbor’s driveway. She was gaping in horror at the chewed-up flowerbed and the smoking lawn mower. Scowling, she turned toward Uncle Newt’s house. And the scowl didn’t go away when she noticed Nick looking back at her. In fact, it got scowlier. Nick smiled weakly, waved, and hurried into the house. He closed the door behind him. “Whoa,” he said when his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside. Cluttering the long hall in front of him were dozens of old computers, a telescope, a metal detector connected to a pair of bulky earphones, an old-fashioned diving suit complete with brass helmet, a stuffed polar bear (the real, dead kind), a chainsaw, something that looked like a flamethrower (but couldn’t be … right?), a box marked KEEP REFRIGERATED, another marked THIS END UP (upside down), and a fully lit Christmas tree decorated with ornaments made from broken beakers and test tubes (it was June). Exposed wires and power cables poked out of the plaster and veered off around every corner, and there were so many diplomas and science prizes and patents hanging (all of them earned by Newton Galileo Holt, a.k.a. Uncle Newt) that barely an inch of wall was left uncovered. Off to the left was a living room lined with enough books to put some libraries to shame, a semitransparent couch made of inflated plastic bags, and a wide-screen TV connected by frayed cords to a small trampoline.

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

If you are looking for a job that may make you sick, I can recommend working at a high powered solar photovoltaic (PV) utility power plant.

Aim for their power lines! They’re the devil’s veins and electricity is his blood.”   – Futurama

But who knows when night’s going to fall anyway.” “Well, you should. Shouldn’t you?” “No, why would I –” “Isn’t that part of your job?” “Knowing in intimate detail the prerogatives of a fickle and broken sky?” “Yes.” “You are aware that even professional astronomers and astrophysicists are unable to explain why the atmosphere changes colors at random and why the sun can rise and set three times in an hour and why we haven’t all just died already, right?” “Yes.” “But you still think I have the answer to that universal mystery. Because I work for a Holiday Inn.” “Yes.” “You’re kind of special, aren’t you?” “That’s what my mommy likes to say.” “I’m gonna... go now. I’ve got... towels.” Catrina

There had been twenty-six and a half apocalypses to date. Governments were destabilized so often and so unexpectedly that a person could become mayor by walking into a city and asking politely. The accepted course of action for a global thermonuclear war was to close one’s windows and wait a few days until the offending parties tuckered themselves out and took a nap. Big-budget summer blockbusters regularly involved two old folks sitting on their porch, drinking lemonade and talking about their grandkids.