Instant Machining Quotes

After a fairly shaky start to the day, Arthur's mind was beginning to reassemble itself from the shell-shocked fragments the previous day had left him with. He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject's taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject's metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject's brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

If I was feeling depressed or frustrated about my lot in life, all I had to do was tap the Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game's two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It's just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.

What am I in this instant? I’m a typewriter making the dry echo in the dark, humid dawn. I haven’t been human for a long time. They wanted me to be an object. I am an object. An object dirty with blood. An object that creates other objects and the machine creates us all. It makes demands. Mechanisms make endless demands on my life. But I don’t totally obey: if I have to be an object, let me be an object that screams. There’s something inside of me that hurts. Oh, how it hurts and how it screams for help. But tears aren’t there in the machine that is me. I’m an object without a destiny. I’m an object in whose hands? such is my human destiny. What saves me is the scream. I protest in the name of what’s inside the object behind the behind of the thought-feeling. I’m an urgent object.

It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depth by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.

That is the germ of my great discovery. But you are wrong to say that we cannot move about in Time. For instance, if I am recalling an incident very vividly I go back to the instant of its occurrence: I become absent-minded, as you say. I jump back for a moment. Of course we have no means of staying back for any length of Time, any more than a savage or an animal has of staying six feet above the ground. But a civilized man is better off than the savage in this respect. He can go up against gravitation in a balloon, and why should he not hope that ultimately he may be able to stop or accelerate his drift along the Time-Dimension, or even turn about and travel the other way?

Cherish your existence, for memories become legacies and life can change in an instant.

The mainstream media act just like in the classic studies of herd animals; at the exact instant more than half of the herd makes a move to bolt, they all move.

If we want to avert an impending calamity and a state of things which may transform this globe into an inferno, we should push the development of flying machines and wireless transmission of energy without an instant’s delay and with all the power and resources of the nation.

Nothing good about this but it's title. A priggish little yarn. And Hidden Riches is not a story--it's a machine. It creaks. It never made me forget for one instant that it was a story. Hence it isn't a story.

Smells are the time machines of human perception. A scent can take you instantly back to a particular place and time.

They had chains which they fastened about the leg of the nearest hog, and the other end of the chain they hooked into one of the rings upon the wheel. So, as the wheel turned, a hog was suddenly jerked off his feet and borne aloft. At the same instant the ear was assailed by a most terrifying shriek; the visitors started in alarm, the women turned pale and shrank back. The shriek was followed by another, louder and yet more agonizing--for once started upon that journey, the hog never came back; at the top of the wheel he was shunted off upon a trolley and went sailing down the room. And meantime another was swung up, and then another, and another, until there was a double line of them, each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy--and squealing. The uproar was appalling, perilous to the ear-drums; one feared there was too much sound for the room to hold--that the walls must give way or the ceiling crack. There were high squeals and low squeals, grunts, and wails of agony; there would come a momentary lull, and then a fresh outburst, louder than ever, surging up to a deafening climax. It was too much for some of the visitors--the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes. Meantime, heedless of all these things, the men upon the floor were going about their work. Neither squeals of hogs nor tears of visitors made any difference to them; one by one they hooked up the hogs, and one by one with a swift stroke they slit their throats. There was a long line of hogs, with squeals and life-blood ebbing away together; until at last each started again, and vanished with a splash into a huge vat of boiling water. It was all so very businesslike that one watched it fascinated. It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics. And yet somehow the most matter-of-fact person could not help thinking of the hogs; they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests--and so perfectly within their rights! They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretence at apology, without the homage of a tear. Now and then a visitor wept, to be sure; but this slaughtering-machine ran on, visitors or no visitors. It was like some horrible crime committed in a dungeon, all unseen and unheeded, buried out of sight and of memory.

We are in the grip of some big machine grinding us along. The force of it simplifies everything. A weird calm settled over me from inside out. What is about to happen has stood in line to happen. All the roads out of that instant have been closed, one by one.

It's like when you find out your lover has been unfaithful: in one horrible instant everything she was to you, the whole beautiful enchantment, falls away, and you see her as she really is - mortal, machinating, tethered like everyone else to a little patch of space and time. And the worst of it is that you knew all along.

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariable delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The Nutri-Matic was designed and manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation whose complaint department now covers all the major landmasses of the first three planets in the Sirius Tau Star system.

...we are changed as technology offers us substitutes for connecting with each other face-to-face. We are offered robots and a whole world of machine-mediated relationships on networked devices. As we instant-message, e-mail, text, and Twitter, technology redraws the boundaries between intimacy and solitude. We talk of getting “rid” of our e-mails, as though these notes are so much excess baggage. Teenagers avoid making telephone calls, fearful that they “reveal too much.” They would rather text than talk. Adults, too, choose keyboards over the human voice. It is more efficient, they say. Things that happen in “real time” take too much time. Tethered to technology, we are shaken when that world “unplugged” does not signify, does not satisfy. After an evening of avatar-to avatar talk in a networked game, we feel, at one moment, in possession of a full social life and, in the next, curiously isolated, in tenuous complicity with strangers. We build a following on Facebook or MySpace and wonder to what degree our followers are friends. We recreate ourselves as online personae and give ourselves new bodies, homes, jobs, and romances. Yet, suddenly, in the half-light of virtual community, we may feel utterly alone. As we distribute ourselves, we may abandon ourselves. Sometimes people experience no sense of having communicated after hours of connection. And they report feelings of closeness when they are paying little attention. In all of this, there is a nagging question: Does virtual intimacy degrade our experience of the other kind and, indeed, of all encounters, of any kind?

... the ads made me feel bilious and love-stricken, invaded and debauched by a coldly mechanical lust for whatever fetish the desire machines were pushing at their victims at any given instant.

The machine couldn’t be stopped and certainly shouldn’t be destroyed, the wizard said. Destroying the machine might well cause this universe to stop existing, instantly. On the other hand, the Post Office was filling up, so one day Chief Postal Inspector Rumbelow had gone into the room with a crowbar, had ordered all the wizards out, and belted the machine until things stopped whirring. The letters ceased, at least. This came as a huge relief, but nevertheless, the Post Office had its Regulations, and so the chief postal inspector was brought before Postmaster Cowerby and asked why he had decided to risk destroying the whole universe in one go. According to Post Office legend, Mr. Rumbelow had replied: “Firstly, sir, I reasoned that if I destroyed the universe all in one go, no one would know; secondly, when I walloped the thing the first time, the wizards ran away, so I surmised that unless they has another universe to run to they weren’t really certain; and lastly, sir, the bloody thing was getting on my nerves. Never could stand machinery, sir.

James Brown hid everything, and in the game of instant information he lost big-time, because the information machine turns a truth into a lie and a lie into the truth, transforms superstitions and stereotypes into fact with such ease and fluidity that after a while you get to believing as I do, that the media is not a reflection of the American culture but rather is teaching it. As long as James Brown was selling records he let that craziness run. He didn't care. The media worked in his favor and helped fuel his success. But it killed his public reputation and once the success was gone once the head disappeared, the body followed.

This experience, Lick would say, gave him an instant insight into the scientific method: Always be extremely careful in your work—and in your proclamations of faith.

2 I know it might be tedious, and I know I might be close to undelightful ranting, but I’m going to take one more step toward us to suggest that any time we opt for the human interaction rather than the automated or digital one, which requires noticing how ubiquitous the automated or digital one has become (ubiquity makes invisibility, makes us look up from our machines and be like where’d the people go?)—checking out groceries; getting our ibuprofen; the menu thing; being in class; getting directions; finding or buying a book; learning how to do stuff—is a small act of revolt. Except there’s no such thing as small revolt, because each revolt, even if only fleetingly, even if only for an instant, is making the world of our dreams.

I saw immediately what they were: human technology that had become haunted, possessed by quick, gleaming cleverness. I had seen smart machines before then, but nothing with the agility and cunning of true intelligence. I knew instantly that these were a different order of machine. Some alchemy of chaos and complexity had given their minds powers of consciousness and free will.

On a different front, everybody said that casinos in South Africa would create jobs. They’ve had precisely the opposite effect. Wherever they’ve been erected, they’ve drained the local economy of money as poor people – seduced by the dream of becoming instant millionaires – have frittered away their hard-earned, meagre incomes on the slot machines. Consequently, local businesses and shops have suffered and have had to lay off

The bar was crowded with theorizing Sherlockians, who in the absence of any actual evidence had created grand machinations to explain the crime. Minor points of canonical disagreement became reasons for brutal murder. Some tried to piece together their theories in small groups, hoping that with enough brainpower and expertise they might arrive at a solution. Others jumped straight over the “investigation” phase and landed square at the end of the story they were creating, instantly accusing the man across the table of some vile treachery. And, moreover, actually employing phrases like “vile treachery” in doing so. Everyone was a suspect. But at the world’s largest Sherlockian gathering, everyone was a detective as well.

...Not yet dry behind the ears, not old enough to buy a beer, but old enough to die for his country. He can recite to you the nomenclature of a machine gun or grenade launcher and use either one effectively if he must. He digs foxholes and latrines and can apply first aid like a professional. He can march until he is told to stop, or stop until he is told to march. He obeys orders instantly and without hesitation, but he is not without spirit or individual dignity. He is self-sufficient. ...He sometimes forgets to brush his teeth, but never to clean his rifle. He can cook his own meals, mend his own clothes, and fix his own hurts. If you're thirsty, he'll share his water with you; if you are hungry, food. He'll even split his ammunition with you in the midst of battle when you run low. He has learned to use his hands like weapons and weapons like they were his hands. He can save your life-or take it, because that is his job. He will often do twice the work of a civilian, draw half the pay, and still find ironic humor in it all. He has seen more suffering and death than he should have in his short lifetime. He has wept in public and in private, for friends who have fallen in combat and is unashamed. He feels every note of the National Anthem vibrate through his body while at rigid attention, while tempering the burning desire to "square-away" those around him who haven't bothered to stand, remove their hat, or even stop talking. ...Just as did his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he is paying the price for our freedom. Beardless or not, he is not a boy. He is the American Fighting Man that has kept this country free for over two hundred years. He has asked nothing in return, except our friendship and understanding. Remember him, always, for he has earned our respect and admiration with his blood. And now we have women over there in danger, doing their part in this tradition of going to war when our nation calls us to do so. As you go to bed tonight, remember this. A short lull, a little shade, and a picture of loved ones in their helmets.

These three men who hated him spoke his language and wore his uniform, but he saw their loveless faces set immutably into cramped, mean lines of hostility and understood instantly that nowhere in the world, not in all the fascist tanks or planes or submarines, not in the bunkers behind the machine guns or mortars or behind the blowing flame throwers, not even among all the expert gunners of the crack Hermann Goering Antiaircraft Division or among the grisly connivers in all the beer halls in Munich and everywhere else, were there men who hated him more.

He had always thought of civilisation as a machine, cast from rigid iron, everything riveted in its proper place. Now he saw it was a fabric gauzy as a bride’s veil. A tissue everyone agrees to leave in place, but one that can be ripped away in an instant. And hell lurks just beneath.

His eyes kindled and a slight flush sprang into his thin cheeks. For an instant the veil had lifted upon his keen, intense nature, but for an instant only. When I glanced again his face had resumed that red-Indian composure which had made so many regard him as a machine rather than a man.

Whether he remained here, or found a means to leave, he ought certainly to possess himself of the best possible weapons. By the term Mr. Lecky understood some sort of firearm. The fact that he was totally unacquainted with the use of guns assisted him in the illusion that, given a revolver, he would instantly become formidable. Trusting machines as he did, he regarded a revolver as a small killing machine. He believed that its operation required little more than pointing and pulling a trigger. The revolver would obediently deliver, unerring and fast as light, death to a great distance.

You commit yourself completely to something and then you take your eyes off it for an instant and it’s gone. Like it never was. Like you can’t even see the evidence of the thing that was there, that you trusted your weight, your honor, your life, your heart to. I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you.

Lestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke at clapping, as at the well-wrought crisis of a play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes’s pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.

WHICH FAKE ROM-COM LADY CAREER SHOULD YOU PURSUE? ...Think Bond girl—you’re incredibly smart in the one specific area that just so happens to help the protagonist in this one very specific instant of the plot. “Give me that,” you’ll say, snatching the hieroglyph from the hero’s hand. “I have two PhDs in cryptozoological translation.” You’ll shove the hero aside from the beeping machine. “I’m NASA’s top-ranking expert in nuclear disarmament techniques.” Does it make sense? No, but who cares? You are very, very pretty. And smart, definitely smart because even though you look like a supermodel and wear very sexy clothing and a full face of makeup, you are also wearing glasses. Sure, twenty-four looks a little young to have three PhDs but they’re pretty sure making you smart in whatever will move the plot forward means this movie is feminist. You will either end up running away with the hero, or you will die. Apologies.

It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.

One reason that he was reluctant to relinquish some of his works and declare them completed was that he relished a world in flux. He had an uncanny ability to convey movements—of the body and the mind, of machines and horses, and of rivers and everything else that flows. No instant, he wrote, is self-contained, just as no action in a theatrical pageant nor any drop in a flowing river is self-contained. Each moment incorporates what came right before and what is coming right after. Similarly, he looked upon his art and engineering and his treatises as a part of a dynamic process, always receptive to a refinement by the application of a new insight.

Gentlemen,” he cried, “let me introduce you to the famous black pearl of the Borgias.” Lestrade and I sat silent for a moment, and then, with a spontaneous impulse, we both broke at clapping, as at the well-wrought crisis of a play. A flush of colour sprang to Holmes’s pale cheeks, and he bowed to us like the master dramatist who receives the homage of his audience. It was at such moments that for an instant he ceased to be a reasoning machine, and betrayed his human love for admiration and applause. The same singularly proud and reserved nature which turned away with disdain from popular notoriety was capable of being moved to its depths by spontaneous wonder and praise from a friend.

Player One button, and my worries would instantly slip away as my mind focused itself on the relentless pixelated onslaught on the screen in front of me. There, inside the game’s two-dimensional universe, life was simple: It’s just you against the machine. Move with your left hand, shoot with your right, and try to stay alive as long as possible.

He never approves of anything I do,” Kusha says from the garage, hiding her frown. She gets all her old cars and tools from places you don’t want your daughters to visit. And Rashad Gaumont certainly doesn’t want her to visit Magic Mama, the not-enough-evolved, middle-aged man from the Old City. “He’s not a citizen! He lives in a bus! So what if he made it himself? So what if he teaches you about machines? Don’t meet him.” “Why?” Kusha used to ask Rashad, and she’d always get the same answer: “The unevolved kind brings chaos and wars.” Kusha didn’t listen. She went again and bought this car, too, from an antique dealer. He almost gave it away, saying it will never run again. It has the old days’ engine, the kind you don’t find in this era. A change of engines and batteries, a new set of all-terrain-tires, some safety trackers, sensors, and, well, a whole list of other things with 300% luck to make it run again through the Junk Land—the land outside the cities where it’s only ruins and rubble. Needs hard work, yes. But Kusha instantly liked the color of its body, the moment she saw it—a sort of green with greyish tint, and a good load of rust.

In the same year, looking for a diversion from ill-health and overwork, Loudon reviewed a three-volume romance entitled The Mummy’s Tale – A Novel, for The Gardener’s magazine. Set in 2126, in an England that had reverted to absolute monarchy, this featured prototypes for espresso machines, air-conditioning and, most prophetically, ‘a communication system that permitted instant world dissemination of news’.

First, a dial tone, followed by eleven rapid beeps from an invisible push-button telephone. This was followed by three or four high-pitched electronic whistles, collapsing into a longer whistle resembling the flatlining of a dying patient hooked to an EKG machine (this was the sound of the phone line’s echo suppression being disabled). There were a few more beeps absorbed into a wall of white noise, and then the white noise abruptly doubled, meaning the receiving modem was now interacting with the calling modem. There was an instant where it sounded like something inside the computer had broken, spontaneously repaired by the digital interplay of two probing modulators, similar in pitch to a metal detector passing over a pocket watch. This was bookended by another fleeting second of white noise, and then . . . silence.

Pham Nuwen spent years learning to program/explore. Programming went back to the beginning of time. It was a little like the midden out back of his father’s castle. Where the creek had worn that away, ten meters down, there were the crumpled hulks of machines—flying machines, the peasants said—from the great days of Canberra’s original colonial era. But the castle midden was clean and fresh compared to what lay within the Reprise’s local net. There were programs here that had been written five thousand years ago, before Humankind ever left Earth. The wonder of it—the horror of it, Sura said—was that unlike the useless wrecks of Canberra’s past, these programs still worked! And via a million million circuitous threads of inheritance, many of the oldest programs still ran in the bowels of the Qeng Ho system. Take the Traders’ method of timekeeping. The frame corrections were incredibly complex—and down at the very bottom of it was a little program that ran a counter. Second by second, the Qeng Ho counted from the instant that a human had first set foot on Old Earth’s moon. But if you looked at it still more closely. . .the starting instant was actually some hundred million seconds later, the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems. So behind all the top-level interfaces was layer under layer of support. Some of that software had been designed for wildly different situations. Every so often, the inconsistencies caused fatal accidents. Despite the romance of spaceflight, the most common accidents were simply caused by ancient, misused programs finally getting their revenge. “We should rewrite it all,” said Pham. “It’s been done,” said Sura, not looking up. She was preparing to go off-Watch, and had spent the last four days trying to root a problem out of the coldsleep automation. “It’s been tried,” corrected Bret, just back from the freezers. “But even the top levels of fleet system code are enormous. You and a thousand of your friends would have to work for a century or so to reproduce it.” Trinli grinned evilly. “And guess what—even if you did, by the time you finished, you’d have your own set of inconsistencies. And you still wouldn’t be consistent with all the applications that might be needed now and then.” Sura gave up on her debugging for the moment. “The word for all this is ‘mature programming environment.’ Basically, when hardware performance has been pushed to its final limit, and programmers have had several centuries to code, you reach a point where there is far more signicant code than can be rationalized. The best you can do is understand the overall layering, and know how to search for the oddball tool that may come in handy—take the situation I have here.” She waved at the dependency chart she had been working on. “We are low on working fluid for the coffins. Like a million other things, there was none for sale on dear old Canberra. Well, the obvious thing is to move the coffins near the aft hull, and cool by direct radiation. We don’t have the proper equipment to support this—so lately, I’ve been doing my share of archeology. It seems that five hundred years ago, a similar thing happened after an in-system war at Torma. They hacked together a temperature maintenance package that is precisely what we need.” “Almost precisely.

It is difficult beyond description to pursue a complex policy in a contentious part of the world when the policy is subject to instant modification based on the boss’s perception of how inaccurate and often-already-outdated information is reported by writers who don’t have the Administration’s best interests at heart in the first place. It was like making and executing policy inside a pinball machine, not the West Wing of the White House.

Later that afternoon with the Germans already in Trafalgar Square and advancing down Whitehall to take their position in the rear, the enemy unit advancing across St. James 'Park made their final charge. Several of those in the Downing Street position were already dead... and at last the Bren ceased its chatter, its last magazine emptied. Churchill reluctantly abandoned the machine-gun, drew his pistol and with great satisfaction, for it was a notoriously inaccurate weapon, shot dead the first German to reach the foot of the steps. As two more rushed forward, covered by a third in the distance, Winston Churchill moved out of the shelter of the sandbags, as if personally to bar the way up Downing Street. A German NCO, running up to find the cause of the unexpected hold-up, recognised him and shouted to the soldiers not to shoot, but he was too late. A burst of bullets from a machine-carbine caught the Prime Minister in the chest. He died instantly, his back to Downing Street, his face toward the enemy, his pistol still in his hand.

Autumn was a harvest of big-box stores and their back-to-school sales: fruit leather, instant mac 'n' cheese, and bread that we unhusked, crinkling, from its plastic sleeve. My mouth watered for the sweetness of processed wheat sown thick through gas stations from California to New York. Honey Buns and Wonder Breads, in perfect squares and machined circles, and the ripe weight of a Danish, mass-produced, that attempts no fidelity to the country after which it is named--- no country but this one ambered by waves of industrial grain.

Hay momentos en los que uno advierte el movimiento de un objeto antes de ver el objeto en sí. Al instante, la mente colorea un poco la situación, inspirándose en expectativas o probabilidades. Lo que venga en ese momento. Algo en la hierba, junto al estanque, tiene todo el aspecto de ser una rana, y al cabo resulta ser una hoja agitada por el viento. Este era, en resumen, uno de esos momentos. Un pensamiento pasó rozándome, o traspasándome, como una flecha, y acto seguido se perdió, y no pude fiarme de lo que pensé que había visto.

But it is troubling how many people expect applause, recognition, when they have not even begun to learn an art or a craft. Instant success is the order of the day; “I want it now!” I wonder whether this is not part of our corruption by machines. Machines do things very quickly and outside the natural rhythm of life, and we are indignant if a car doesn’t start at the first try. So the few things that we still do, such as cooking (though there are TV dinners!), knitting, gardening, anything at all that cannot be hurried, have a very particular value.

Just because I look like a human being doesn’t mean I am. This body has more genetic material that’s not strictly human than it does material that is human. And it heavily integrates machines as well. My blood is actually a bunch of nanobots in a fluid. I am and every other CDF soldier is a genetically-modified cyborg.” “But you’re still you, right?” Lowen asked. “You’re still the same person you were when you left Earth. Still the same consciousness.” “That’s a question of some contention among us soldiers,” Wilson said, setting his arm back down. “When you transfer over to the new body, the machine that does the transfer makes it at least seem like for an instant you’re in two bodies at once. It feels like you as a person make the transfer. But I think it’s equally possible that what happens is that memories are transferred over to a brain specially prepared for them, it wakes up, and there’s just enough cross talk between the two separate brains to give the illusion of a transfer before the old one shuts down.” “In which case, you’re actually dead,” Lowen said. “The real you. And this you is a fake.” “Right.” Wilson took another sip of his drink. “Mind you, the CDF could show you graphs and charts that show that actual consciousness transfer happens. But I think this is one of those things you can’t really model from the outside. I have to accept the possibility that I could be a fake Harry Wilson.” “And this doesn’t bother you,” Lowen said. “In a metaphysical sense, sure,” Wilson said. “But in a day-to-day sense, I don’t think about it much. On the inside, it sure feels like I’ve been around for ninety years, and ultimately this version of me likes being alive. So.

Every rock is a day Denny doesn’t waste. Smooth river granite. Blocky dark basalt. Every rock is a little tombstone, a little monument to each day where the work most people do just evaporates or expires or becomes instantly outdated the moment it’s done. I don’t mention this stuff to the reporter, or ask him what happens to his work the moment after it goes out on the air. Airs. Is broadcast. Evaporates. Gets erased. In a world where we work on paper, where we exercise on machines, where time and effort and money passes from us with so little to show for it, Denny gluing rocks together seems normal.

There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant-a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn't even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying. Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology's greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.

He had found a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea. The way it functioned was very interesting. When the Drink button was pressed it made an instant but highly detailed examination of the subject’s taste buds, a spectroscopic analysis of the subject’s metabolism and then sent tiny experimental signals down the neural pathways to the taste centers of the subject’s brain to see what was likely to go down well. However, no one knew quite why it did this because it invariably delivered a cupful of liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.

Intimacy The woman in the cafe making my cappuccino — dark eyes, dyed red hair, sleeveless black turtleneck — used to be lovers with the man I’m seeing now. She doesn’t know me; we’re strangers, but still I can’t glance at her casually, as I used to, before I knew. She stands at the machine, sinking the nozzle into a froth of milk, staring at nothing — I don’t know what she’s thinking. For all I know she might be remembering my lover, remembering whatever happened between them — he’s never told me, except to say that it wasn’t important, and then he changed the subject quickly, too quickly now that I think about it; might he, after all, have been lying, didn’t an expression of pain cross his face for just and instant? I can’t be sure. And really it was nothing, I tell myself; there’s no reason for me to feel awkward standing here, or complicitous, as though there’s something significant between us. She could be thinking of anything; why, now, do I have the sudden suspicion that she knows, that she feels me studying her, trying to imagine them together?— her lipstick’s dark red, darker than her hair — trying to see him kissing her, turning her over in bed the way he likes to have me. I wonder if maybe there were things about her he preferred, things he misses now that we’re together; sometimes, when he and I are making love, there are moments I’m overwhelmed by sadness, and though I’m there with him I can’t help thinking of my ex-husband’s hands, which I especially loved, and I want to go back to that old intimacy, which often felt like the purest happiness I’d ever known, or would. But all that’s over; and besides, weren’t there other lovers who left no trace? When I see them now, I can barely remember what they looked like undressed, or how it felt to have them inside me. So what is it I feel as she pours the black espresso into the milk, and pushes the cup toward me, and I give her the money, and our eyes meet for just a second, and our fingers touch?

Well, at least you’ll have Bob the Copying Machine to keep you warm at night.” “Um. His name is Franklin,” Monty said, holding up a hand. “Get it right.” Seeing a blinking light on the machine, I pointed to it. “Looks like Franklin is out of paper. You should fix that.” “Oh, I’ll stuff him real good,” Monty said, before grabbing paper from the pack and slowly sticking it into the slot. “Damn, he’s all nice and tight now.” I cleared my throat. Sherry, the computer lab teacher, had walked into the lounge. Monty flipped around, the smile vanishing instantly as he spotted her. “I, uh, was just refilling the paper,” he said, pointing to the machine. “Good job,” Sherry said, looking at him like he belonged in a mental ward.

Instead of storing those countless microfilmed pages alphabetically, or according to subject, or by any of the other indexing methods in common use—all of which he found hopelessly rigid and arbitrary—Bush proposed a system based on the structure of thought itself. "The human mind . . . operates by association," he noted. "With one item in its grasp, it snaps instantly to the next that is suggested by the association of thoughts, in accordance with some intricate web of trails carried by the cells of the brain. . . . The speed of action, the intricacy of trails, the detail of mental pictures [are] awe-inspiring beyond all else in nature." By analogy, he continued, the desk library would allow its user to forge a link between any two items that seemed to have an association (the example he used was an article on the English long bow, which would be linked to a separate article on the Turkish short bow; the actual mechanism of the link would be a symbolic code imprinted on the microfilm next to the two items). "Thereafter," wrote Bush, "when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button. . . . It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together from widely separated sources and bound together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails." Such a device needed a name, added Bush, and the analogy to human memory suggested one: "Memex." This name also appeared for the first time in the 1939 draft. In any case, Bush continued, once a Memex user had created an associative trail, he or she could copy it and exchange it with others. This meant that the construction of trails would quickly become a community endeavor, which would over time produce a vast, ever-expanding, and ever more richly cross-linked web of all human knowledge. Bush never explained where this notion of associative trails had come from (if he even knew; sometimes things just pop into our heads). But there is no doubt that it ranks as the Yankee Inventor's most profoundly original idea. Today we know it as hypertext. And that vast, hyperlinked web of knowledge is called the World Wide Web.

The modern battlefield is like a huge, sleeping machine with innumerable eyes and ears and arms, lying hidden and inactive, ambushed for the one moment on which all depends. Then from some hole in the ground a single red light ascends in fiery orelude. A thousand guns roar out on the instant, and at a touch, driven by innumerable levers, the work of annihilation goes pounding on its way. Orders fly like sparks and flashes over a close network, spurring on to heightened destruction in front and bringing up from behind a steady stream of fresh men and fresh materials to fling into the flames. Every one feels that he is caught in a vortex which draws him on and on and thrusts him with unrelenting precision over the brink of death.

We often hear that technology is fragmenting the world, reducing our relationships to screen exchanges rather than the real stuff, and so on, as if machines - rather than humans - were responsible for maintaining our mental health. I wanted to write something which explored the opposite possibility: that phones give us a power to affect and improve each other's lives that we have never had in history before. Contacts was of course written before the bewildering events of 2020, but the lockdown has reminded a lot of us how dependent we all are upon the core relationships in life, on our networks, and perhaps how much we've taken some of those relationships for granted. Contacts is about the fact that, for all its dangers, the age of instant communication gives us what is basically a superpower... If we only choose to use it.

Two years later, DeepMind engineers used what they had learned from game playing to solve an economic problem of vital interest: How should Google optimize the management of its computer servers? The artificial neural network remained similar; the only things that changed were the inputs (date, time, weather, international events, search requests, number of people connected to each server, etc.), the outputs (turn on or off this or that server on various continents), and the reward function (consume less energy). The result was an instant drop in power consumption. Google reduced its energy bill by up to 40 percent and saved tens of millions of dollars—even after myriad specialized engineers had already tried to optimize those very servers. Artificial intelligence has truly reached levels of success that can turn whole industries upside down.

Tout ce que je ressens est décuplé. Je grouille d’émotions, je fourmille de sentiments. Je pleure souvent. De tristesse, de joie, de rage. Je m’oublie au bénéfice des autres. J’ai tellement d’empathie, je peux tellement comprendre les autres que j’en suis influençable. Je suis incapable d’avoir un avis tranché. Je ne m’aime pas. Mais ce n’est pas grave, tant que les autres m’aiment. Je me juge constamment. Avec sévérité. Mon cerveau n’est jamais au repos, mon imagination est une machine de guerre. Quand je regarde un film, quand j’utilise un objet, je me demande ce que font les comédiens à cet instant précis, quelle est la vie de celui qui l’a fabriqué, qui vit là. Je suis toujours en hypervigilance. Je sursaute quand je croise maman dans le couloir, je crie quand Lily entre dans la salle de bains sans frapper. Lorsque j’entends parler d’un fait divers, je me mets à la place des victimes. Je vis les scènes comme si j’y étais. Je suis lucide. Trop.

In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

Leonid Gavrilov, a researcher at the University of Chicago, argues that human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually. As engineers have long recognized, simple devices typically do not age. They function reliably until a critical component fails, and the whole thing dies in an instant. A windup toy, for example, works smoothly until a gear rusts or a spring breaks, and then it doesn’t work at all. But complex systems—power plants, say—have to survive and function despite having thousands of critical, potentially fragile components. Engineers therefore design these machines with multiple layers of redundancy: with backup systems, and backup systems for the backup systems. The backups may not be as efficient as the first-line components, but they allow the machine to keep going even as damage accumulates. Gavrilov argues that, within the parameters established by our genes, that’s exactly how human beings appear to work. We have an extra kidney, an extra lung, an extra gonad, extra teeth.

The Air Force has always had more money than sales resistance, and they bought a one-year program (probably for something in the order of a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars) and in June of 1961 Hawkins and Summers punched the “start” button and the machine started to shuffle IBM cards. And to print out structures that looked like road maps of a disaster area, since if the compounds depicted could even have been synthesized, they would have, infallibly, detonated instantly and violently. The machine’s prize contribution to the cause of science was the structure, to which it confidently attributed a specific impulse of 363.7 seconds, precisely to the tenth of a second, yet. The Air Force, appalled, cut the program off after a year, belatedly realizing that they could have got the same structure from any experienced propellant man (me, for instance) during half an hour’s conversation, and at a total cost of five dollars or so. (For drinks. I would have been afraid even to draw the structure without at least five Martinis under my belt.)

The fearful began to instantly see the entire humanity of an individual in a cheeky, offensive tweet and were outraged; people were attacked and unfriended for backing the “wrong” candidate or having the “wrong” opinion or for simply stating the “wrong” belief. It was as if no one could differentiate between a living person and a string of words hastily typed out on a black sapphire screen. The culture at large seemed to encourage discourse but social media had become a trap, and what it really wanted to do was shut down the individual. What often activated my stress was that other people were always angry about everything, presenting themselves as enraged by opinions that I believed in and liked or thought were simply innocuous. My pushback against all of this forced me to confront a degraded fantasy of myself—an actor, as someone I never thought existed—and this, in turn, became a constant reminder of my failings. And what was worse: this anger could become addictive to the point where I just gave up and sat there exhausted, mute with stress. But ultimately silence and submission were what the machine wanted.

I consider reading the greatest bargain in the world. A shelf of books is a shelf of many lives and ideas and imaginations which the reader can enjoy whenever he wishes and as often as he wishes. Instead of experiencing just one life, the book-lover can experience hundreds or even thousands of lives. He can live any kind of adventure in the world. Books are his time machine into the past and also into the future. Books are his “transporter” by which he can beam instantly to any part of the universe and explore what he finds there. Books are an instrument by which he can become any person for a while—a man, a woman, a child, a general, a farmer, a detective, a king, a doctor, anyone. Great books are especially valuable because a great book often contains within its covers the wisdom of a man or woman’s whole lifetime. But the true lover of books enjoys all kinds of books, even some nonsense now and then, because enjoying nonsense from others can teach us to also laugh at ourselves. A person who does not learn to laugh at his own problems and weaknesses and foolishness can never be a truly educated or a truly happy person. Also, probably the same thing could be said of a person who does not enjoy learning and growing all his life

Lorsque je suis revenu de la côte est l’automne dernier, j’aurais aimé que le monde entier se conforme et se soumette pour toujours au même impératif moral; je voulais renoncer à ces aventures turbulentes qui m’avaient donné un aperçu privilégié sur les tréfonds de l’âme humaine. Seul Gatsby, l’homme qui donne son nom à ce livre, faisait figure d’exception – Gatsby qui représentait pourtant tout ce que je méprise profondément. Si la personnalité de quelqu’un est essentiellement la somme de tout ce qu’il a accompli, alors, oui, il y avait chez lui quelque chose de grandiose, une sensibilité accrue aux promesses de la vie, comme s’il était relié à l’une de ces machines complexes qui détectent les tremblements de terre à quinze mille kilomètres de distance. Cette réceptivité n’avait rien à voir avec la sensiblerie mollassonne qu’on honore sous le nom de « tempérament créatif ». C’était une aptitude extraordinaire à l’espoir, une vocation romantique que je n’ai jamais rencontrées chez personne d’autre et ne rencontrerai probablement jamais plus. Non : Gatsby, lui, a bien tourné finalement; en revanche, c’est ce qui a perdu Gatsby, cette écume nauséabonde qui flottait dans le sillage de ses rêves, qui a mis fin pour l’instant à mon intérêt pour les peines avortées et les élans brisés des humains.

Space Rockets as Power Symbols The moon rocket is the climactic expression of the power system: the maximum utilization of the resources of science and technics for the achievement of a relatively miniscule result: the hasty exploration of a barren satellite. Space exploration by manned rockets enlarges and intensifies all the main components of the power system: increased energy, accelerated motion, automation, cyber-nation, instant communication, remote control. Though it has been promoted mainly under military pressure, the most vital result of moon visitation so far turns out to be an unsought and unplanned one-a full view of the beautiful planet we live on, an inviting home for man and for all forms of life. This distant view on television evoked for the first time an active, loving response from many people who had hitherto supposed that modern technics would soon replace Mother Earth with a more perfect, scientifically organized, electronically controlled habitat, and who took for granted that this would be an improvement. Note that the moon rocket is itself necessarily a megastructure: so it naturally calls forth such vulgar imitations as the accompanying bureaucratic obelisk (office building) of similar dimensions, shown here (left). Both forms exhibit the essentially archaic and regressive nature of the science-fiction mind.

A native is a man or creature or plant indigenous to a limited geographical area - a space boundaried and defined by mountains, rivers, or coastline (not by latitudes, longitudes, or state and county lines), with its own peculiar mixture of weeds, trees, bugs, birds, flowers, streams, hills, rocks, and critters (including people), its own nuances of rain, wind, and seasonal change. Native intelligence develops through an unspoken or soft spoken relationship with these interwoven things: it evolves as the native involves himself in his region. A non-native awakes in the morning in a body in a bed in a room in a building on a street in a county in a state in a nation. A native awakes in the in the center of a little cosmos - or a big one, if his intelligence is vast - and he wears this cosmos like a robe, senses the barely perceptible shiftings, migrations, moods, and machinations of its creatures, its growing green things, its earth and sky. Native intelligence is what Huck Finn had rafting the Mississippi, what Thoreau had by his pond, what Kerouac had in Desolation Lookout and lost entirely the instant he caught a whiff of any city. But some have it in cities - like the Artful Dodger, picking his way through a crowd of London pockets; like Mother Teresa in the Calcutta slums. Sissy Hankshaw had it on freeways, Woody Guthrie in crowds of fruit pickers, Ghandi in jails. Almost everybody has a dab of it wherever he or she feels most at home..

Similarly, the computers used to run the software on the ground for the mission were borrowed from a previous mission. These machines were so out of date that Bowman had to shop on eBay to find replacement parts to get the machines working. As systems have gone obsolete, JPL no longer uses the software, but Bowman told me that the people on her team continue to use software built by JPL in the 1990s, because they are familiar with it. She said, “Instead of upgrading to the next thing we decided that it was working just fine for us and we would stay on the platform.” They have developed so much over such a long period of time with the old software that they don’t want to switch to a newer system. They must adapt to using these outdated systems for the latest scientific work. Working within these constraints may seem limiting. However, building tools with specific constraints—from outdated technologies and low bitrate radio antennas—can enlighten us. For example, as scientists started to explore what they could learn from the wait times while communicating with deep space probes, they discovered that the time lag was extraordinarily useful information. Wait times, they realized, constitute an essential component for locating a probe in space, calculating its trajectory, and accurately locating a target like Pluto in space. There is no GPS for spacecraft (they aren’t on the globe, after all), so scientists had to find a way to locate the spacecraft in the vast expanse. Before 1960, the location of planets and objects in deep space was established through astronomical observation, placing an object like Pluto against a background of stars to determine its position.15 In 1961, an experiment at the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California used radar to more accurately define an “astronomical unit” and help measure distances in space much more accurately.16 NASA used this new data as part of creating the trajectories for missions in the following years. Using the data from radio signals across a wide range of missions over the decades, the Deep Space Network maintained an ongoing database that helped further refine the definition of an astronomical unit—a kind of longitudinal study of space distances that now allows missions like New Horizons to create accurate flight trajectories. The Deep Space Network continued to find inventive ways of using the time lag of radio waves to locate objects in space, ultimately finding that certain ways of waiting for a downlink signal from the spacecraft were less accurate than others. It turned to using the antennas from multiple locations, such as Goldstone in California and the antennas in Canberra, Australia, or Madrid, Spain, to time how long the signal took to hit these different locations on Earth. The time it takes to receive these signals from the spacecraft works as a way to locate the probes as they are journeying to their destination. Latency—or the different time lag of receiving radio signals on different locations of Earth—is the key way that deep space objects are located as they journey through space. This discovery was made possible during the wait times for communicating with these craft alongside the decades of data gathered from each space mission. Without the constraint of waiting, the notion of using time as a locating feature wouldn’t have been possible.

The last refuge of the Self, perhaps, is “physical continuity.” Despite the body’s mercurial nature, it feels like a badge of identity we have carried since the time of our earliest childhood memories. A thought experiment dreamed up in the 1980s by British philosopher Derek Parfit illustrates how important—yet deceiving—this sense of physical continuity is to us.15 He invites us to imagine a future in which the limitations of conventional space travel—of transporting the frail human body to another planet at relatively slow speeds—have been solved by beaming radio waves encoding all the data needed to assemble the passenger to their chosen destination. You step into a machine resembling a photo booth, called a teletransporter, which logs every atom in your body then sends the information at the speed of light to a replicator on Mars, say. This rebuilds your body atom by atom using local stocks of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and so on. Unfortunately, the high energies needed to scan your body with the required precision vaporize it—but that’s okay because the replicator on Mars faithfully reproduces the structure of your brain nerve by nerve, synapse by synapse. You step into the teletransporter, press the green button, and an instant later materialize on Mars and can continue your existence where you left off. The person who steps out of the machine at the other end not only looks just like you, but etched into his or her brain are all your personality traits and memories, right down to the memory of eating breakfast that morning and your last thought before you pressed the green button. If you are a fan of Star Trek, you may be perfectly happy to use this new mode of space travel, since this is more or less what the USS Enterprise’s transporter does when it beams its crew down to alien planets and back up again. But now Parfit asks us to imagine that a few years after you first use the teletransporter comes the announcement that it has been upgraded in such a way that your original body can be scanned without destroying it. You decide to give it a go. You pay the fare, step into the booth, and press the button. Nothing seems to happen, apart from a slight tingling sensation, but you wait patiently and sure enough, forty-five minutes later, an image of your new self pops up on the video link and you spend the next few minutes having a surreal conversation with yourself on Mars. Then comes some bad news. A technician cheerfully informs you that there have been some teething problems with the upgraded teletransporter. The scanning process has irreparably damaged your internal organs, so whereas your replica on Mars is absolutely fine and will carry on your life where you left off, this body here on Earth will die within a few hours. Would you care to accompany her to the mortuary? Now how do you feel? There is no difference in outcome between this scenario and what happened in the old scanner—there will still be one surviving “you”—but now it somehow feels as though it’s the real you facing the horror of imminent annihilation. Parfit nevertheless uses this thought experiment to argue that the only criterion that can rationally be used to judge whether a person has survived is not the physical continuity of a body but “psychological continuity”—having the same memories and personality traits as the most recent version of yourself. Buddhists

...He can recite to you the nomenclature of a machine gun or grenade launcher and use either one effectively is he must. He digs foxholes and latrines and can apply first aid like a professional. He can march until he is told to stop, or stop until he is told to march. He obeys orders instantly and without hesitation, but he is not without spirit or individual dignity. He is self-sufficient. ...He sometimes forgets to brush his teeth, but never to clean his rifle. He can cool his own meals, mend his own clothes, and fix his own hurts. ...He'll even split his ammunition with you in the midst of battle when you run low. He has learned to use his hands like weapons and weapons like they were his hands. He can save your life- or take it, because that is his job. He will often do twice the work of a civilian, draw half the pay, and still find ironic humor in it all. He has seen more suffering and death than he should have in his short lifetime. He has wept in public and in private, for friends who have fallen in combat and is unashamed. He feels every note of the National Anthem vibrate through his body while at rigid attention, while tempering the burning desire to "square-away" those around him who haven't bothered to stand, remove their hat, or even stop talking. ...Just as did his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, he is paying the price for our freedom. Beardless or not, he is not a boy. He is the American Fighting Man that has kept this country free for over two hundred years. He has asked nothing in return, except our friendship and understanding. Remember him, always, for he has earned our respect and admiration with his blood. And now we even have women over there in danger, doing their part in this tradition of going to war when our nation calls us to do so. As you go to bed tonight, remember this. A short lull, a little shade, and a picture of loved ones in their helmets.

I have to second Gran’s thanks for not giving up on me.” “I did consider it a few times,” she teased. “But you can be such an engaging fellow that I never considered it for long.” “And there was all that encouragement from my siblings,” he said. “All their little machinations to help our romance along.” He had the satisfaction of watching his wife blush very prettily. “I didn’t have anything to do with that. I had no idea they were trying to ‘push you’ anywhere.” “Of course you didn’t. You don’t have an ounce of guile in your entire body. But I knew what they were doing.” She blinked at him. “You did?” “My siblings are as transparent as that fetching night rail you put on every evening.” “If you knew, why didn’t you fight them?” “Because they were pushing me in a direction I wanted to go.” “That’s very sweet, but I’m sure you had no desire to marry until-“ “From the moment I met you, sweetheart, I could tell I was in trouble. I didn’t acknowledge it, but on some level I sensed it. When a man first sees the thing he never realized he wanted, he knows it instantly. He just doesn’t always know how to get it.” She laughed. “Oh, I think you figured out very quickly how to get it. You just kissed me until I stopped kneeing you in the privates, and after that I was putty in your hands.” “So that’s the secret, is it?” Reaching over, he hauled her onto his lap. “Now I know how I’ll be spending my afternoon.” Her eyes gleamed at him. “Meeting with the tenants?” “Guess again.” He began to unbutton her gown, which very conveniently opened in the front. “Consulting with the carpenter?” “Absolutely not.” Kissing each swath of flesh revealed with the release of a button, he started dragging up her skirts with his other hand. “Seducing your wife?” she teased, then caught her breath as he slipped his hand between her legs to find her already ready for him. “Exactly. But, if you don’t mind, I believe I shall skip the part where you knee me in the privates.” And as she burst into laughter, he set about to show her the decided advantages in marrying a rakehell.

Solemnly, for once looking a little awed, a little like a small-town boy on Broadway, Windrip took the oath, administered by the Chief Justice (who disliked him very much indeed) and, edging even closer to the microphone, squawked, "My fellow citizens, as the President of the United States of America, I want to inform you that the real New Deal has started right this minute, and we're all going to enjoy the manifold liberties to which our history entitles us—and have a whale of a good time doing it! I thank you!" That was his first act as President. His second was to take up residence in the White House, where he sat down in the East Room in his stocking feet and shouted at Lee Sarason, "This is what I've been planning to do now for six years! I bet this is what Lincoln used to do! Now let 'em assassinate me!" His third, in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was to order that the Minute Men be recognized as an unpaid but official auxiliary of the Regular Army, subject only to their own officers, to Buzz, and to High Marshal Sarason; and that rifles, bayonets, automatic pistols, and machine guns be instantly issued to them by government arsenals. That was at 4 P.M. Since 3 P.M., all over the country, bands of M.M.'s had been sitting gloating over pistols and guns, twitching with desire to seize them. Fourth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress (in session since January fourth, the third having been a Sunday), demanding the instant passage of a bill embodying Point Fifteen of his election platform—that he should have complete control of legislation and execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking anything that it might amuse him to do. By Joint Resolution, with less than half an hour of debate, both houses of Congress rejected that demand before 3 P.M., on January twenty-first. Before six, the President had proclaimed that a state of martial law existed during the "present crisis," and more than a hundred Congressmen had been arrested by Minute Men, on direct orders from the President. The Congressmen who were hotheaded enough to resist were cynically charged with "inciting to riot"; they who went quietly were not charged at all. It was blandly explained to the agitated press by Lee Sarason that these latter quiet lads had been so threatened by "irresponsible and seditious elements" that they were merely being safeguarded. Sarason did not use the phrase "protective arrest," which might have suggested things.

When players study all those patterns, they are mastering tactics. Bigger-picture planning in chess—how to manage the little battles to win the war—is called strategy. As Susan Polgar has written, “you can get a lot further by being very good in tactics”—that is, knowing a lot of patterns—“and have only a basic understanding of strategy.” Thanks to their calculation power, computers are tactically flawless compared to humans. Grandmasters predict the near future, but computers do it better. What if, Kasparov wondered, computer tactical prowess were combined with human big-picture, strategic thinking? In 1998, he helped organize the first “advanced chess” tournament, in which each human player, including Kasparov himself, paired with a computer. Years of pattern study were obviated. The machine partner could handle tactics so the human could focus on strategy. It was like Tiger Woods facing off in a golf video game against the best gamers. His years of repetition would be neutralized, and the contest would shift to one of strategy rather than tactical execution. In chess, it changed the pecking order instantly. “Human creativity was even more paramount under these conditions, not less,” according to Kasparov. Kasparov settled for a 3–3 draw with a player he had trounced four games to zero just a month earlier in a traditional match. “My advantage in calculating tactics had been nullified by the machine.” The primary benefit of years of experience with specialized training was outsourced, and in a contest where humans focused on strategy, he suddenly had peers. A few years later, the first “freestyle chess” tournament was held. Teams could be made up of multiple humans and computers. The lifetime-of-specialized-practice advantage that had been diluted in advanced chess was obliterated in freestyle. A duo of amateur players with three normal computers not only destroyed Hydra, the best chess supercomputer, they also crushed teams of grandmasters using computers. Kasparov concluded that the humans on the winning team were the best at “coaching” multiple computers on what to examine, and then synthesizing that information for an overall strategy. Human/Computer combo teams—known as “centaurs”—were playing the highest level of chess ever seen. If Deep Blue’s victory over Kasparov signaled the transfer of chess power from humans to computers, the victory of centaurs over Hydra symbolized something more interesting still: humans empowered to do what they do best without the prerequisite of years of specialized pattern recognition.

After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of the world. But their wallets always waited cold sober in the cloakroom while the Icelandic purse lay open for all in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. “Reputation is king, the rest is crap!” my Bæring from Bolungarvík used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything else was a defeat. But the morning after they turned into weak-willed doughboys. But all the same I did succeed in loving them, those Icelandic clodhoppers, at least down as far as their knees. Below there, things did not go as well. And when the feet of Jón Pre-Jón popped out of me in the maternity ward, it was enough. The resemblances were small and exact: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I instantly acquired a physical intolerance for the father, and forbade him to come in and see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in the bass voice out in the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on I made it a rule: I sacked my men by calling a car. ‘The taxi is here,’ became my favourite sentence.

The coffee made by the six-year-old drip filter machine in the break room was as black as tar. The DI who made it every morning had the tolerance of a bull and the neck of one too. His name was James Graham, and Jamie had seen him take a cup of coffee out of the jug when it was made by someone else, and then add a spoon full of instant coffee to it. More than once.  When that happened, he did nothing but complain about how weak it was.  It just so happened that Graham bought good coffee as well as making it strong, so it was easier — and tastier — for everyone to just let him make a pot, half fill a cup, and then top it up with water and milk until it was the right shade.  That morning Jamie didn’t add any water, and took a russet-brown cup back to her desk. She sat down and Roper eyed her, flicking through the files from the shelter. She’d laid it all out for him and he’d regaled her with the particulars of the conversation he’d had with Mary. She was

Let us begin by saying that no two symmetriads are alike and that the geometry of each is, as it were, an “invention” of the living ocean. So then, the symmetriad produces in its interior things that are often called “instant machines,” though these formations bear no resemblance to machines constructed by people — the term only refers to a certain “mechanical” purposiveness of operation.

● Pursuing online courses with pre-recorded videos? ● Not able to communicate with the instructor while in an online lecture? ● Online lectures seem boring and disengaging? Not anymore. Technology has been able to advance an already transformative concept. Online learning has made its way into almost every professional’s career life. However, there is a new concept which not many people are aware of - LIVE & interactive learning. As the name suggests, it’s just like traditional classroom learning but entirely online. Let’s see what it is, how it works, and how it can benefit your career. LIVE Learning: The Better, More Interactive Learning Method LIVE & interactive learning entails experienced tutors and instructors delivering lectures via LIVE online learning platforms that are built with features to aid in engaging educational learnings. Furthermore, Online Courses are delivered in a similar format that is found in a traditional classroom. With interactivity, teachers can not only deliver lectures, take LIVE questions, and respond, but also the students can interact with one another - just like they would in a brick and mortar classroom. Taking Online Courses Up a Notch Instead of sitting through a pre-recorded lecture, you can now attend the session LIVE. And the best part about this type of learning is that both tutors and students can interact with each other, so query resolution is instant, students can voice out their thoughts, collaboration becomes easy, and the face-to-face interaction definitely makes it more interactive. Reasons Why LIVE & Interactive Learning is Taking the Lead ● Comfortable Learning Pace Students pursuing LIVE & interactive online courses get the opportunity to learn at their own pace. They can discuss their questions in LIVE lectures and interact with the faculty as well. ● Focus on Tougher Modules In a regular classroom, the teacher always decides which modules require special focus. However, with LIVE & interactive learning, you can choose how much time you want to spend on a particular module. ● Extensive Study Materials Another added benefit of LIVE & interactive online courses is that you have access to study material 24*7 and from anywhere. This gives you control and ample time to go through the material more than once or as required. ● Opportunity for More Interaction Ranging from Online Data Analytics Courses to finance, marketing, and sales, online courses allow students to involve themselves in class discussions and chat with more ease. This is just not possible in regular face-to-face interactions where teachers can ask questions and embarrass you in front of the entire class if you are wrong or don’t know the answer. It’s Not a Roadblock, Rather an Accelerant to Your Career The best part - you don’t have to leave your current job to pursue a degree program. Passion to gain knowledge and upskill and a search engine that will take you the right online course is all you need. So whether you are scouting for online data analytics courses, machine learning courses, or digital marketing, LIVE & interactive learning can help you gain the education you deserve.

Then I got the idea of the portable diathermy machine. I rented one, took it on the bus going home that night. There sat all the tired commuters with their wrist radios, talking to their wives, saying, 'Now I'm at Forty-third, now I'm at Forty-fourth, here I am at Forty-ninth, now turning at Sixty-first.' One husband cursing, 'Well, get out of that bar, damn it, and get home and get dinner started, I'm at Seventieth!' And the transit-system radio playing 'Tales from the Vienna Woods,' a canary singing words about a first-rate wheat cereal. Then—I switched on my diathermy! Static! Interference! All wives cut off from husbands grousing about a hard day at the office. All husbands cut off from wives who had just seen their children break a window! The 'Vienna Woods' chopped down, the canary mangled! Silence! A terrible, unexpected silence. The bus inhabitants faced with having to converse with each other. Panic! Sheer, animal panic!" "The police seized you?" "The bus had to stop. After all, the music was being scrambled, husbands and wives were out of touch with reality. Pandemonium, riot, and chaos. Squirrels chattering in cages! A trouble unit arrived, triangulated on me instantly, had me reprimanded, fined, and home, minus my diathermy machine, in jig time.

This means I can call up a client and say, “The bad news is that your buyer backed out because he decided to join a competitive curling team in Moscow. But! The good news is I got you another offer!” The bad news is instantly replaced by the good news. For people who sell other things, this could mean that a product won’t be ready on time or an order was placed incorrectly. Instead of calling up your customer and dropping the bad news, take time to think about what little surprise you can add to remedy the situation and maintain the relationship. “I’m so sorry that your order won’t be received on time. Please know that I’ve reduced my commission to make this a better deal for you, you get free shipping, and 20 percent off your next order.” Sometimes surprise comes in the simple form of exceeded expectations.

LSD profoundly alters cognitive unity. Many people feel that the separation between the self and world dissolves when on LSD, and they begin to feel at one with everything. Conscious experience as a unified whole also breaks down on LSD, especially during the acute phase at high doses, so that perceptions that originate from inside are difficult to disentangle from those originating from outside. Experience itself becomes like movie frames slowed down so that each frame is perceivable. We know now that there are neurobiological reasons for this; hallucinogens have profound effects on global brain activity. Psilocybin, for example, decreases the connections between visual and sensorimotor networks, while it seems to increase the connectivity between the resting-state networks. Temporal integration is related to one’s sense of the current moment. Conscious experience is somehow located in time. We feel like we occupy an omnipresent widthless temporal point—the now. As Riccardo Manzotti says: Every conscious process is instantiated by patterns of neural activity extended in time. This apparently innocuous hypothesis hides a possible problem. If neural activity spans in time (as it has to do since neural activity consists in trains of temporally distributed spikes), something that takes place in different instants of time has to belong to the same cognitive or conscious process. For instance, what glues together the first and the last spike of neural activity underpinning the perception of a face? We know that neuronal oscillations at different frequencies act as this temporal glue. However, when you’re on LSD, this glue seems to dissolve. As Albert Hofmann and many others report, your normal sense of time vanishes on psychedelics. The famous bicycle trip on acid during which Hofmann reported that he felt he was not moving, and yet he arrived at home somehow, illustrates this distortion of the brain mechanisms that support our normal perception of the flow of time.

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A certain magistrate told somebody whom he was examining in court that he or she "should always be polite to the police." I do not know whether the magistrate noticed the circumstance, but the word "polite" and the word "police" have the same origin and meaning. Politeness means the atmosphere and ritual of the city, the symbol of human civilisation. The policeman means the representative and guardian of the city, the symbol of human civilisation. Yet it may be doubted whether the two ideas are commonly connected in the mind. It is probable that we often hear of politeness without thinking of a policeman; it is even possible that our eyes often alight upon a policeman without our thoughts instantly flying to the subject of politeness. Yet the idea of the sacred city is not only the link of them both, it is the only serious justification and the only serious corrective of them both. If politeness means too often a mere frippery, it is because it has not enough to do with serious patriotism and public dignity; if policemen are coarse or casual, it is because they are not sufficiently convinced that they are the servants of the beautiful city and the agents of sweetness and light. Politeness is not really a frippery. Politeness is not really even a thing merely suave and deprecating. Politeness is an armed guard, stern and splendid and vigilant, watching over all the ways of men; in other words, politeness is a policeman. A policeman is not merely a heavy man with a truncheon: a policeman is a machine for the smoothing and sweetening of the accidents of everyday existence. In other words, a policeman is politeness; a veiled image of politeness—sometimes impenetrably veiled. But my point is here that by losing the original idea of the city, which is the force and youth of both the words, both the things actually degenerate. Our politeness loses all manliness because we forget that politeness is only the Greek for patriotism. Our policemen lose all delicacy because we forget that a policeman is only the Greek for something civilised. A policeman should often have the functions of a knight-errant. A policeman should always have the elegance of a knight-errant.

Fowler's philosophy [of phrenology] is all about the possibility and real hope of change. Calvinistic predestination and hellfire are swept away in an instant; if the brain and its resultant behavior is malleable throughout one's life, then nobody is fated to remain bad: they can mend their ways and their selves... Bad actions became the correctable result of improper development, rather than machinations of some cloven-footed prat with a fiery pitchfork. What Fowler holds out is nothung less than the promise of redemption. Will it surprise you at all when, at long last, Fowler tears aside his scientific raiments, and reveals what he has been all along: a minister leading his flock heavenward? "[Let us] redouble our efforts for... that high and holy destiny hereafter as such by this great principle of ILLIMITABLE PROGRESSION!" Indeed. Look carefully around this empty plaza: what you see is nothing less than the birthplace of American progressivisim.

I came across Kyla years ago, when she made short videos about the economy that were as funny as they were informative. It was instantly apparent that she had not only mastered the technical details of how the economic machine works; she could also explain it in a way that had so much empathy for the human side of this field. Her work exploded in 2022 when she coined the term “vibecession” to describe a situation in which the economy was technically okay but people still felt glum about it, and their vibes could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a perfect example of understanding the gap between the chalkboard and the real world. Let me tell you: Roughly 0 percent of economic PhDs understand that gap, and exactly 0 percent can explain it like Kyla can.

And then the shock she helped give the world: Absolom. It wasn’t the announcement of Absolom that changed the world. It was when they saw its power. That day was a Saturday in November. Adeline thought the government had selected a weekend for the first departure for several reasons. The most important was so that the world could watch. They told the press it was so the victims’ families could be present to witness the sentence carried out. That morning, those families stood in the viewing booth, mothers and fathers and their children—at least, the children the man in the Absolom chamber hadn’t taken from them. He stared at his victims’ families with hate-filled eyes. That fire vanished as the machine began to vibrate. Fear took its place. He opened his mouth and screamed, but no one could hear it. A flash filled the chamber, and he was gone. So was the world before. Overnight, crime rates plummeted. Adeline had always heard the saying that the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. That’s what Absolom was to the world: a new devil. Prison was a known. So was the death penalty. They were the devils the world knew. Conceptually, the world knew what Absolom was: a box that sent a person to the past, in an alternate universe. What they didn’t know was what truly happened there. Exile was certain. A lonely death was certain. But how? An exotic disease? Starvation? Being torn apart by an animal? In the absence of certainty, a mind tends to imagine the worst. That’s what Absolom became to the world. The phrase “A fate worse than Absolom” quickly supplanted its predecessor: “A fate worse than death.” Before the first departure, the Absolom machine had been an idea. In those small moments as it hummed to life, the world saw something else: a person who was pure evil, with hate in his heart, instantly hollowed out, gutted, cowering with fear, and then, gone. In an instant, they saw evil wiped from existence.

Software,” as the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen has proclaimed, “is eating the world.” It’s true. You use software nearly every instant you’re awake. There’s the obvious stuff, like your phone, your laptop, email and social networking and video games and Netflix, the way you order taxis and food. But there’s also less-obvious software lurking all around you. Nearly any paper book or pamphlet you touch was designed using software; code inside your car helps manage the braking system; “machine-learning” algorithms at your bank scrutinize your purchasing activity to help spy the moment when a criminal dupes your card and starts fraudulently buying things using your money. And this may sound weirdly obvious, but every single one of those pieces of software was written by a programmer—someone precisely like Ruchi Sanghvi or Mark Zuckerberg. Odds are high the person who originally thought of the product was a coder: Programmers spend their days trying to get computers to do new things, so they’re often very good at understanding the crazy what-ifs that computers make possible. (What if you had a computer take every word you typed and, quietly and constantly and automatically in the background, checked it against a dictionary of common English words? Hello, spell-check!) Sometimes it seems that the software we use just sort of sprang into existence, like grass growing on the lawn. But it didn’t. It was created by someone who wrote out—in code—a long, painstaking set of instructions telling the computer precisely what to do, step-by-step, to get a job done. There’s a sort of priestly class mystery cultivated around the word algorithm, but all they consist of are instructions: Do this, then do this, then do this. News Feed is now an extraordinarily complicated algorithm involving some trained machine learning; but it’s ultimately still just a list of rules. So the rule makers have power. Indeed, these days, the founders of high-tech companies—the ones who determine what products get created, what problems get solved, and what constitutes a “problem” in the first place—are increasingly technologists, the folks who cut their teeth writing endless lines of code and who cobbled together the prototype for their new firm themselves. Programmers are thus among the most quietly influential people on the planet.

All humans discount the future. We would rather have a million dollars today than in 30 years from now. We’d rather a flimsy bridge today, rather than a sturdy, durable bridge 5 years from now. We’d rather eat all the fish in the waters tonight, than to go a little hungry and leave fish for others in the future. To delay instant gratification requires cultural training. To be convinced of the value of investing into the future requires a kind of wisdom, knowledge, patience and trust that is gained from history, elders, and system thinking. It requires collective action and collaboration on a large and long scale. It requires civilization. Civilization is a system of trust, both in the goodness of humans today, but also in the ingenuity of humans in the future. It’s a way for humans to trust the future. Civilization is a social machine accumulated over many generations and is constantly being tested by new events. American society over emphasizes the individual's self-interest, and over-relies on the marketplace to solve social problems, and so coddles the short term. Modern Americanism tends to ignore the government which can take the long view because it is inefficient. But the calculus of efficiency is shifted when taking the long view. Storing adequate supplies for a population that are only used in an emergency is inefficient in the short term and this inefficiency is not something companies can afford to do. That short-term inefficiency, however, makes total sense in the long view because it is highly efficient over time. Investing into a communal project that may not pay off until you are long gone is not a natural reflex of modern Americans, whether liberal or conservative. The antidote to this natural focus on the short term is education and a shift in norms. As we continue to civilize ourselves, we can appreciate the gifts of past long-term work, and the need in our fast-moving world today to pay the gifts forward by investing into work that will likely pay off in future generations.

There is no time for philosophy.

In the library, Arthur switches on the newly installed, ornate brass wall sconce that instantly washes the room in an artificial sunlight. He can never get over it, get used to it even, such abruptness of light from dark. It is something that bothers him. When he was a child, the warmth of a candle or a lantern brought the family closer, around a table, away from the shadows. But these new lights scatter people like mice, drive them to other rooms to hide and separate. Machines now in the streets that prevent human contact and deter conversation. These things, new conveniences, he thinks will change people. The future more hurried, more complex; the one his son, Jack, will have to navigate.

What do the Soviet pilots think as they press the fire control button? is there the same absense of emotion which I seek as i press the button of my camera? Do we both, for an instant, lose our humanity in machines?

We’ve become conditioned to expect instant gratification. Sometimes, we treat our lover as if he were a washing machine! It’s much easier to get a new one than to repair an existing one, right? So once the color blue is felt, it quickly leads to purple and that’s the end of the love story for many of us; we move on…

NOT SO LONG AGO, when I was in school, research required a trip to a library stocked with bundles of printed paper—an inconvenient undertaking when the nearest good library was miles away. Today, affordable machines can deliver the content of a library’s journals to your lap in an instant—and behind this modern wonder we again find silicon chips with digital devices.

Dr. Stadler,” asked one of them, pointing at the building on the knoll, “is it true that you consider Project X the greatest achievement of the State Science Institute?” There was a dead drop of silence. “Project . . . X . . . ?” said Dr. Stadler. He knew that something was ominously wrong in the tone of his voice, because he saw the heads of the newsmen go up, as at the sound of an alarm; he saw them waiting, their pencils poised. For one instant, while he felt the muscles of his face cracking into the fraud of a smile, he felt a formless, an almost supernatural terror, as if he sensed again the silent working of some smooth machine, as if he were caught in it, part of it and doing its irrevocable will. “Project X?” he said softly, in the mysterious tone of a conspirator. “Well, gentlemen, the value—and the motive—of any achievement of the State Science Institute are not to be doubted, since it is a nonprofit venture—need I say more?

In 1950, the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) published an article in Mind titled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence.”[1] In it, Turing asked one of the most profound questions in the history of science: “Can machines think?” While the idea of thinking machines dates back at least as far as the bronze automaton Talos in Greek myth,[2] Turing’s breakthrough was boiling the concept down to something empirically testable. He proposed using the “imitation game”—which we now know as the Turing test—to determine whether a machine’s computation was able to perform the same cognitive tasks that our brains can. In this test, human judges interview both the AI and human foils using instant messaging without seeing whom they are talking to. The judges then pose questions about any subject matter or situation they wish. If after a certain period of time the judges are unable to tell which was the AI responder and which were the humans, then the AI is said to have passed the test.

the division. Hundreds and hundreds plunged into the fighting with their major at the head. All around James and his men, the new Lewis machine guns ratter-tattered incessantly. Cannon boomed. Tanks rolled. The air was thick with smoke from the smoke bombs thrown by the Royal Engineers into no-man’s land to screen the soldiers now entering the area. The smell of cordite, blood and human waste floated around them. But all were unaware, determined as they were to win. Defeat was not a word in their vocabulary. Many of the men were killed instantly. Two hours into the battle, James was hit in both legs by machine-gun fire. He fell, still clutching his baton. He felt the bullets hit him and the pain was intense, unbearable. He wanted to touch his legs but couldn’t sit up. He groaned, and at that moment he knew he was going to die. What a way to go, he thought … on a foreign field because of a useless war. He closed his eyes as a wave of agony gripped him. Half an hour later, it was Lieutenant Stead who found him and pulled him as far away from the fighting as he could. James was unconscious, his skin clammy. The lieutenant felt for a pulse and was relieved that the major had one, weak as it was. A few seconds later, Captain Allan Lister was on the scene to assist him, along with two stretcher-bearers and a stretcher. Together, dodging through the crowds of fighting soldiers, they carried James to the Casualty Clearing Station, a large medical tent. A team of army doctors took over at once. They could give no reassurance to the lieutenant and the captain that their major would live, despite their efforts.

Barely across the Ourcq, Donovan’s battalion began taking fire from three sides. One bullet grazed Wild Bill’s thigh; another tore off the heel of his boot. A shell fragment would surely have killed him had it not struck the respirator of his gas mask. Donovan’s adjutant, Lieutenant Oliver Ames, ran forward and flung himself down alongside the major, joined by a mess cook, John Kayes. A sniper’s bullet whizzed past Donovan and struck Ames in the head, killing him instantly. Kayes was fatally riddled by machine-gun fire. Donovan reached out toward the men and was shot through the hand. Two days later, still deployed along the Ourcq, Donovan, with Kilmer at his side, crept to the northern edge of a wood for a better view of the enemy’s position. Suddenly he realized that Kilmer was not with him. He retraced his steps and found the sergeant sprawled on the ground, a bullet through his brain.

My father works in a factory, and has done so for the past 14 years. All of their workers have to wear the same outfits—navy blue coveralls, brown steel toe boots—and they have to produce so much work each night. The company is telling them how to look, how to work, and sometimes how to think. Dad comes home each morning and he is still running like that machine. Before he began this job, he was much livelier. I never get to see the Dad that I had before age six. His constantly having to work as a part of a machine has stripped him of his personality and happiness. In another instance at the factory, he was injured on the job by a crane, and was instantly replaced by someone else on the line because the job could be done by “anyone.

an instant, a simple swatch of light, then movement: the blond-haired executioner. She stood in a doorway just beyond the street corner, hiding, waiting, arms raised and weapon trained. The reflection in the car window saved Dewey from what would have been, in five feet or so, a warm bullet in the back of the head. Dewey stopped just before the corner, feet away from where the blond assassin lurked. He looked behind him, down the block he’d just run down, and saw a Laundromat. He dropped back and entered the Laundromat. He ran through the store, pushing his way past piles of laundry and women folding articles, to the back room, where a man sat, smoking a cigarette in front of a pile of papers. “Lo siento,” murmured Dewey as he charged through the office toward an alley entrance, gun in hand. The sirens became louder, multiple vehicles joining in the distance. Out the door and across the alley and through a dented steel door. Inside, stacks of bread loaves, other boxes of food, the smell of meat. He moved through the storage room and entered the back of a bodega. Colt .45 cocked in front of him, he passed a middle-aged woman who fainted as she saw the weapon in his hand. Catching the eye of the man at the cash register, Dewey held a finger to his lips. There, at the side of the entrance, her back to the store, stood the blond assassin. Suddenly another customer, an elderly woman, screamed as she saw Dewey with gun. The blonde turned abruptly, leveling what he now saw was an HK UMP compact machine gun with a six-inch suppressor on the end. A full auto hail of bullets crashed through the windows as she swept the weapon east-west. The elderly woman’s screams ended abruptly as a bullet ripped through her head and killed her. The assassin’s bullets shattered the storefront’s glass, but Dewey was already down and partially hidden by a chest freezer, which shielded him from the slugs. As soon as the blonde’s gun swept past him, Dewey had a clear sight. He fired twice, two quick shots into the assassin’s neck and chest, flinging her backward onto the brick sidewalk in a shower of blood and glass. Dewey ran

Sit in a quiet place and meditate in imagination that body is no more bondage to you, that it is your machine for your work of life, that you are not flesh, that you are the governor of it, that you can use it at pleasure, and that it always obeys your order faithfully. Imagine body as separated from you. When it cries out, stop it instantly, as a mother does her baby. When it disobeys you, correct it by discipline, as a master does his pupil. When it is wanton, tame it down, as a horse-breaker does his wild horse. When it is sick, prescribe to it, as a doctor does to his patient. Imagine that you are not a bit injured, even if it streams blood; that you are entirely safe, even if it is drowned in water or burned by fire. E-Shun,

I tried to look at where did the kind of learning we do in schools, where did it come from? . . . It came from . . . the last and the biggest of the empires on this planet, [the British Empire]. What they did was amazing. They created a global computer made up of people. It’s still with us today. It’s called the bureaucratic administrative machine. In order to have that machine running, you need lots and lots of people. They made another machine to produce those people: the school. The schools would produce the people who would then become parts of the bureaucratic administrative machine. . . . They must know three things: They must have good handwriting, because the data is handwritten; they must be able to read; and they must be able to do multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in their head. They must be so identical that you could pick one up from New Zealand and ship them to Canada and he would be instantly functional.10 Of

He turned his head to look at her, trying to think of ways to plead his case. Some way to dazzle and beguile her and make her glad that it was him she was here with. Something witty and persuasive, but she turned at precisely the same moment he did, with invitation in her eyes, and all he could come up with was, “Damn, I really want to kiss you.” Her hesitation was a mere fraction of a second. “Me too,” she whispered. It was all he needed to hear, and in an instant she was in his arms. He kissed her, hard, with no prelude, no artful negotiations or seductive machinations. Just hungry kisses that sent his mind spinning and his body following. She kissed him back with equal enthusiasm, with one hand on his chest and the other wrapped tightly around the back of his neck, pulling him closer. Her mouth was sweet, as sweet as he’d imagined, with lips so soft he could have fallen over the edge of that lighthouse and thought the sensation was just from her touch.

In the same year, William Henly, a Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote to the Humane Society with a suggestion that electricity be used to shock the heart and brain in ‘cases of Apparent Death from Drowning’. After all, he reasoned, why not use ‘the most potent resource in nature, which can instantly pervade the innermost recesses of the animal frame’? In 1794, the first clear success in using electricity to restart the heart was recorded by what had become the Royal Humane Society. Sophia Greenhill, a young girl, had fallen from a window in Soho and was pronounced dead by a doctor at Middlesex Hospital. Mr Squires, a local member of the Society, made it to the girl in around twenty minutes. Using a friction-type electricity machine, he applied shocks to her body. It seemed ‘in vain’, until he began to shock her thorax. Then he felt a pulse, and the child began to breathe again. She was concussed but went on to make a full recovery, and the Royal Humane Society was finally sure of the importance of electricity in reanimating those in ‘suspended animation’.

Markets are voting machines; they function by taking referenda. In the new world money market, for example, currency values are now decided by a constant referendum of thousands of currency traders in hundreds of trading rooms around the globe, all connected to each other by a vast electronic network giving each trader instant access to information about any factor that might affect values. That constant referendum makes it much harder for central banks and governments to manipulate currency values.