“
Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.
”
”
Dave Barry
“
Math anxiety: an intense lifelong fear of two trains approaching each other at speeds of 60 and 80 MPH.
”
”
Rick Bayan
“
Officer, I know I was going faster than 55MPH, but I wasn't going to be on the
road an hour.
”
”
Steven Wright
“
when you’re sitting on a plane 40, 000 feet up in the air, looking out the window, dreaming of your future and how bright it appears to be, or maybe just watching the drops of rain being pushed into different designs from the force of air at 400 mph, well, life feels good. it feels safe, your seat belt is on and your feet are up. then the oxygen masks fall, the plane jumps, snaps and jolts. people start to scream, babies burst out crying, people start praying all in time to the overhead announcement that we’re gonna crash. right then, as your life flashes before your eyes, you hear yourself say, “god, if you get me outta this one, i’ll stop [insert lie here] forever.” right then the nose of the plane pulls up and the captain says, “wow, that was a close one, folks. we’re ok, we’ll be landing in thirty minutes and we’re all safe and sound, sorry for the scare…” that’s how getting hooked on junk is, and when the kick is over you can’t believe you ever got on that plane in the first place. the question is, will you ever fly again?
”
”
Nikki Sixx (The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star)
“
Thrown at Kuhawk at 460 mph while I was roasting a heart,” Maroc says, showing him a hover-tray. It holds something stone-hard and dead—a bird. A crow.
”
”
Misba (The Oldest Dance (Wisdom Revolution, #2))
“
How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation.
”
”
Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
“
I hated the term "heartbroken." It was such an understatement. "Broken" typically implied you were talking about something you could put back together. Or replace. My heart didn't feel like it was broken. It felt like it had been tossed into the blender and liquidized at 180 MPH.
”
”
Rachel K. Burke (Sound Bites: A Rock & Roll Love Story)
“
Well, good afternoon, sunshine. How are you feeling?"
"Like something the cat dragged in, then dragged back outside to leave in the rain, and mud, then the lightning hit it, and burned it, and the cat came back to tear it into pieces, before burying it.
”
”
Adley Maddox (Racing Outside the Line (A Love Story at 190 mph #1))
“
I love full on, like 65 mph in a handicapped parking spot.
”
”
Dark Jar Tin Zoo (Love Quotes for the Ages. Specifically Ages 19-91.)
“
It’s like doing one of those dumb math problems: three people are driving at 20mph in a car carrying two gallons of gas and a horse doing yoga, when a car traveling at 30mph with two clowns drinking cola collides, what time is it in Tokyo? It doesn’t make any sense and the only answer I ever come up with is who
”
”
Jane Harvey-Berrick (Dangerous to Know & Love)
“
When your dawn theater sounds to clear your sinuses: don't delay. Jump. Those voices may be gone before you hit the shower to align your wits.
Speed is everything. The 90-mph dash to your machine is a sure cure for life rampant and death most real.
Make haste to live.
Oh, God, yes.
Live. And write. With great haste.
”
”
Ray Bradbury
“
Crowley was currently doing 110 mph somewhere east of Slough. Nothing about him looked particularly demonic, at least by classical standards. No horns no wings. Admittedly he was listening to a Best of Queen tape, but no conclusions should be drawn from this because all tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums
”
”
Neil Gaiman
“
Teachers should have a proud place in society. In India, regrettably, they do not – as exemplified, by what I chanced to witness a few years back in Delhi. A wizened old man driving his 1938 Austin at a speed under 20 mph with a sign at the back of the car reading, ‘Please overtake me – as all my students have.’ Pathetic, but how true!
”
”
Fali S. Nariman (Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography)
“
Remember you future counselors and bringers of relief: there will never be a cure for life's problems because so many of tomorrow's problems will be new. Good words, like good work and good thinking, help, even if good words are a lot like highway paint. They can keep plenty of heavy things moving at 70 MPH from going the wrong way. But that doesn't mean life won't cross over if it has to. Learn to avoid the collisions. Find other directions. Often a new yes is the best no. Life lived well doesn't get easier but it does get better. Learn to let things go by. And don't be reluctant: life is al[l]ways surpassing us by. Enjoy it.
”
”
Mark Z. Danielewski (Honeysuckle & Pain (The Familiar, #3))
“
Instead of finding myself in the future, I traveled about fifty metres along the sidewalk at 200mph before finding myself in a bush. When asked by the nurse filling out the hospital accident reports 'Cause of accident?' I stated, 'time travel attempt' but she wrote down 'stupidity'.
”
”
David Thorne (I'll Go Home Then, It's Warm and Has Chairs. The Unpublished Emails.)
“
When you change the way you look at things; the things you look at change.
”
”
Polly Letofsky (3mph:The Adventures of One Woman's Walk Around the World)
“
Now I know that strange things happen to your body when it meets the snow at 100 mph, no matter what the position. In the twinkling of hitting the snow I regained a proper respect for speed. If you are inattentive, as well as somewhat stupid, you may breed a contempt for big speeds, forgetting respect through the grace of being atop your skis each run. No one on his back at 100 mph will ever after have contempt for speed.
”
”
Dick Dorworth (The Perfect Turn: and other tales of skiing and skiers)
“
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it is important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are.
~Maya Angelou
”
”
Juanita Fletcher Cone MD MPH (LIVING WATER FOR THE THIRSTY SOUL: 365 STORIES OF HOPE HEALTH & HEALING)
“
In vain did he point out its 823cc engine, its three-speed gearbox, its incredible safety devices like the balloons which inflated on dangerous occasions such as when you were doing 45 mph on a straight dry road but were about to crash because a huge safety balloon had just obscured the view.
”
”
Terry Pratchett (Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch)
“
A 22-caliber bullet can travel as fast as 1,022 mph. I learned that at Quantico.
However, the bullet that hit him probably traveled at 818 mph. Sound travels at 761 mph. I hear the bullet after I see the shot enter his head.
But in my mind it all goes so fast that it’s just a single message.
”
”
Francis Y. Barel (Saving Kennedy)
“
It goes something like this: I am one person among 6.5 billion people on Earth at the moment. That's one person among 6,500,000,000 people. That'a lot of Wembley Stadiums full of people, and even more double-decker buses (apparently the standard British measurements for size). And we live on an Earth that is spinning at 67,000 miles an hour through space around a sun that is the centre of our solar system (and our solar system is spinning around the centre of the Milky Way at 530,000 mph). Just our solar system (which is a tiny speck within the entire universe) is very big indeed. If Earth was a peppercorn and Jupiter was a chestnut (the standard American measurements), you'd have to place them 100 metres apart to get a sense of the real distance between us.
And this universe is only one of many. In fact, the chances are that there are many, many more populated Earths - just like ours - in other universes.
And that's just space.
Have a look at time, too. If you're in for a good run, you may spend 85 years on this Earth. Man has been around for 100,000 years, so you're going to spend just 0.00085 percent of man's history living on this Earth. And Man's stay on Earth has been very short in the context of the life of the Earth (which is 4.5 billion years old): if the Earth had been around for the equivalent of a day (with the Big Bang kicking it all off at midnight), humans didn't turn up until 11.59.58 p.m. That means we've only been around for the last two seconds.
A lifetime is gone in a flash. There are relatively few people on this Earth that were here 100 years ago. Just as you'll be gone (relatively) soon.
So, with just the briefest look at the spatial and temporal context of our lives, we are utterly insignificant. As the Perspective Machine lifts up so far above the woods that we forget what the word means, we see just one moving light. It is beautiful. A small, gently glowing light. It is a firefly lost somewhere in the cosmos. And a firefly - on Earth - lives for just one night. It glows beautifully, then goes out.
And up there so high in our Perspective Machine we realize that our lives are really just like that of the firefly. Except the air is full of 6.5 billion fireflies. They're glowing beautifully for one night. Then they are gone.
So, Fuck It, you might as well REALLY glow.
”
”
John C. Parkin (F**k It: The Ultimate Spiritual Way)
“
If love looked like a deer, smelled like a deer, and ran like a deer, then I wouldn't passively wait for it to find me. Nope, I'd seek it out at 60 MPH, and then run it over.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
I’m on the road, Butte is 58 miles away, and I’m driving 85 mph. So I should be there in an hour. Oh, if only love were so easy to calculate.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
Close-up violence -- it's like a tornado hitting you at 200 mph without warning. It takes all your preparation, fierceness to survive.
”
”
David R. Wommack (Wommack's Self-Defense for Women: 3 Seconds to Live)
“
Nathan had been riding through Kingswood at about 35 mph when some idiot drove straight into him. He was thrown over the bonnet of the car on impact and ended up crumpled on the road,
”
”
Darren Galsworthy (The Evil Within: Murdered by her stepbrother – the crime that shocked a nation. The heartbreaking story of Becky Watts by her father)
“
Focus on the road, not the wall. When someone learns to drive a race car, one of the first lessons taught is that when you are going around a curve at 200 mph, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.
”
”
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
“
The M42 bus won the Golden Snail award for being the city’s slowest, clocking just 3.6 mph in weekday traffic along 42 St. Even more embarrassing, the M42 lost a race against a kid's big wheel bike
”
”
Jeffrey Tanenhaus (New York City Essential Guide 2017: Insider Advice from a Tour Guide)
“
Since 2008, batters have hit only .175 against pitches thrown at 100 m.p.h. or above. Batting averages go up as the speed of the pitches goes down: .210 at 99, .213 at 98, .225 at 97, .242 at 96 and .252 at 95.
”
”
Barry Bearak
“
But imagine this, for a moment. If an asteroid happened to hit one of the rare remaining older surfaces; if its strike were glancing enough that it didn’t pulverise the surface, but forceful enough that it ejected a chunk of rock with an escape velocity of 12,000 mph; if that chunk, flung out into space, wandered aimlessly for a million years or two before feeling the gravitational tug of a nearby planet; if it tore through the atmosphere of that planet in a blaze of glory and landed on one of the planet’s frozen ice caps; if the chunk was buried in snow, squeezed, shoved and harried until it re-emerged, blinking, into the strangely blue daylight; and if, tens of thousands of years later a few local bipeds happened upon it, might it contain signs of alien life? If so, it would surely become one of the most exciting pieces of real estate in the entire Solar System.
”
”
Gabrielle Walker (Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of the World's Most Mysterious Continent)
“
But totally unexpected at the high altitude at which the bombers flew was a 140-mile-per-hour wind. They were blown with it over the target and their ground speed was therefore nearly 450 mph, impossible for the bombardiers.
”
”
Richard Rhodes (The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition)
“
My timing is perfect, and I wind up in a traffic jam. The cars around me are driven by fat cows and bellowing bulls. We roll along, six mph. I can run faster than this. We brake. They chew their cud and moo into their phones until the herd shifts gears and rolls forward again.
”
”
Laurie Halse Anderson (Wintergirls)
“
In 1996 Hubacek had been driving drunk at 100 mph with no headlights. He crashed into a van carrying a married couple and their nanny. The husband and the nanny were killed. Poe sentenced Hubacek to 110 days of boot camp, and to carry a sign once a month for ten years in front of high schools and bars that read, I KILLED TWO PEOPLE WHILE DRIVING DRUNK, and to erect a cross and a Star of David at the scene of the crash and to keep it maintained, and to keep photographs of the victims in his wallet for ten years, and to send $10 every week for ten years to a memorial fund in the names of the victims, and to observe the autopsy of a person killed in a drink-driving accident.
”
”
Jon Ronson (So You've Been Publicly Shamed)
“
We’re stuck with ourselves all the time, with the thoughts that race around our brains at 10,000 mph, with our feelings, with our daily dramas and our ongoing struggles. But by thinking about someone else, authentically listening to and connecting with another person, you focus less on all your own strife and struggles. You get a break from you.
”
”
Saskia Lightstar (The Cancer Misfit: A Guide to Navigating Life After Treatment)
“
I can go from zero to sixty in 59 M.P.H.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book is Not for Sale)
“
Passion + Persistence + Patience = Success.
”
”
Polly Letofsky (3mph:The Adventures of One Woman's Walk Around the World)
“
Pages must be done longhand. The computer is fast—too fast for our purposes. Writing by computer gets you speed but not depth. Writing by computer is like driving a car at 85 mph. Everything is a blur. “Oh, my God, was that my exit?” Writing by hand is like going 35 mph. “Oh, look, here comes my exit. And look, it has a Sonoco station and a convenience store.
”
”
Julia Cameron (The Miracle of Morning Pages: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About the Most Important Artist's Way Tool)
“
As Democrats and Republicans become further destructive to themselves and to the health of the nation, Far right and Far left have created conditions for a country that is now - too far gone.
I don't think it can be fixed or saved. Or helped. The USA is going 175 mph in the wrong lane. It's a country going in the wrong direction; headed for a collision with destiny.
”
”
Tyler Lazarus Stump (New World Disorder Old World Stupidity (Atomic Dial, Nuclear Hands: The Sequels That Always Existed.))
“
After six months of attempting to prove I was living on a globe shaped Earth spinning on its axis at approximately 1,080 mph while orbiting the Sun at a mean velocity of 66,600 mph while the solar system orbits around the Milky Way at approximately 420,000 mph while the Milky Way itself is ripping through the galaxy at a trajectory of approximately 2,237,000 mph, I failed.
”
”
Nathan Roberts (The Doctrine of the Shape of the Earth: A Comprehensive Biblical Perspective)
“
If you’re looking for fast driving there’s a dragway in the southwestern part of the county. It opens next week.”
“Do you race there?” he asks.
“Yes.” And I plan on spending a lot of time there over the next six weeks.
“Isaiah.” Beth attempts to step in between us, but Logan angles himself so that she can’t. “That’s not why I brought him here.”
An insane glint strikes the guy’s eyes and all of a sudden, I feel a connection to him. A twitch of his lips shows he might be my kind of crazy. “How fast do the cars there go?”
“Some guys hit speeds of 120 mph in an eighth mile.”
“No!” Beth stomps her foot. “No. I promised Ryan nothing crazy would happen. Logan, this is not why I brought you here.”
“Have you hit those speeds?” He swats his hand at Beth as if she’s a fly, earning my respect. Most guys would be terrified of having their balls ripped off and handed to them for dismissing Beth like that.
“Not driving my car, I haven’t,” I answer honestly. But I hope to with Rachel’s car, and with mine, after a few modifications. “Speed can be bought. Just depends on how much you want to spend.”
Logan offers his hand. “I’m Logan.”
“Isaiah,” I say as we shake.
“Shit,” mumbles Beth.
”
”
Katie McGarry (Crash into You (Pushing the Limits, #3))
“
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club)
“
H’mph,” growled the squire, “that’s a damned nuisance. I wanted a word or two with Mr. Joss Merlyn. Now look here, my good woman, your precious husband may have bought Jamaica Inn behind my back, in his blackguardly fashion, and we’ll not go into that again now, but one thing I won’t stand for, and that’s having all my land hereabouts made a byword for everything that’s damnable and dishonest round the countryside.
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (Jamaica Inn)
“
(Until the end of their lives, these men and women would tell stories about the summer they followed Lyndon Johnson and his Flying Windmill around Texas; as Oliver Knight of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram would write about one trip, “That mad dash from Navasota to Conroe in which I dodged stumps at 70 MPH just to keep up with that contraption will ever be green in my memory.”) At the landing site, there would be the brief respite
”
”
Robert A. Caro (Means of Ascent (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, #2))
“
different types cling to each other and literally crawl together to their destined home, moving at about 60 MPH (that’s microns per hour, or about one-five-hundredth of an inch). Most follow a path set by their predecessors, with each successive wave shoving and squeezing farther to build the brain from the inside out. Neither the destinations nor the timing is haphazard; each neuron must arrive at an exact location at a predetermined time.
”
”
Rahul Jandial (Life Lessons From A Brain Surgeon: Practical Strategies for Peak Health and Performance)
“
is easy to recall from everyday experience that neither electricity nor magnetism have visual properties. So, on its own, it’s not hard to grasp that there is nothing inherently visual, nothing bright or colored about that candle flame. Now let these same invisible electromagnetic waves strike a human retina, and if (and only if) the waves each happen to measure between 400 and 700 nanometers in length from crest to crest, then their energy is just right to deliver a stimulus to the 8 million cone-shaped cells in the retina. Each in turn sends an electrical pulse to a neighbor neuron, and on up the line this goes, at 250 mph, until it reaches the warm, wet occipital lobe of the brain, in the back of the head. There, a cascading complex of neurons fire from the incoming stimuli, and we subjectively perceive this experience as a yellow brightness occurring in a place we have been conditioned to call “the external world.” Other creatures receiving the identical stimulus will experience something altogether different, such as a perception of gray, or even have an entirely dissimilar sensation. The point is, there isn’t a “bright yellow” light “out there” at all. At most, there is an invisible stream of electrical and magnetic pulses. We are totally necessary for the experience of what we’d call a yellow flame. Again, it’s correlative.
”
”
Robert Lanza (Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe)
“
Greenland, the world’s largest island, is a cold and desolate place, all but a tiny coastal strip of which is covered by an ice cap 5,000 feet thick. In winter, with temperatures down to -9°F (-23°C), the sun does not rise until ten in the morning, and sets again at two in the after-noon. Few crops grow, and only a few sheep graze the scrubland in the extreme south. Storms with winds of up to 150 mph frequently sweep the frozen wastes, and it is often so cold that a man’s breath freezes on his beard.
”
”
Bernard Edwards (The Twilight of the U-Boats)
“
Imagine that you get in your car and begin driving at 5 miles per hour. You drive for a minute, accelerate to double your speed to 10 mph, drive for another minute, double your speed again, and so on. The really remarkable thing is not simply the fact of the doubling but the amount of ground you cover after the process has gone on for a while. In the first minute, you would travel about 440 feet. In the third minute at 20 mph, you’d cover 1,760 feet. In the fifth minute, speeding along at 80 mph, you would go well over a mile. To complete the sixth minute, you’d need a faster car—as well as a racetrack. Now think about how fast you would be traveling—and how much progress you would make in that final minute—if you doubled your speed twenty-seven times. That’s roughly the number of times computing power has doubled since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. The revolution now under way is happening not just because of the acceleration itself but because that acceleration has been going on for so long that the amount of progress we can now expect in any given year is potentially mind-boggling. The answer to the question about your speed in the car, by the way, is 671 million miles per hour. In that final, twenty-eighth minute, you would travel more than 11 million miles. Five minutes or so at that speed would get you to Mars. That, in a nutshell, is where information technology stands today, relative to when the first primitive integrated circuits started plodding along in the late 1950s.
”
”
Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future)
“
Phases of the Love Cloud
Week 1: A cloud of feelings form around you.
Week 2: It has the texture of cotton candy with an implied sweetness and suggestion of sensuality.
Week 3: It lightens to a blinding brightness, as if barely covering the sun.
Week 4: The texture become less permeable and hardens like sugar caramelized when making leche flan on too high a fire.
Week 5: The cloud darkens gradually and lightning blinks
intermittently like a firefly convention in Georgia.
Week 6: There’s an eerie silence gathering around the cloud
which is growing way out of proportion.
Week 8: 200 MPH winds hit, torrential rains
and the roof comes off the house.
Week 10: There’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun appears.
Weeks11-25: Inside you there's a storm of tears
that makes Noah's flood look a kiddie-pool.
Week 26: A new cloud of feelings form around you...
”
”
Beryl Dov
“
They’re not nuts, friends, they’re simply seeing it all through different eyes. They have imagination, and they know something about being alone and in pain. They’re altering the real world to fit their fantasies. That’s okay.
We all do it. Don’t say you don’t. How many of you have come out of the movie, having seen Bullitt or The French Connection or Vanishing Point or The Last American Hero or Freebie and the Bean, gotten in your car, and just about done a wheelie, sixty-five mph out of the parking lot? Don’t lie to me, gentle reader, we all have weird-looking mannerisms that seem perfectly rational to us, but make onlookers cock an eyebrow and cross to the other side of the street.
I’ve grown very fond of people who can let it out, who can have the strength of compulsion to indulge their special affectations. They seem to me more real than the faceless gray hordes of sidewalk sliders who go from there to here without so much as a hop, skip, or a jump.
”
”
Harlan Ellison ("Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman)
“
Get it out of your head and onto paper. When I had to explain to my board that, since we were a public company, I thought that it would be best if we sold all of our customers and all of our revenue and changed business, it was messing with my mind. In order to finalize that decision, I wrote down a detailed explanation of my logic. The process of writing that document separated me from my own psychology and enabled me to make the decision swiftly. Focus on the road, not the wall. When someone learns to drive a race car, one of the first lessons taught is that when you are going around a curve at 200 mph, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.
”
”
Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
“
At the end of the ridge we leaned on our ice axes and looked up.
Above us was the legendary Hillary Step, the forty-foot ice wall that formed one of the mountain’s most formidable hurdles.
Cowering from the wind, I tried to make out a route up it.
This ice face was to be our final and hardest test. The outcome would determine whether we would join those few who have touched that hallowed ground above.
If so, I would become only the thirty-first British climber ever to have done this.
The ranks were small.
I started up cautiously. It was a long way to come to fall here.
Points in. Ice axe in. Test them. Then move.
It was slow progress, but it was progress. And steadily I moved up the ice.
I had climbed steep pitches like this so many times before, but never twenty-nine thousand feet up in the sky. At this height, in this rarefied thin air, and with 40 mph of wind trying to blow us off the ice, I was struggling. Again.
I stopped and tried to steady myself.
Then I made that old familiar mistake--I looked down.
Beneath me, either side of the ridge, the mountain dropped away into abysses.
Idiot, Bear.
I tried to refocus on only what was in front of me and above.
Up. Keep moving up.
So I kept climbing.
It was the climb of my life, and nothing was going to stop me.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
Ove kept exactly to every speed limit, even on that 35 mph road where the recently arrived idiots in suits came tanking along at 55. Among their own houses they put up speed bumps and damnable numbers of signs about “Children Playing,” but when driving past other people’s houses it was apparently less important. Ove had repeated this to his wife every time they drove past over the last ten years.
“And it’s getting worse and worse,” he liked to add, just in case by some miracle she hadn’t heard him the first time.
Today he’d barely gone a mile before a black Mercedes positioned itself a forearm’s length behind his Saab. Ove signaled with his brake lights three times. The Mercedes flashed its high beams at him in an agitated manner. Ove snorted at his rearview mirror. As if it was his duty to fling himself out of the way as soon as these morons decided speed restrictions didn’t apply to them. Honestly. Ove didn’t move. The Mercedes gave him a burst of its high beams again. Ove slowed down. The Mercedes sounded its horn. Ove lowered his speed to 15 mph. When they reached the top of a hill the Mercedes overtook him with a roar. The driver, a man in his forties in a tie and with white cables trailing from his ears, held up his finger through the window at Ove.
p. 28
”
”
Fredrik Backman
“
Since we were on Everest, many other climbers have succeeded on the “big one” as well. She has now been scaled by a blind man, a guy with prosthetic legs, and even by a young Nepalese teenager.
Don’t be fooled, though. I never belittle the mountain. She is still just as high and just as dangerous. Instead, I admire those mountaineers--however they have climbed her. I know what it is really like up there.
Humans learn how to dominate and conquer. It is what we do. But the mountain remains the same--and sometimes she turns and bites so damn hard that we all recoil in terror.
For a while.
Then we return. Like vultures. But we are never in charge.
It is why, within Nepal, Everest is known as the mother goddess of the sky--lest we forget.
This name reflects the respect the Nepalese have for the mountain, and this respect is the greatest lesson you can learn as a climber. You climb only because the mountain allows it.
If the peak hints at you to wait, then you must wait; and when she begins to beckon you to go then you must struggle and strain in the thin air with all your might.
The weather can change in minutes, as storm clouds envelop the peak--and the summit itself stubbornly pokes into the fierce band of jet-stream winds that circle the earth above twenty-five thousand feet. These 150+ mph winds cause the majestic plume of snow that pours off Everest’s peak.
A constant reminder that you have got to respect the mountain.
Or you die.
”
”
Bear Grylls (Mud, Sweat and Tears)
“
The watcher’s eyes are likely to swivel forward in a sequence of stately turns as the screen’s pixel glows: each quarter-ounce mass of eyeball tugged by six flat muscles, in a glissando slide within the slippery fat lining the orbital cavity. The eye blinks, the widened pupils are in position, and the incoming electromagnetic waves roar in. Ripping through the thin layer of the cornea, they decelerate slightly, with their outermost edges forming a nearly flat plane as they travel inward, carrying the as-yet-undetected signal from the screen deep into the waiting human. The waves continue through the liquid of the aqueous humor and on to the gaping hole of the pupil. The human may have squinted to avoid the glare, but human reflexes work at the rate of slow thousandths of a second and are no match for these racing intruders. The pupil is crossed without obstruction. The stiff lens just below focuses the incoming waves even more, sending them into the inland sea of the jellylike vitreous humor deeper down in the eye. A very few of the incoming electric waves explode against the organic molecules in their way, but most simply whirl through those soft biological barriers and continue straight down, piercing the innermost wrapping of the eyeball, till they reach the end-point of their journey: the fragile, stalklike projection from the living brain known as the retina. And deep inside there, in the dark, barely slowed from their original 670 million mph, the waves splatter into the ancient, moist blood vessels and cell membranes, and something unexpected happens. An electric current switches on.
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David Bodanis (Electric Universe: How Electricity Switched on the Modern World)
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Ryan was convinced of the aging fifties motto ‘Live fast, die young’, and, though his scooter didn’t do more than 22 m.p.h. downhill, he liked to warn Clara in grim tones not to get ‘too involved’, for he wouldn’t be here long; he was ‘going out’ early and with a ‘bang’”.
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Zadie Smith (White Teeth)
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To see why temporarily high returns don’t prove anything, imagine that two places are 130 miles apart. If I observed the 65 mph speed limit, I can drive that distance in two hours. But if I drive 130 mph, I can get there in one hour. If I try this and survive, am I “right”? Should you be tempted to try it, too, because you hear me bragging that it “worked?” Flashy gimmicks for beating the market are much the same: in short streaks, so as long as your luck holds out, they work. Over time, they will get you killed.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Recall that Guinness deems it acceptable for a man (Felix Baumgartner) to ascend 128,000 feet into the outer reaches of our atmosphere in a hot-air balloon wearing a spacesuit, open the door of his capsule, stand atop a ladder suspended above the planet, and then free-fall back down to Earth at a top speed of 843 mph (1,358 kmh), passing through the sound barrier while creating a sonic boom with just his body. But the risks associated with sleep deprivation are considered to be far, far higher.
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Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams)
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What’s there to worry about? In case you forgot, we’re standing on a rock that’s spinning at 733 mph (1180 km/h) and traveling through space at 67,000 mph (107,000 km/h).
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Charles F Glassman
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It’s like framing out a new house: you have to do it in stages. First you put up the actual frame, then the drywall, then the paint. It’s the same thing with a sale. You can’t expect to close so soon. There are going to be objections, so be prepared for a prolonged battle. You have to get your foundation in place first. In essence, human beings are not built in a way where we go from zero to 100 mph in one shot. There have to be these little stopping-off points, where we can take a deep breath and consolidate our thoughts. In other words, the way you raise someone’s level of certainty is bit by bit; you can’t do it all at once.
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Jordan Belfort (Way of the Wolf: Straight line selling: Master the art of persuasion, influence, and success)
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I say you are reading to slow.
You need to read at least 93.5 mph.
According to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Around 2.2 million new titles are published worldwide each year.
If a book is in average 250 pages.
Or 3 cm.
That is 66 km of books every year.
Or just 180 meters of books every day.
If you can spend 4h/day to read you just need to read 45 meters of books an hour or 1500 bph (Books Per Hour).
You are probably reading at 0.025-0.1 books per hour.
But if you practice, you might have a chance?
If each book contains 250 pages.
And each page is on average 20 cm tall.
And you can spend 4h on average each day reading.
That means you have to read text at a speed of 187.5 km/h to keep up. However that is probably a bit too fast, since there is usually some white space on each page of a book so lets round it down to 150km/h.
According to Stephen Hawking
“if you stacked the new books being published next to each other, at the present rate of production you would have to move at ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the end of the line.”
90mph equals 144.841 km/h.
I say, Stephen Hawking was a bit too generous.
I calculated the reading speed needed on my own and came to the same approximately the same conclusion as Hawking.
Yes I know. Great minds think a like, but since I think my calculation was a bit better. It must mean I'm a bit smarter than him, right?
Not that I would want to flatter myself, just a little bit smarter is enough.
Now I just need to study physics so I can solve how we may travel back in time to keep up reading all the books or make an alternative world with less authors so we can keep up reading.
If you like me, think this situation is unacceptable.
You too may sign my petition to forbid anyone from writing more than one book of 250 pages in their entire life for the next 2000-10.000 years.
So we can catch up with reading all those books.
You will have to excuse me but I tried to set my goal of reading 2.3 million books next year here on goodreads. But it only allowed to set the counter to 99 thousand so unfortunately it will have to wait until they fix this.
I suspect the limit is there by intent. Since if everyone read all the books published each year and a few millions more, goodreads would not be needed. Their business model is based on you not reading 150kmbookpages/h.
I have contacted customer support, unfortunately they did not take my suggestion seriously, if you could please help me and also email them then hopefully they will come to their senses and fix this once they see there is a demand. (Don't do this, it's just a joke.)
In the meantime I will just go back to reading 10-20 books a year.
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myself and Stephen Hawking?
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In 1915, California’s general speed limits were 10 mph “in built-up territory,” 15 mph “in any city or town,” and 20 mph outside these two areas. But Los Angeles restricted drivers to 12 mph in its central district, and San Diego prohibited speeds above 12 mph anywhere in the city. Speed traps enforced the laws. Cops sheltered behind shrubbery or buildings and timed cars with stopwatches.
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Jeff Guinn (The Vagabonds: The Story of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's Ten-Year Road Trip)
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Tropical storms typically have up to a steady 73 MPH wind with higher wind gusts. It's like taking the house for a drive down the interstate!
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Steven Magee
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Each 5 mph you drive over 60 mph is like paying an additional 10 cents a gallon for gas.
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Keith Bradford (Life Hacks: Any Procedure or Action That Solves a Problem, Simplifies a Task, Reduces Frustration, Etc. in One's Everyday Life (Life Hacks Series))
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333 Texas has the highest speed limit of any US state – you can drive down the Texas State Highway 130 at 85mph
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Jim Green (3001 Unusual Facts, Funny True Stories & Odd Trivia: Amazing Book of Odd & Unusual Trivia Interesting Facts about Famous People, Odd Trivia from Science ... Unusual Facts from US & World History)
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It is my position that this perception has been created to remove critical focus from the spinning ball model. That is the model that postulates we are on a rock spinning 1,040 mph and going around the sun at over 60,000 mph, while shooting through the galaxy at over 500,000 mph. This all happens in a remote part of the universe that was created when nothing exploded and created everything.
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Matt Long (The House that Jesus Built: The Biblical Shape of the Earth, An Intelligent Alternative Design)
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Rules are often contrasted with standards.5 A ban on “excessive” speed on the highway is a standard; so is a requirement that pilots of airplanes be “competent,” or that student behavior in the classroom be “reasonable.” These might be compared with rules specifying a 55-mph speed limit, or a ban on pilots who are over the age of seventy, or a requirement that students sit in assigned seats.
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Cass R. Sunstein (Decisions about Decisions: Practical Reason in Ordinary Life)
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The absence of battleships in the task force that steamed with Enterprise toward Wake had little to do with the growing importance of the aircraft carrier as a strategic weapon. There were many officers in the Navy—“black shoes,” as opposed to those upstart aviators who wore brown shoes—who clung stubbornly to the doctrine of battleship might. But hurling fourteen-inch shells a dozen miles at one’s opponent was about to change. For Arizona or other battleships that might have accompanied Enterprise, it was a simple matter of math. The top speed of the Arizona and the standard classes of battleships built before the Washington Treaty was 21 knots (24 mph). Enterprise, the slowest of the three carriers then in the Pacific, could move along at 32 knots (37 mph). When it came to covering distances and getting the job done, Enterprise and its consorts were high-speed delivery machines. The plodding battleships simply could not keep up. Had they been along, the trip to Wake would have taken 50 percent longer, exposing the force to enemy submarines that much longer.
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Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
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The thickness of the armor decking was increased by 1.75 inches, and giant torpedo bulges, or blisters, were added below the waterline on the exterior of each side of the hull. In theory, these bulges provided some measure of protection from torpedoes or near-miss bombs. They were filled with air in the outer half and water in the half next to the hull, and were designed to absorb the shock of an explosion and dissipate potential damage to the ship. Bulkheads bisecting the bulge limited flooding and damage to a particular section. All this meant more weight and new boilers and turbines were also installed to keep up Arizona’s speed, which peaked at 20.7 knots (23.8 mph) during post-overhaul sea trials. Returned to full commission on March 1, 1931, Arizona embarked President Herbert Hoover from Hampton Roads, Virginia, for a ten-day tour of the Caribbean, calling at Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. It was the sort of low-key inspection of naval operations combined with a warm respite from wintry Washington that American presidents happily undertook in those years. Franklin Roosevelt would soon become a master of it.
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Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
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If you have a dog who—at least some amount of the time—has to walk on the field leash, you should absolutely make sure that he is fitted with a harness. In general, using a harness instead of a collar is preferable, but if your dog is on a long leash, it is vital. The danger of injury that a dog is exposed to is extremely high when he reaches the end of a leash with fifteen, thirty, or more feet. The entire pressure of the jerk he receives when he hits the end of the line is distributed across the cervical spine, larynx, thyroid, and trachea. You can compare this to the impact of crashing into another car at about 35 mph. Remember: we humans put the seat belt across our chests and don’t wrap it around our necks—and for a good reason. In my opinion, wearing a harness is always more sensible than wearing a collar—in field leash training it is indispensable!
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Clarissa Von Reinhardt (Chase!: Managing Your Dog's Predatory Instincts (Dogwise Training Manual))
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Equation: mv In English: Mass times velocity The special part: It has a specific direction assigned to it. Mass and velocity are multiplied together to get the magnitude of the momentum, so a large 200-pound man jogging 5 miles per hour (mph) (200 * 5 = 1000) and a petite 100-pound woman running 10 mph (100 * 10 = 1000) will each hit you with the same momentum and knock you back just as hard. The only difference between mass and velocity when it comes to momentum is that the velocity is what gives momentum its direction. This means if you tackle someone, the direction of the momentum you transfer to your opponent is the same as the direction you were running before the tackle. This may seem like a trivial statement at first, but the directional component of momentum is the key to redirecting and controlling an otherwise unstoppable blow. A high-momentum strike, or “push” strike, has the ability to move your opponent, or parts of your opponent, and that is an incredibly powerful tool to have in a fight. If your opponent is rigid, light on his feet, or if you strike him near his center of mass, a high-momentum strike can push him back, knock him off balance, push the air out of his lungs, or even send him to the floor if the stars are aligned properly. If your opponent is loose, a high-momentum strike to the hands can move them away from his face and leave him open. Whether he is loose or stiff, a high-momentum strike to the chin can make your opponent’s head rotate quickly about the base of his skull, resulting in a knockout.
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Jason Thalken (Fight Like a Physicist: The Incredible Science Behind Martial Arts (Martial Science))
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Staggering in scope and breadth, 'God 4.0' is the culmination of Ornstein’s work on the psychology of consciousness. Connecting the latest research from archeology, religious history, psychology and brain science, the authors extend a timely invitation to explore a latent, intuitive faculty we all share – one that can moves us beyond belief, faith, and doctrine to a wider perception of who we are and who we could become. — David D. Sobel, MD, MPH, Stanford University School of Medicine
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Robert Ornstein (God 4.0: On the Nature of Higher Consciousness and the Experience Called “God”)
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For example, a thirty-five-year-old man with average fitness for his age—a VO2 max in the mid-30s—should be able to run at a ten-minute mile pace (6 mph). But by age seventy, only the very fittest 5 percent of people will still be able to manage this. Similarly, an average forty-five- to fifty-year-old will be able to climb stairs briskly (VO2 max = 32), but at seventy-five, such a feat demands that a person be in the top tier of their age group.
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Peter Attia (Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity)
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In the Netherlands, unsurprisingly, they’ve nailed this by designating two types of road: flow roads and access roads. The former are through roads, on which you’d put a separate cycle route away from traffic. The latter offer no-through routes for motor traffic, allowing people in cars to access homes and businesses, but not cut through on their way elsewhere, making it safe for cycling. The current thinking is that if there’s more than a thousand vehicles a day or they’re going at more than 35mph you really need to do something about it if you want people to feel safe.
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Laura Laker (Potholes and Pavements: A Bumpy Ride on Britain’s National Cycle Network)
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The Duster sat in the shadows of the old barn like a dire wolf in the recesses of a cave. Beauregard tossed the shotgun in the passenger seat. He climbed in and fired up the engine. It roared to life, stirring up the decades of dust in the barn. The duals played a concerto as he shifted it into gear and burst out of the barn. He skirted around the remains of the van, rolled over the body in the grass and hit the blacktop doing 40 mph.
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S.A. Cosby (Blacktop Wasteland)
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She was like driving at 160 mph but knowing without a doubt if you spun out or crashed, you'd be fine. You'd bounce back without any damage because she was there to make sure of it.
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Hannah Lily
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On the 14th October 2012 Felix Baumgartner broke the record for freefall distance when he jumped from a helium balloon. He jumped from an altitude of 127,852 feet and fell 119,431 feet before landing in New Mexico. He reached a speed of 843mph.
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M Prefontaine (The Book of Intriguing Facts for Smart Kids: Odd Facts for Curious Minds (Thinking Books for Kids 3))
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Steve is driving his car. He is traveling at 60 feet/second and the speed limit is 40 mph. Is Steve speeding?
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Richard Benson (F in Exams: The Funniest Test Paper Blunders)
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bullet typically travels at about 1,400 miles per hour (about 2,000 mph at the muzzle, and more than 800 mph by the time it reaches a target 1,000 yards away).3 The bullet’s total flight time at 1,000 yards is about 2–3 seconds. Even at these speeds, the typical bullet used in target rifle matches requires about 40 minutes of elevation correction at 1,000 yards.
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Linda K. Miller (The Wind Book for Rifle Shooters: How to Improve Your Accuracy in Mild to Blustery Conditions)
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For example, when the recent decisions by a number of states to raise the speed limit on certain highways to 65 m.p.h. and not to impose stiffer penalties on drunk driving were challenged by safety groups, they were defended with the patently false assertion that there would be no increase in accident rates, instead of with a frank acknowledgment of economic and political factors which outweighed the likely extra deaths. Dozens of other incidents, many involving the environment and toxic wastes (money vs. lives), could be cited. They make a mockery of the usual sentiments about the pricelessness of every human life. Human lives are priceless in many ways, but in order to reach reasonable compromises, we must, in effect, place a finite economic value on them. Too often when we do this, however, we make a lot of pious noises to mask how low that value is. I’d prefer less false piety and a considerably higher economic value placed on human lives.
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John Allen Paulos (Innumeracy: Mathematical Illiteracy and Its Consequences)
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If you run one lap at 5 mph, how fast must you run the second lap to get an average speed of 10 mph?
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Robert Hamner (Answered with Math (Volume 2): Cool problems solved with math and physics)
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The first U.S. speeding ticket went to an electric taxi driver who got a ticket in May 1899 in New York City (12 mph in an 8-mph zone). A police officer who pulled the driver over was on a bicycle.
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Amy Myers Jaffe (Energy's Digital Future: Harnessing Innovation for American Resilience and National Security (Center on Global Energy Policy Series))
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this is a hard game played by hard men, vengeful men without remorse and with really long memories. If you disrespect them, their team, or the game, you will pay, often with something in the ribs at 90 mph.
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Tim Kurkjian (I'm Fascinated by Sacrifice Flies: Inside the Game We All Love)
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A mechanistic rather than a living organism metaphor A high-performing team is a concept that grew out of 20th-century mechanistic linear thinking. High performance was a term used for manufacturing machinery, or cars that could accelerate fast from standstill to 60 mph. It was about achieving greater productivity and efficiency out of a fixed system, so that it creates more, faster and cheaper. High performance is unconcerned about whether what is produced is of beneficial value. It is focused on efficiency rather than creating benefit for all stakeholders. Sub-optimization Some teams I have worked with over the years have been motivated to be the ‘best team on the block’, the standout region in their company.
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Peter Hawkins (Leadership Team Coaching: Developing Collective Transformational Leadership)
Randall Munroe (What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions)
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We could use geofencing to limit car speeds within cities, or certain parts of cities, or even by time of day or day of week such as when schools or bars let out. Doing so would save lives. We choose not to. Europe isn’t exactly limiting speeds, yet. But as of 2022, Europe requires that all new cars sold use GPS and street sign detection to determine if a driver is speeding and if so, warn the driver. Starting in 2021, Volvo limits top speeds on new cars to 112 mph. It’s not revolutionary—nor that helpful to pedestrians and bicyclists
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Wes Marshall (Killed by a Traffic Engineer: Shattering the Delusion that Science Underlies our Transportation System)
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It seemed to me that the precision required to play good golf demanded much greater mental discipline than was necessary for good tennis. The reason for the low margin of error was not hard to discover: the speed of the club head that is necessary to hit the ball a long distance. The speed of the golfer’s arms on the downswing is not much greater than the speed of the tennis player’s arm on the serve, but because of the greater length and flexibility of the golf club, the club-head speed is much greater than that of a racket. If a club head traveling over 100 mph contacts the ball with a face open a mere degree or two, the ball can be sent off target many tens of yards. With those odds, it’s amazing that the ball ever does go exactly where we want it to. In tennis, the serve is the only shot in which the player initiates the action, whereas in golf he does so on every shot. It is interesting to note that if you miss your first serve in tennis, you get another try. Golf is not so forgiving! Further, in tennis a much larger surface hits a much larger ball a much shorter distance. Moving from tennis to golf was definitely going to require some fine-tuning of my concentration. The greater precision required in golf is also reflected in the manner in which the player addresses the ball. A tennis player can be pretty casual, or even a little flamboyant, as he sets up the service line, bounces the ball a few times, and serves. Most professional golfers display much more self-discipline. They seem to approach the ball in the same controlled, almost ritualistic way every time. Even their dress seems more meticulous. (I’ve often felt I could pick out the golfers from the tennis players at a cocktail party.) Meticulousness has never been my strong suit. There isn’t a family picture of me as a boy in which at least one shoe wasn’t untied. I could usually solve
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W. Timothy Gallwey (The Inner Game of Golf)
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Only a psychological freak could approach a 100-mph fastball aimed not all that far from his head with total confidence. “Lenny
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Michael Lewis (Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game)
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The difference between reacting and responding is subtle, but immense.
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Shawn Green (The Way of Baseball: Finding Stillness at 95 mph)
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Four days before the declaration of World War II, on August 27, 1939, the test pilot van Chaim flew the first jet aircraft in the world, the Heinkel 178. Only a small circle of people directly concerned knew of this event, which for that time was of great importance. Exactly a year later, on August 27, 1940, the first Italian jet plane, the Caproni-Campini made its first flight. It reached 300 mph, and the event received great propaganda.
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Adolf Galland (The First and The Last)
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Newspaper writers and politicians treated the pilots as “knights” of the war. They flew fast and dangerous maneuvers in order to defend critical artillery observation balloons. They battled other pilots either one-on-one or in squadrons, fought like heroes, and died in droves. France alone produced at least 68,000 aircraft, of which 52,000 were lost in battle. The planes reached speeds of over 100 mph and fired machine guns, pistols, or rockets at each other. The winners sped away; the losers spiraled to the earth
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Paul T. Dean (Courage: Roy Blanchard's Journey in America's Forgotten War)
Ian Harding (Blood Beach (Assault Troop #1))
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Thus many of the new revisers of hell contend that it is only remedial. In effect, you take a really nasty purgatorial bus ride, like Greyhound with a better destination. I’m sure it’s bumpy, and crowded with people who should never take off their shoes but do, and Keanu Reeves is driving and screaming about not being able to go slower than 50 mph or the bus will explode. But this particular hypothetical hell does have “good news”—once you see the error of your ways, there is an exit. My guess is that you pull the cord as an act of repentance, the bell rings, and as you hop off at the next stop Keanu says he was just kidding about the bus blowing up and hands you a transfer pass allowing you to jump on an express bus to the good and happy place.
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Thor Ramsey (The Most Encouraging Book on Hell Ever)
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Yes, nothing says “sexy” like the names of German cities, and a few years back I was zipping by them while driving 135 mph on the Autobahn. (Keep in mind, I was wearing my seatbelt while driving at 135 mph, so in case I got into an accident, I would be trisected into three neat sections. That would make for easier cleanup; truly, the German way.)
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William Shatner (Shatner Rules: Your Guide to Understanding the Shatnerverse and the World at Large)
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I've been through Irene. I went through Isabelle," said Bill Motley, who works at Ace Hardware in Nags Head has lived on the Outer Banks for 13 years. "I'm not even worried about this one. I'm more worried about my tomato plants. With the wind coming, if we get a 50-mph gust, it will knock over my tomato plants.
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Anonymous
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Billy nods and turns to the window. He knows he will never see Faison again, but how can he know? How does anyone ever know anything—the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation. And yet he knows, at least he thinks he knows, he feels it seeded in the purest certainty of his grief as he finds his seat belt and snaps it shut, that snick like the final lock of a vast and complex system. He’s in. Bound for the war. Good-bye, good-bye, good night, I love you all. He sits back, closes his eyes, and tries to think about nothing as the limo takes them away.
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Ben Fountain (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk)
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You might be surprised to learn that a yo-yo controlled by 1992 World Champion Dale Oliver was actually clocked at a blistering 14,300 revolutions per minute (rpm). Conversely, the Hornet plods along at a slower 2200 rpm. This is the same aircraft engine, however, that catapulted legendary aviator Roscoe Turner to victory in his Hornet-powered Wedell-Turner racer during the 1934 Thompson Trophy Race. During this race, Turner was able to sustain speeds in excess of 290 mph.
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Dave Prochnow (YO!)
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Not to be conceited, but I think I made a real impact on her life. And I was only driving 45 mph when I hit her!
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Jarod Kintz (Sleepwalking is restercise)
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The financial crisis of 2008 is illustrated by the following analogy. There is no doubt that the improvements in engineering have made the passenger car safer than it was 50 years ago. But that does not mean that the automobile is safe at any speed. A small bump on the road can flip the most advanced passenger car speeding 120 mph today just as surely as an older model traveling 80 mph. During the Great Moderation, risks were indeed lower, and financial firms rationally leveraged their balance sheets in response. But their leverage became too great, and all that was needed was an unexpected increase in the default rate on subprime mortgages—that “bump on the road”—to catapult the economy into a crisis.
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Jeremy J. Siegel (Stocks for the Long Run: The Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies)
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Google unveiled its latest driverless car. It plans to build 100 prototypes from scratch, rather than modifying others’ vehicles as it has done in the past. The car has no steering wheel or pedals, only a “stop” and a “go” button. The two-seater electric vehicle can travel up to 25mph (40kph) and the firm hopes to pilot it on Californian roads within two years. However, there remain significant regulatory and legal barriers to its spread.
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Anonymous
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One cannot examine the actions of the Secret Service on November 22, 1963, without concluding that the Service stood down on protecting President Kennedy. Indeed, the 120-degree turn into Dealey Plaza violates Secret Service procedures, because it required the presidential limousine to come to a virtual stop. The reduction of the president’s motorcycle escort from six police motorcycles to two and the order for those two officers to ride behind the presidential limousine also violates standard Secret Service procedure. The failure to empty and secure the tall buildings on either side of the motorcade route through Dealey Plaza likewise violates formal procedure, as does the lack of any agents dispersed through the crowd gathered in Dealey Plaza. Readers who are interested in a comprehensive analysis of the Secret Service’s multiple failures and the conspicuous violation of longstanding Secret Service policies regarding the movement and protection of the president on November 22, 1963, should read Vince Palamara’s Survivor’s Guilt: The Secret Service and the Failure to Protect. The difference in JFK Secret Service protection and its adherence to the services standard required procedures in Chicago and Miami would be starkly different from the arrangements for Dallas. Palamara established that Agent Emory Roberts worked overtime to help both orchestrate the assassination and cover up the unusual actions of the Secret Service in the aftermath. Roberts was commander of the follow-up car trailing the presidential limousine. Roberts covered up the escapades of his fellow secret servicemen at The Cellar, a club in downtown Ft. Worth, where agents, some directly responsible for the safety of President Kennedy during the motorcade, drank until dawn on November 22. He also ordered a perplexed agent Donald Lawton off the back of the presidential limousine while at Love Field, thus giving the assassins clearer, more direct shots and more time to get them off. Also, although Roberts recognized rifle fire being discharged in Dealey Plaza, he neglected to mobilize any of the agents under his watch to act. To mask the inactivity of his agents, Roberts, in sworn testimony, falsely increased the speed of the cars (from 9–11 mph to 20–25 mph) and the distance between them (from five feet to 20–25 feet).85 No analysis of the Secret Service’s actions on the day of the assassination can be complete without mentioning that Secret Service director James Rowley was a former FBI agent and close ally of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, as well as a crony of Lyndon Johnson. Hoover was one of Johnson’s closest associates. The FBI Director would take the unusual step of flying to Dallas for a victory celebration in 1948 when Johnson illegally stole his Senate seat through election fraud. Johnson and Hoover were neighbors in the Foxhall Road area of the District of Columbia. Hoover’s budget would virtually triple during the years LBJ dominated the appropriations process as Senate Majority Leader. Rowley was a protégé of the director and one of the few men who left the FBI on good terms with Hoover. Rowley’s first public service job in the Roosevelt administration was arranged for him by LBJ. The neglect of assigning even one Secret Service agent to secure Dealey Plaza, as well as cleaning blood and other relatable pieces of evidence from the presidential limousine immediately following the assassination, seizing Kennedy’s body from Parkland Hospital to prevent a proper, well-documented autopsy, failing to record Oswald’s interrogation—all were important pieces of the assassination deftly executed by Rowley.
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Roger Stone (The Man Who Killed Kennedy: The Case Against LBJ)
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(Irigaray was my favourite. She denounced Einstein’s E = mc2 as a sexist equation which ‘privileges the speed of light’ over more feminine speeds ‘which are vitally necessary to us’. Presumably, light might have appeased her if it had shown its feminine side by slowing down to 30 m.p.h. in built-up areas.)
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Nick Cohen (What's Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way)