Orbital Best Quotes

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I'm left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

Well, it is a photo taken from orbit,” Mindy said. “The NSA enhanced the image with the best software they have.” “Wait, what?” Venkat stammered. “The NSA?” “Yeah, they called and offered to help out.

When I applied to graduate school many years ago, I wrote an essay expressing my puzzlement at how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets. Part of that problem is political will; we could take a lot of people off the streets tomorrow if we made it a national priority. But I have also come to realize that NASA had it easy. Rockets conform to the unchanging laws of physics. We know where the moon will be at a given time; we know precisely how fast a spacecraft will enter or exist the earth's orbit. If we get the equations right, the rocket will land where it is supposed to--always. Human beings are more complex than that. A recovering drug addict does not behave as predictably as a rocket in orbit. We don't have a formula for persuading a sixteen-year-old not to drop out of school. But we do have a powerful tool: We know that people seek to make themselves better off, however they may define that. Our best hope for improving the human condition is to understand why we act the way we do and then plan accordingly. Programs, organizations, and systems work better when they get the incentives right. It is like rowing downstream.

He was Mo-Maw’s youngest son, but he was also her confidant, her lady’s maid, and errand boy. He was her one flattering mirror, and her teenage diary, her electric blanket, her doormat. He was her best pal, the dog she hardly walked, and her greatest romance. He was her cheer on a dreich morning, the only laughter in her audience. Jodie shunted him again but Mungo only grumbled and curled tighter around her. Her brother was her mother’s minor moon, her warmest sun, and at the exact same time, a tiny satellite that she had forgotten about. He would orbit her for an eternity, even as she, and then he, broke into bits.

The truth is that Percy has always been important to me, long before I fell so hard for him there was an audible crash. It's only lately that his knee bumping mine under a narrow pub table leaves me fumbling for words. A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.

In Summation A poem by Taylor Swift At this hearing I stand before my fellow members of the Tortured Poets Department With a summary of my findings A debrief, a detailed rewinding For the purpose of warning For the sake of reminding As you might all unfortunately recall I had been struck with a case of a restricted humanity Which explains my plea here today of temporary i n s a n i t y You see, the pendulum swings Oh, the chaos it brings Leads the caged beast to do the most curious things Lovers spend years denying what’s ill fated Resentment rotting away galaxies we created Stars placed and glued meticulously by hand next to the ceiling fan Tried wishing on comets. Tried dimming the shine. Tried to orbit his planet. Some stars never align. And in one conversation, I tore down the whole sky Spring sprung forth with dazzling freedom hues Then a crash from the skylight bursting through Something old, someone hallowed, who told me he could be brand new And so I was out of the oven and into the microwave Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave How gallant to save the empress from her gilded tower Swinging a sword he could barely lift But loneliness struck at that fateful hour Low hanging fruit on his wine stained lips He never even scratched the surface of me. None of them did. “In summation, it was not a love affair!” I screamed while bringing my fists to my coffee ringed desk It was a mutual manic phase. It was self harm. It was house and then cardiac arrest. A smirk creeps onto this poet’s face Because it’s the worst men that I write best. And so I enter into evidence My tarnished coat of arms My muses, acquired like bruises My talismans and charms The tick, tick, tick of love bombs My veins of pitch black ink All’s fair in love and poetry Sincerely, The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department

At best, we’d been fellow celestial bodies whose orbits coincided at regular intervals.

Being infinite, the whole of reality is too much for the conscious human mind to grasp. The best any one of us can do is to take the biggest slice of Infinite Reality we can hold - intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally - and make that slice our personal sense of what is real. But no matter how broad it is, any human perception of reality can be no more than a tiny sliver of Infinite Reality. Civilization also has a limited perception of Infinite Reality. And with a haughty self-assurance, it imposes that perception on us until we think it is our own.

Harrison’s visit to Dylan’s Woodstock sessions and his invitation to Eric Clapton to solo on “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” convinced him that an outsider could revive stalled sessions. Dylan and the Band treated Harrison as an equal, while in his own band, Lennon and McCartney persistently patronized his material, even as it began to peak. (Lennon, in fact, sat out most of Harrison’s Beatle recordings from here on out.) Taking in an ally could only ease Harrison’s reentry into the contentious Beatle orbit. Along with lobbying for Ringo Starr to replace Pete Best, bringing Preston into the Get Back project stands as a defining move for Harrison: he single-handedly rescued Let It Be, and pushed his material throughout 1969, until Abbey Road featured his best work yet.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy notes that Disaster Area, a plutonium rock band from the Gagrakacka Mind Zones, are generally held to be not only the loudest rock band in the Galaxy, but in fact the loudest noise of any kind at all. Regular concert goers judge that the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within large concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage, while the musicians themselves play their instruments by remote control from within a heavily insulated spaceship which stays in orbit around the planet—or more frequently around a completely different planet.

The truth is that Percy has always been important to me, long before I fell so hard for him there was an audible crash. It's only lately that his knee bumping mine under a narrow pub table leaves me fumbling for words. A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I'm left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

I have another scan this week," I say lightly, hoping to reassure my loved ones that it is safe to rejoin my orbit. There is always another scan, because this is my reality. But the people I know are often busy contending with mildly painful ambition and the possibility of reward. I try to begrudge them nothing, except I'm not alongside them anymore. In the meantime, I have been hunkering down with old medical supplies and swelling resentment. I tried— haven't I tried? — to avoid fights and remember birthdays. I showed up for dance recitals and listened to weight-loss dreams and kept the granularity of my medical treatments in soft focus. A person like that would be easier to love, I reasoned. I try a small experiment and stop calling my regular rotation of friends and family, hoping that they will call me back on their own. _This is not a test. This is not a test._ The phone goes quiet, except for a handful of calls. I feel heavy with strange new grief. Is it bitter or unkind to want everyone to remember what I can't forget? Who wants to be confronted with the reality that we are all a breath away from a problem that could alter our lives completely? A friend with a very sick child said it best: I'm everyone's inspiration and and no one's friend. I am asked all the time to say that, given what I've gained in perspective, I would never go back. Who would want to know the truth? Before was better.

Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years.

With Jace, my world orbited around his. No one could penetrate it. Not even the nicest of guys, the kindest of hearts, the best for me. I was addicted to hurting myself being with him, pushing aside all the things that made me whole and healthy.

There are many advantages to space solar energy. It is clean and without waste products. It can generate power twenty-four hours a day, rather than just during daylight hours. (These satellites are almost never in the shadow of the Earth, since their path takes them considerably away from the Earth’s orbit.) The solar panels have no moving parts, which vastly reduces breakdowns and repair costs. And best of all, space solar power taps into a limitless supply of free energy from the sun.

Sandy was fascinated by the economy of Teddy Lloyd's method, as she had been four years earlier by Miss Brodie''s variations on her love story, when she had attached to her first, war-time lover the attributes of the art master and the singing master who had then newly entered her orbit. Teddy Lloyd's method of presentation was similar, it was economical, and it always seemed afterwards to Sandy that where there was a choice of various courses, the most economical was the best, and that the course to be taken was the most expedient and most suitable at the time for all the objects in hand.

Once there were three tribes. The Optimists, whose patron saints were Drake and Sagan, believed in a universe crawling with gentle intelligence—spiritual brethren vaster and more enlightened than we, a great galactic siblinghood into whose ranks we would someday ascend. Surely, said the Optimists, space travel implies enlightenment, for it requires the control of great destructive energies. Any race which can't rise above its own brutal instincts will wipe itself out long before it learns to bridge the interstellar gulf. Across from the Optimists sat the Pessimists, who genuflected before graven images of Saint Fermi and a host of lesser lightweights. The Pessimists envisioned a lonely universe full of dead rocks and prokaryotic slime. The odds are just too low, they insisted. Too many rogues, too much radiation, too much eccentricity in too many orbits. It is a surpassing miracle that even one Earth exists; to hope for many is to abandon reason and embrace religious mania. After all, the universe is fourteen billion years old: if the galaxy were alive with intelligence, wouldn't it be here by now? Equidistant to the other two tribes sat the Historians. They didn't have too many thoughts on the probable prevalence of intelligent, spacefaring extraterrestrials— but if there are any, they said, they're not just going to be smart. They're going to be mean. It might seem almost too obvious a conclusion. What is Human history, if not an ongoing succession of greater technologies grinding lesser ones beneath their boots? But the subject wasn't merely Human history, or the unfair advantage that tools gave to any given side; the oppressed snatch up advanced weaponry as readily as the oppressor, given half a chance. No, the real issue was how those tools got there in the first place. The real issue was what tools are for. To the Historians, tools existed for only one reason: to force the universe into unnatural shapes. They treated nature as an enemy, they were by definition a rebellion against the way things were. Technology is a stunted thing in benign environments, it never thrived in any culture gripped by belief in natural harmony. Why invent fusion reactors if your climate is comfortable, if your food is abundant? Why build fortresses if you have no enemies? Why force change upon a world which poses no threat? Human civilization had a lot of branches, not so long ago. Even into the twenty-first century, a few isolated tribes had barely developed stone tools. Some settled down with agriculture. Others weren't content until they had ended nature itself, still others until they'd built cities in space. We all rested eventually, though. Each new technology trampled lesser ones, climbed to some complacent asymptote, and stopped—until my own mother packed herself away like a larva in honeycomb, softened by machinery, robbed of incentive by her own contentment. But history never said that everyone had to stop where we did. It only suggested that those who had stopped no longer struggled for existence. There could be other, more hellish worlds where the best Human technology would crumble, where the environment was still the enemy, where the only survivors were those who fought back with sharper tools and stronger empires. The threats contained in those environments would not be simple ones. Harsh weather and natural disasters either kill you or they don't, and once conquered—or adapted to— they lose their relevance. No, the only environmental factors that continued to matter were those that fought back, that countered new strategies with newer ones, that forced their enemies to scale ever-greater heights just to stay alive. Ultimately, the only enemy that mattered was an intelligent one. And if the best toys do end up in the hands of those who've never forgotten that life itself is an act of war against intelligent opponents, what does that say about a race whose machines travel between the stars?

It had personally pained Trump not to be able to give it to him. But if the Republican establishment had not wanted Trump, they had not wanted Christie almost as much. So Christie got the job of leading the transition and the implicit promise of a central job—attorney general or chief of staff. But when he was the federal prosecutor in New Jersey, Christie had sent Jared’s father, Charles Kushner, to jail in 2005. Charlie Kushner, pursued by the feds for an income tax cheat, set up a scheme with a prostitute to blackmail his brother-in-law, who was planning to testify against him. Various accounts, mostly offered by Christie himself, make Jared the vengeful hatchet man in Christie’s aborted Trump administration career. It was a kind of perfect sweet-revenge story: the son of the wronged man (or, in this case—there’s little dispute—the guilty-as-charged man) uses his power over the man who wronged his family. But other accounts offer a subtler and in a way darker picture. Jared Kushner, like sons-in-law everywhere, tiptoes around his father-in-law, carefully displacing as little air as possible: the massive and domineering older man, the reedy and pliant younger one. In the revised death-of-Chris-Christie story, it is not the deferential Jared who strikes back, but—in some sense even more satisfying for the revenge fantasy—Charlie Kushner himself who harshly demands his due. It was his daughter-in-law who held the real influence in the Trump circle, who delivered the blow. Ivanka told her father that Christie’s appointment as chief of staff or to any other high position would be extremely difficult for her and her family, and it would be best that Christie be removed from the Trump orbit altogether.

Nikki could barely pull herself away from the spinning alien beauty in the window, but Elon Musk was on the big screen with a drink in his hand. “Congratulations, Starship, on entering Martian orbit,” he said, smiling and raising his flute of champagne from the now very distant Florida peninsula. “Cheers to the six of you and best wishes for a safe and stellar landing on Monday.” -- from the upcoming novel MARS COLONY AGATHA: NIKKI RED by Jack Chaucer, 1-1-20

Religion invents a problem where none exists by describing the wicked as also made in the image of god and the sexually nonconformist as existing in a state of incurable mortal sin that can incidentally cause floods and earthquakes. How did such evil nonsense ever come to be so influential? And why are we so continually locked in combat with its violent and intolerant votaries? Well, religion was the race’s first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.

But Jesus will not be a means to an end; he will not be used. If he calls you to follow him, he must be the goal. Does that sound like fanaticism? Not if you understand the difference between religion and the gospel. Remember what religion is: advice on how you must live to earn your way to God. Your job is to follow that advice to the best of your ability. If you follow it but don’t get carried away, then you have moderation. But if you feel like you’re following it faithfully and completely, you’ll believe you have a connection with God because of your right living and right belief, and you’ll feel superior to people who have wrong living and wrong belief. That’s a slippery slope: If you feel superior to them, you stay away from them. That makes it easier to exclude them, then to hate them, and ultimately to oppress them. And there are some Christians like that—not because they’ve gone too far and been too committed to Jesus, but because they haven’t gone far enough. They aren’t as fanatically humble and sensitive, or as fanatically understanding and generous as Jesus was. Why not? They’re still treating Christianity as advice instead of good news. The gospel isn’t advice: It’s the good news that you don’t need to earn your way to God; Jesus has already done it for you. And it’s a gift that you receive by sheer grace—through God’s thoroughly unmerited favor. If you seize that gift and keep holding on to it, then Jesus’s call won’t draw you into fanaticism or moderation. You will be passionate to make Jesus your absolute goal and priority, to orbit around him; yet when you meet somebody with a different set of priorities, a different faith, you won’t assume that they’re inferior to you. You’ll actually seek to serve them rather than oppress them. Why? Because the gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it’s about being called to follow a King. Not just someone with the power and authority to tell you what needs to be done—but someone with the power and authority to do what needs to be done, and then to offer it to you as good news.

In his book 'God and the Universe of Faiths,' British theologian John Hick makes a compelling argument. Before Copernicus, he says, earthlings believed they occupied the center of the universe - and why not? Earth was the place from which they saw everything else. It was the ground under their feet, and as far as they could tell everything revolved around them. Then Copernicus proposed a new map of the universe with the sun at the center and all the planets orbiting around it. His proposal raised religious questions as well as scientific ones, but he was right. The sun, not the earth, holds the planets in our solar system together. Hick argues that it is past time for a Copernican revolution in theology, in which God assumes the prime place at the center and Christianity joins the orbit of the great religions circling around. Like the scientific revolution, this one requires the surrender of primary place and privileged view. Absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits. This new map does not require anyone to give up the claim to uniqueness. It only requires the acceptance of unique neighbors, who concur that the brightness they see at the center of everything exceeds their ability to possess it. The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, 'We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.

Dream Meditation Practices are best performed in an isolated (close to nature) chamber that is clean and dry. Diet should be modified before practice so that solid food is reduced and a sense of lightness is obtained. This meditation is best done after bathing; the student can be nude or wear a light robe. Begin by lying on your back. Focus your mind on the lower tan tien. Summon the spirits residing in the organs by chanting their names in the order of the creation cycle: Houhou or Shen (heart), Beibei or Yi (spleen), Yanyan or Po (lungs), Fu Fu or Zhi (kidneys), and Jianjian or Hun (liver).20 Repeat the chanting and gathering until a bright light and warmth appear in the lower tan tien. Opening this place will automatically open the Microcosmic Orbit. Coordinate your breathing with this meditation to assist the process: inhaling stimulates the kidneys and liver, while exhaling moves the heart and lungs to the centerpoint—the stomach and spleen. Bring the merged five spirits from the lower tan tien (you can also include the other four spirits) up to the heart, and then to the Crystal Palace (also known as the Divine Palace or Hall of Light). The team of merged spirits—now the Yuan Shen or Original Spirit—can exit via the crown. Being conscious during the whole dream, or alternatively remembering the dream after waking, completes the process. You also have the choice of practicing meditation during your dream state. Process the content of the dream during the day, taking any actions in the material world that are now necessary. Remember that one of our goals with the Kan and Li practice is to merge the everyday mind with your dream landscape and meditation. Fusion of these three minds (different from the three tan tiens) is a feature of the developing sage. Ideally, dreaming can include the practice of Microcosmic Orbit, Fusion, and even Kan and Li.

In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. In the summer it's too darn hot. It's one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature ranger between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it's quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet's orbit, and then find, ha;f an orbit later, that your skin's bubbling. Spring is overrated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they actually knew the first think about pleasures of spring they would know of at least 5,983 better places to spent it than New York, and that's just on the same latitude. Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of fats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion can and should be discounted. When its fall in New York, the air smells as if someone's been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and a stick your head in a building.

The model favoured by Schreck, one that had been in existence for some forty years, placed the planets in orbit around the sun, and the sun and moon in orbit around the earth. Complex though this was, it appeared to a majority of astronomers the one that best corresponded to the available evidence. There were some, however, who preferred an altogether more radical possibility. Among them was a Czech Jesuit, Wenceslas Kirwitzer, who had met Galileo in Rome, and then sailed with Schreck to China, where he had died in 1626. Prior to his departure, he had written a short pamphlet, arguing for heliocentrism: the hypothesis that the earth, just like Venus and the other planets, revolved around the sun.24 The thesis was not Kirwitzer’s own. The first book to propose it had been published back in 1543. Its author, the Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, had in turn drawn on the work of earlier scholars at Paris and Oxford, natural philosophers who had argued variously for the possibility that the earth might rotate on its axis, that the cosmos might be governed by laws of motion, even that space might be infinite. Daring though Copernicus’ hypothesis seemed, then, it stood recognisably in a line of descent from a long and venerable tradition of Christian scholarship. Kirwitzer was not the only astronomer to have been persuaded by it. So too had a number of others; and of these the most high profile, the most prolific, the most pugnacious, was Galileo.

Teddy actually cries, he misses her so bad, and eventually he convinces her that she”—here Sadie makes quote marks with her fingers—“‘owes’ him the chance to explain.” “And she agrees to meet?” I ask, mostly because I worry I’ve been silent too long. “Yes.” “This,” I say. “This is the part I never get.” Sadie leans forward and tilts her head to the side. “That’s because while you’re trying, Win, you’re still too male to get it. Women have been conditioned to please. We are responsible not just for ourselves but everyone in our orbit. We think it is our job to comfort the man. We think we can make things better by sacrificing a bit of ourselves. But you’re also right to ask. It’s the first thing I tell my clients: If you’re ready to end it, end it. Make a clean break and don’t look back. You don’t owe him anything.” “Did Sharyn go back to him?” I ask. “For a little while. Don’t shake your head like that, Win. Just listen, okay? That’s what these psychos do. They manipulate and gaslight. They make you feel guilty, like it’s your fault. They sucker you back in.” I still don’t get it, but that’s not important, is it? “Anyway, it didn’t last. Sharyn saw the light fast. She ended it again. She stopped replying to his calls and texts. And that’s when Teddy upped his assholery to the fully psychotic. Unbeknownst to her, he bugged her apartment. He put keyloggers on her computers. Teddy has a tracker on her phone. Then he starts texting her anonymous threats. He stole all her contacts, so he floods mailboxes with malicious lies about her—to her friends, her family. He writes emails and pretends he’s Sharyn and he trashes her professors and friends. On one occasion, he contacts Sharyn’s best friend’s fiancé—as Sharyn—and

One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of a grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra, where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere. It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why. In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred character attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79. In the summer it’s too darn hot. It’s one thing to be the sort of life form that thrives on heat and finds, as the Frastrans do, that the temperature range between 40,000 and 40,004 is very equable, but it’s quite another to be the sort of animal that has to wrap itself up in lots of other animals at one point in your planet’s orbit, and then find, half an orbit later, that your skin’s bubbling. Spring is overrated. A lot of the inhabitants of New York will honk on mightily about the pleasures of spring, but if they actually knew the first thing about the pleasures of spring they would know of at least 5,983 better places to spend it than New York, and that’s just on the same latitude. Fall, though, is the worst. Few things are worse than fall in New York. Some of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats would disagree, but most of the things that live in the lower intestines of rats are highly disagreeable anyway, so their opinion can and should be discounted. When it’s fall in New York, the air smells as if someone’s been frying goats in it, and if you are keen to breathe, the best plan is to open a window and stick your head in a building.

While David runs the financial end of the Rockefeller dynasty, Nelson runs the political. Nelson would like to be President of the United States. But, unfortunately for him, he is unacceptable to the vast majority of the grass roots of his own party. The next best thing to being President is controlling a President. Nelson Rockefeller and Richard Nixon are supposed to be bitter political competitors. In a sense they are, but that still does not preclude Rockefeller from asserting dominion over Mr. Nixon. When Mr. Nixon and Mr. Rockefeller competed for the Republican nomination in 1968, Rockefeller naturally would have preferred to win the prize, but regardless of who won, he would control the highest office in the land. You will recall that right in the middle of drawing up the Republican platform in 1960, Mr. Nixon suddenly left Chicago and flew to New York to meet with Nelson Rockefeller in what Barry Goldwater described as the "Munich of the Republican Party." There was no political reason why Mr. Nixon needed to crawl to Mr. Rockefeller. He had the convention all sewed up. The Chicago Tribune cracked that it was like Grant surrendering to Lee. In The Making of the President, 1960, Theodore White noted that Nixon accepted all the Rockefeller terms for this meeting, including provisions "that Nixon telephone Rockefeller personally with his request for a meeting; that they meet at the Rockefeller apartment…that their meeting be secret and later be announced in a press release from the Governor, not Nixon; that the meeting be clearly announced as taking place at the Vice President's request; that the statement of policy issuing from it be long, detailed, inclusive, not a summary communiqué." The meeting produced the infamous "Compact of Fifth Avenue" in which the Republican Platform was scrapped and replaced by Rockefeller's socialist plans. The Wall Street Journal of July 25, 1960, commented: "…a little band of conservatives within the party…are shoved to the sidelines… [T]he fourteen points are very liberal indeed; they comprise a platform akin in many ways to the Democratic platform and they are a far cry from the things that conservative men think the Republican Party ought to stand for…" As Theodore White put it: "Never had the quadrennial liberal swoop of the regulars been more nakedly dramatized than by the open compact of Fifth Avenue. Whatever honor they might have been able to carry from their services on the platform committee had been wiped out. A single night's meeting of the two men in a millionaire's triplex apartment in Babylon-by-the-Hudson, eight hundred and thirty miles away, was about to overrule them; they were exposed as clowns for all the world to see." The whole story behind what happened in Rockefeller's apartment will doubtless never be known. We can only make an educated guess in light of subsequent events. But it is obvious that since that time Mr. Nixon has been in the Rockefeller orbit.

If you can’t fit your house in an airplane, you could try putting it on one. That’s how NASA transported the Space Shuttles across the country using a specialized Boeing 747 which carried the Shuttle on its back. To carry the Space Shuttle orbiter, the carrier aircraft has a special mount that protrudes from the top of the fuselage. This mount fits into a socket in the belly of the Shuttle orbiter. Next to the mount is an instructional plaque, which features the single best joke in the history of the aerospace industry: ATTACH ORBITER HERE NOTE: BLACK SIDE DOWN

The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning. Give them new opportunities, even when it is sometimes more work than seems feasible for one person to do. Figure out what the next job for them will be. Build an intellectual partnership with them. Find them mentors from outside your team or organization—people who have even more to offer than you do. But make sure you don’t get too dependent on them; ask them to teach others on the team to do their job, because they won’t stay in their existing role for long. I often thought of these people as shooting stars—my team and I were lucky to have them in our orbit for a little while, but trying to hold them there was futile.

We tend to see our lives from the prisms of others. That explains why we stop living and constantly race against our best interests. The ensuing frustration impacts negatively on us and others within our orbits. Life is as beautiful as the rose of contentment and as ugly as the thorn of inordinate ambition. Those who can think will thank. Those who thank live. Stop the rat race. Roll out the drums. Be thankful.

To dial up was like watching a rocket launch: first the top light was on, then the second . . . then came the sound of the modem talking to whatever it was talking to . . . sounding like an Atari game’s parody of birdsong or of a clarinet solo, pinging and ponging as more and more of the little lights came on, blinking and then steady, orange and then green . . . the sound building to a crescendo that recalled the noise of TV static, as machines confided who-knows-what secret binary handshakes between them while I listened. Then came a key change. Then the pitch of the static pulse tweaked, now higher, now lower, and then, gloriously, the final light went to green and I was online, in orbit: cyberspace.

So, no—I’m not disappointed. I’m happy that you’re happy. I only ever intended to object to the notion that a young woman is a mere satellite, orbiting around the world of men, nothing to do but sparkle and shine, moving from her father to her husband as if drawn by gravity, rather than moving of her own free will—or capable of spinning off in another direction entirely.

This is what we do best. We add to what was learned before, raising the old questions again and again, lifting them if we can toward higher and higher ground, and ourselves with them. Why are there so many kinds of animals, and why are we among them? Probably we have been asking these questions ever since we lived in caves—when it was still the common experience of our kind to stand alone on a cliff’s rim and survey a wilderness of animals, feeling kinship in difference, difference in kinship, our eyes watchful in their large orbits, our arms outspread. The questions were born then, as we stared down, or looked up at the sky, turning to follow the turning flocks, revolving our heads on our featherless shoulders: high above the plains of our first hours, winged only with the questions.

Curled time It was the moment of last reckoning, The last moment for time and life as well, Because for long life had been meandering, Along the highways of time, until they all crashed and fell, They fell into the self terminating moments of time, For time no longer found a reason to tarry in this world, It had lost its melody, its symphony, and its every happy rhyme, Thus forcing time to create moments that always flowed in formations curled, Always moving back to where they began, Thereby cancelling every prospect of future, With future dead, the present too died and moments of time no longer ran, Because there was no present to stand on, no future to go to, and ah the time’s torture, To live in this curled formation, Where every moment ended the moment it began, Time existed but it had lost its original sensation, Now that present didn't exist , future had no existence at all; I wondered whose was this plan, Not the Sky, not the Earth, not the Sun and not at all the Moon, They all existed in their orbits like before, So who could be this senseless goon, Who forced time to lead a curled path, where only past existed now and rest it was forced to ignore, Life existed like a past memory, Where nothing new took place, It was like a devil’s ceremony, Whee the guest of honour was expected to be the grace, And can there be a worst oxymoron than this, Where the devil romances the grace, And when the devil approached her with the desire to kiss, Grace fled into the curled formation of time and thus began the eternal race, Where grace is at the front tip of these curled moments of time, The hungry Devil is chasing her in the last moment riding this curl, Grace who is keen not to commit this crime, Keeps running, as if on the fast moving rollet of life it were a forcefully cast pearl, Where the pearl wants to stop, to feel the moments passing by, But the rollet of life moves relentlessly in the time’s curl, And the pearl turns dizzy when the speed is too high, But the thought about the devil forces it to stay within this endless whirl.

In the silence of a day stripped of sleep and sustenance, I craft "Walking Alone in a Jungle." Immersed in the theatricality of my mind, questions cascade like an endless stream, leaving me suspended between belief and doubt. At times, I defy divine power, embracing logic as my refuge. Yet, within the labyrinth of thought, I query the origin – cosmic expanse or mere creation? Contemplating life's capricious dance, I grapple with control. Do I dictate my orbit, or does an unseen hand choreograph existence's strange waltz? The mystery deepens as virtuous hearts endure misfortune. If a benevolent God exists, why does adversity visit the good-hearted? "Why must a virtuous soul suffer?" echoes the proverb. Does God truly test the best with the toughest trials, or is this notion a construct of the mind? Amidst constant questioning, I navigate self-reflection. Why does positivity, tied to pure intentions, spawn misunderstanding? As day wears on, thoughts flow into a new book, yet answers elude me. Are unanswered questions born of perpetual thought, or does clarity dwell in thought's absence? The 'why' persists, a relentless echo in contemplative caverns. Existence's fabric seems woven with illusion, prompting scrutiny of authenticity. Why doubt the simplicity of truth, where pain persists? After tireless questioning, understanding teases, slipping away like shadows. Is it thought's 'why' constructing an exitless maze, or does enlightenment reside where thought surrenders? I don't know. Sometimes, I think too much or not enough. Stuck in a perpetual cycle, I laugh bitterly. Perhaps, writing holds answers, or stubborn questioning persists. Why?

Robert Hooke, who is perhaps best remembered now as the first person to describe a cell, and the great and stately Sir Christopher Wren, who was actually an astronomer first and architect second, though that is not often generally remembered now. In 1683, Halley, Hooke, and Wren were dining in London when the conversation turned to the motions of celestial objects. It was known that planets were inclined to orbit in a particular kind of oval known as an ellipse—“a very specific and precise curve,” to quote Richard Feynman—but it wasn’t understood why. Wren generously offered a prize worth forty shillings (equivalent to a couple of weeks’ pay) to whichever of the men could provide a solution.

Take courage, my soul, as you read this epitaph. Your journey, through grace, is one of faith, not sight, and this has always been the pathway of the brightest and the best. Faith was the orbit in which these stars of the first magnitude shone in their day; and happy are you to be in their company. Look again tonight to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of your faith, and thank Him for giving you like precious faith with souls now in glory.

To carry the Space Shuttle orbiter, the carrier aircraft has a special mount that protrudes from the top of the fuselage. This mount fits into a socket in the belly of the Shuttle orbiter. Next to the mount is an instructional plaque, which features the single best joke in the history of the aerospace industry: ATTACH ORBITER HERE NOTE: BLACK SIDE DOWN

We all come into this world the same: naked, scared, and ignorant. After that grand entrance, the life we end up with is simply an accumulation of all the choices we make. Our choices can be our best friend or our worst enemy. They can deliver us to our goals or send us orbiting into a galaxy far, far away. Think about it. Everything in your life exists because you first made a choice about something. Choices are at the root of every one of your results. Each choice starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. Choose poorly, and you just might find yourself back at the drawing board, forced to make new, often harder choices. Don’t choose at all, and you’ve made the choice to be the passive receiver of whatever comes your way. In essence, you make your choices, and then your choices make you.

No wonder the women of the best Nair families never mentioned sex. It was their principal phobia. They associated it with violence and bloodshed. They had been fed on the stories of Ravana who perished due to his desire for Sita and of Kichaka, who was torn to death by Draupadi's legal husband Bhima only because he coveted her. It was customary for a Nair girl to marry when she was hardly out of her childhood and it was also customary for the much older husband to give her a rude shockby his sexual haste on the wedding night. The only heroine whose sex life seemed comparatively untumultuous was Radha who waited on the banks of Jamuna for her blue-skinned lover. But she was another's wife and so an adulteress. In the orbit of licit sex, there seemed to be only crudeness and violence.

Nowhere in Matthew's league, their writing was execrable even if the sentiments were heartfelt. They were students at Middle Temple, and until she discovered they were all from wealthy families, Rosamund oft wonder how they would ever pass their studies if they continued to haunt the Phoenix instead of attending classes. "They've decided you're the only object worth studying, señora," said Filip one day. "They would be experts in all things Rosamund." "Better they spend time on other projects," she muttered, stealing a glance in their direction. "Something laudable upon which to bestow their inheritances." "They're noblemen's sons," Filip replied. "They've no need of those things ordinary people require to elevate or enlighten them. You're the sun around which they orbit." "Then they'd best beware lest they get burned.

Keep them challenged (and figure out who’ll replace them when they move on) The best way to keep superstars happy is to challenge them and make sure they are constantly learning. Give them new opportunities, even when it is sometimes more work than seems feasible for one person to do. Figure out what the next job for them will be. Build an intellectual partnership with them. Find them mentors from outside your team or organization—people who have even more to offer than you do. But make sure you don’t get too dependent on them; ask them to teach others on the team to do their job, because they won’t stay in their existing role for long. I often thought of these people as shooting stars—my team and I were lucky to have them in our orbit for a little while, but trying to hold them there was futile.

There have been no females born on our planet for the last hundred orbits. And it’s common knowledge that a female cannot become pregnant if she does not climax. So we try our best to make conditions right, but there hasn’t been any success yet.

Extrapolating from the drone and its camera settings, that thing was the best part of a metre long," she remarked at last, shakily. "That was no fucking monkey," Karst spat. Behind the Gilgamesh itself, the green world and its orbiting sentinel fell away into obscurity, leaving the ark ship's crew with, at best, mixed feelings about it.

Now Where Do You Find Customers? When novice entrepreneurs search for opportunities, they too often look beyond their Zone of Influence. They think the action is happening somewhere else, in some other location or industry. But seasoned entrepreneurs almost always find and create opportunities within the context of who they are, what they know, and especially who they know. In each of the examples above, the business validation process begins with potential customers in the entrepreneur’s orbit. Actual people with names. Tribes you belong to or are interested in, most of whom are already self-organized online. People you know how to reach, today. Though it’s rarely a part of their official origin stories, the biggest companies in the world—even the viral apps now worth billions—started through personal networks and real human connections. Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in a weekend by emailing friends to use it. Version 1 did well, validating it. And Microsoft started with Bill Gates building software for a guy in Albuquerque. He had a CUSTOMER FIRST. In the beginning, founders should reach out to their friends, their former colleagues, their communities. You may think your business is unique, but trust me, it’s not. Every successful business can start this way. For example, Anahita loves her dogs and wanted healthier snacks for them. She started taking her homemade organic dog treats to her local dog park. She would sell out every time. A year later she now has a store called the Barkery, a dog bakery. Before you even think about picking a business idea, make sure you have easy access to the people you want to help. An easy way to do this is to think about where you have easy access to a targeted group of people whom you really want to help—like, say, new moms in Austin, cyclists, freelance writers, and taco obsessives (like me!). CHALLENGE Top three groups. Let’s write out your top three groups to target. Who do you have easy access to that you’d be EXCITED to help? This can be your neighbors, colleagues, religious friends, golf buddies, cooking friends, etc. The better you understand your target group, the better you can speak to them. The more specifically you can speak to their problems, the better and easier you can sell (or test products). Note how this process prioritizes communication with people, through starting (taking the first iteration of your solution straight to customers) and asking (engaging them in a conversation to determine how your solution can best fix their problem). Business creation should always be a conversation! Nearly every impulse we have is to be tight with our ideas by doing more research, going off alone to build the perfect product—anything and everything to avoid the discomfort of asking for money. This is the validation shortcut. You have to learn to fight through this impulse. It won’t be easy, but it’ll be worth it.

Things with Bekka were really bad, and I had to face the fact that I never loved her. That in my heart, I always had this seed of hope that you'd look at me a different way one day. She knew it, you know. She knew I loved you. We fought about it sometimes." "I'm sorry." I reach for his hand, and he laces his fingers through mine. "You always loved geodes. How something so dull and common as a rock might hide magic inside of it. I thought maybe it was an allegory. Something as common as friendship, might be something more if you just looked past what you expected to see when you looked at me." "An allegory," I echo, my voice just a whisper. "You were always on me to read Rilke. I finally did." "You did?" "I live my life in growing orbits, that spread out over the things of the world...I still don't know if I'm a falcon, or a storm, or a great song." All these years. All these gifts. Not clues. Not messages from Even Handy. Christmas love poems from my best friend.

During NASA’s first fifty years the agency’s accomplishments were admired globally. Democratic and Republican leaders were generally bipartisan on the future of American spaceflight. The blueprint for the twenty-first century called for sustaining the International Space Station and its fifteen-nation partnership until at least 2020, and for building the space shuttle’s heavy-lift rocket and deep spacecraft successor to enable astronauts to fly beyond the friendly confines of low earth orbit for the first time since Apollo. That deep space ship would fly them again around the moon, then farther out to our solar system’s LaGrange points, and then deeper into space for rendezvous with asteroids and comets, learning how to deal with radiation and other deep space hazards before reaching for Mars or landings on Saturn’s moons. It was the clearest, most reasonable and best cost-achievable goal that NASA had been given since President John F. Kennedy’s historic decision to land astronauts on the lunar surface. Then Barack Obama was elected president. The promising new chief executive gave NASA short shrift, turning the agency’s future over to middle-level bureaucrats with no dreams or vision, bent on slashing existing human spaceflight plans that had their genesis in the Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush White Houses. From the starting gate, Mr. Obama’s uncaring space team rolled the dice. First they set up a presidential commission designed to find without question we couldn’t afford the already-established spaceflight plans. Thirty to sixty thousand highly skilled jobs went on the chopping block with space towns coast to coast facing 12 percent unemployment. $9.4 billion already spent on heavy-lift rockets and deep space ships was unashamedly flushed down America’s toilet. The fifty-year dream of new frontiers was replaced with the shortsighted obligations of party politics. As 2011 dawned, NASA, one of America’s great science agencies, was effectively defunct. While Congress has so far prohibited the total cancellation of the space agency’s plans to once again fly astronauts beyond low earth orbit, Obama space operatives have systematically used bureaucratic tricks to slow roll them to a crawl. Congress holds the purse strings and spent most of 2010 saying, “Wait just a minute.” Thousands of highly skilled jobs across the economic spectrum have been lost while hundreds of billions in “stimulus” have been spent. As of this writing only Congress can stop the NASA killing. Florida’s senior U.S. Senator Bill Nelson, a Democrat, a former spaceflyer himself, is leading the fight to keep Obama space advisors from walking away from fifty years of national investment, from throwing the final spade of dirt on the memory of some of America’s most admired heroes. Congressional committees have heard from expert after expert that Mr. Obama’s proposal would be devastating. Placing America’s future in space in the hands of the Russians and inexperienced commercial operatives is foolhardy. Space legend John Glenn, a retired Democratic Senator from Ohio, told president Obama that “Retiring the space shuttles before the country has another space ship is folly. It could leave Americans stranded on the International Space Station with only a Russian spacecraft, if working, to get them off.” And Neil Armstrong testified before the Senate’s Commerce, Science & Transportation Committee that “With regard to President Obama’s 2010 plan, I have yet to find a person in NASA, the Defense Department, the Air Force, the National Academies, industry, or academia that had any knowledge of the plan prior to its announcement. Rumors abound that neither the NASA Administrator nor the President’s Science and Technology Advisor were knowledgeable about the plan. Lack of review normally guarantees that there will be overlooked requirements and unwelcome consequences. How could such a chain of events happen?

Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, our conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never out of pockets, our whole manner ordered as if to say, "I make no sudden moves." Disembodiment.

Kerry had headed up the back stairs of the pub, and even as exhausted as she was, she’d still found it impossible to wipe that image of Cooper from her mind. The sun setting over his back, highlighting the breadth of his shoulders, sending shadows under those cheekbones, made more chiseled by the ridiculously gorgeous, shit-eating grin that had been on his face when he made it clear he was in town to stay. “For another twenty-nine days anyway.” Kerry pulled her pillow over her face and groaned. Part of her was still in utter shock that he was actually there, in her town. Hell, in her orbit at all. Other parts of her--most of them hormonally activated--were still all aquiver from that kiss. She groaned again and ground clenched fists into the mattress on either side of her hips. Damn, but that kiss… How many times had she lain in bed, just like this, only in a bunkhouse at Cameroo Downs, and wondered what it would be like to be kissed by Cooper Jax? Okay, okay, a whole lot more than kissed. But damn…that kiss alone had been worlds better than the best sex she’d ever had. So much so, he’d probably ruined her for having sex with mere mortals. So I guess you’ll just have to have sex with him, then. “Not helpful,” she grunted at her little voice, jerking the pillow off her face and thumping it on the bed beside her. Besides, even if she was willing to have some kind of fling with Cooper, fulfill even a sliver of the many, oh, so very many fantasies she’d had about the man, he’d made it clear from pretty much the moment he’d set foot back into her world that he wasn’t looking for a fling. He’d strolled right in and made it clear he was looking for a--no. She squeezed her eyes shut and tightened her lips, willing her mind to go blank. It didn’t work. She couldn’t shut it out. Cooper Jax had, basically, proposed to her. Then he’d walked all up and down a kelp-covered, low-tide seashore and listened to her enumerate the reasons why they couldn’t even contemplate such a union. Right before kissing her in a way that defied science and made her wonder if she might need a pregnancy test, before pretty much declaring he was going to spend the next four weeks making it as impossible for her to say no to his doing that again, and maybe more, as he could.

A man is best known, understood, measured, even valued, not by his settled conclusions, but by the dilemmas he keeps. They are the best markers of fleeting truth on the perverse road of time.

The one thing we know is that planet Earth does keep moving in the direction of the constellation Leo at a rate of 390 km per second; the motion of the Earth around the Sun, which obviously changes directions, happens to involve a velocity of about 30 km per second, and does not easily lend itself to our best measurement techniques. Rather, we have trouble separating it from the motion with which our solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way. Once we include this, we arrive at the velocity of the Milky way with respect to the system where the universe as a whole is at rest; this velocity comes in at 600 km per second.

Athena, Demeter, Andromeda, Cassiopeia ~ dearest thoughtful Svetlana, your glorious angelic light outshines the entire goddess pantheon of Mount Olympus, , your radiant splendor surpasses the luminous sunsets of a thousand distant worlds, , in all my galactic travels you are the only star whose elegant sway has the power to swing me into orbit, , may our cosmic dance last forever, , may our mutual tidal gravity eternally signal our telepathic presence in each others soulful wandering lives

disparity between Louie and Woody is most pronounced. In Woody Allen comedies, the Woody protagonist or surrogate takes it upon himself to tutor the young women in his wayward orbit and furnish their cultural education, telling them which books to read (in Annie Hall’s bookstore scene, Allen’s Alvy wants Annie to occupy her mind with Death and Western Thought and The Denial of Death—“You know, instead of that cat book”), which classic films to imbibe at the revival houses back when Manhattan still had a rich cluster of them. In Crimes and Misdemeanors, it’s a 14-year-old female niece who dresses like a junior-miss version of Annie Hall whom Woody’s Clifford squires to afternoon showings at the finer flea pits, advising her to play deaf for the remaining years of her formal schooling. “Don’t listen to what your teachers tell ya, you know. Don’t pay attention. Just, just see what they look like, and that’s how you’ll know what life is really gonna be like.” A more dubious nugget of avuncular wisdom would be hard to imagine, and it isn’t just the Woody stand-in who does the uncle-daddy-mentor-knows-best bit for the benefit of receptive minds in ripe containers. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Max von Sydow’s dour painter-philosophe Frederick is the Old World “mansplainer” of all time, holding court in a SoHo loft which he shares with his lover, Lee, played by Barbara Hershey, whose sweaters abound with abundance. When Lee groans with enough-already exasperation when Frederick begins droning on about an Auschwitz documentary—“You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz.

Disembodiment is a kind of terrorism, and the threat of it alters the orbit of all our lives and, like terrorism, this distortion is intentional. Disembodiment. The dragon that compelled the boys I knew, way back, into extravagant theater of ownership. Disembodiment. The demon that pushed the middle-class black survivors into aggressive passivity, or conversation restrained in public quarters, our best manners on display, our hands never out of pockets, our while manner ordered as if to say, "I make no sudden moves." Disembodiment. The serpent of school years, demanding I be twice as good, though I was but a boy.

COSMOPOLITANS AT THE PARADISE Cosmopolitans at the Paradise. Heavenly Kelly's cosmopolitans make the sun rise. They make the sun rise in my blood. Under the stars in my brow. Tonight a perfect cosmopolitan sets sail for paradise. Johnny's cosmopolitans start the countdown on the launch pad. My Paradise is a diner. Nothing could be finer. There was a lovely man in this town named Harry Diner. Lighter than zero Gravity, a rinse of lift, the cosmopolitan cocktail They mix here at the Paradise is the best In the United States - pink as a flamingo and life-announcing As a leaping salmon. The space suit I will squeeze into arrives In a martini glass. Poured from a chilled silver shaker beaded with frost sweat. Finally I go Back to where the only place to go is far. Ahab on the launch pad - I'm the roar Wearing a wild blazer, black stripes and red, And a yarmulke with a propeller on my missile head. There she blows! Row harder, my hearties! - My United Nations of liftoff! I targeted the great white whale black hole. On impact I burst into stars. I am the caliph of paradise, Hip-deep in a waterbed of wives. I am the Ducati of desire, 144.1 horsepower at the rear wheel. Nights and days, black stripes and red, I orbit Sag Harbor and the big blue ball. I pursue Moby-Dick to the end of the book. I raise the pink flamingos to my lips and drink.

Next to the mount is an instructional plaque, which features the single best joke in the history of the aerospace industry: ATTACH ORBITER HERE NOTE: BLACK SIDE DOWN

How many habitable planets are there? From Figure 12 it is evident that there are a handful of planets with instellation in the habitable zone range, and which are also of a size or mass small enough to have a potentially rocky composition. Most of these orbit M stars, but that is just because smallish planets with Earthlike instellation are easier to detect around low mass stars. Taking into account the effect of stellar type on the habitable zone instellation boundaries, at the time of writing there are eighteen known planets in the habitable zone, including Proxima Centauri b (orbiting our nearest stellar neighbour) and planets d, e, f, and g in the remarkable Trappist 1 system. There are an additional twenty-six near-misses which could perhaps be rendered habitable if cloud conditions or other uncertain bits of climate physics become more favourable than current best estimates. One would like to extrapolate from this number to an estimate of the proportion of all stars that have a planet in their habitable zone.

I still think it’s one of the war’s great ironies that our replacement crew ended up arriving in a privately owned civilian vehicle. Spacecraft Three, the ship originally designed for prewar orbital tourism. The pilot, with his cowboy hat and big, confident Yankee grin. [He tries his best Texas accent.] “Anyone order takeout?” [He laughs, then winces and self-medicates again.]

At the same time you're also aware that upon attempting to re-enter normal life from "mom land" or "middle aged" land, or both - you'll be seen as a "weirdo" or "cranky" or "stubborn," or all of the above. Doesn't it make sense you'd think about just not going back? The end of the heroes journey is like the path of a rocket re-entering Earth's atmosphere. It must burn. Pieces blister and break off. You're not the same splashing down into the ocean as when you left. When you took off your boosters were ablaze, fueling the epic push of new life out of yourself and into Earth's orbit. Everyone at Mission Control stood and applauded. But the return is more like free-fall. The rocket that lands in the ocean doesn't look like the one that departed. It's a little pod-like thing, a charred husk of what took off. Instead of wings spreading, a parachute awkwardly collapses into the water. A butterfly in reverse. What's left is this metal shell, just a nub of what was there before. And yet, it's a nub that's been to space for f---'s sake. Just surviving is the success. So much of who I was - my daily habits, my identifying clothing - had to get thrown away in making room to become a mother. What's left of me is now sharing space with a little boy. And as a result, my mental capacity has been reduced from a decent three bed two bath apartment to at best a little tenement studio. While the tight space creates some cons, the pro is that what can come in and what cannot is pretty clear.

Q: Who are your influences? I was lucky as a kid to get to meet Paul Conrad who lived in my hometown. He is a giant in editorial cartooning, winner of three Pulitzers and even more impressively he won a place on Nixon‘s enemies list. He was a huge influence. Starting out I also spent a lot of time looking at Ron Cobb, an insane crosshatcher who drew for the alternative press in the ’60’s, as well as David Levine, Ed Sorel, and R. Crumb. I also love Steinberg‘s visual elegance and innately whimsical voice. Red Grooms is another guy who took cartooning wonderful places. There are also a number of 19th-century cartoonists whose mad drawing skills and ability to create rich visual worlds always impressed me. A.B. Frost, T.S. Sullivant, Joseph Keppler are often overshadowed by Nast, but in many ways they were more adventurous graphically. I also want to throw in here how great it is to work in D.C. There’s a great circle of cartoonists here and being in their orbit is a daily inspiration. Opening the Post to Toles and Richard Thompson (Richard’s Poor Almanac is the best and most original cartoon in the country and sadly known mostly only to those lucky enough to be in range of the Post;, Cul de Sac is pretty good too). And then there’s Ann Telnaes’ animations that appear in the Post online—-truly inspired and the wave of the future, as well as Beeler, Galifianakis, Bill Brown, and others. It raises one’s game to be around all these folks. (2010 interview with Washington City Paper)

She sighed. ‘This must be so confusing for you. I’ll do my best to make sense of everything.’ The face in the wall gasped. ‘I haven’t asked your name! I’m sorry. It’s been so long since I had someone to talk to. I’m so scattered. Do you have a name?’ ‘Jane 23.’ ‘Jane 23,’ Owl said. She nodded, real slow. ‘Well, since you’re the only Jane I see here, is it okay if I leave the numbers off?

And Einstein's genius, in general relativity, was to cast gravity in the form Wheeler poeticized: gravitational "falling" or "orbiting" is just matter doing its best to move straight (i.e., traveling along geodesics) in a curved space-time.

Eliza wonders, floating in the corridors of Gateway, watching the RLVs rise into low Earth orbit, the continents shifting past, the clouds swirling, endlessly, this whole strange giant spaceship planet as it travels at 1200 kilometres an hour around the sun, while at the same time Earth, Mars, Venus, Sun and all travel at nearly 800,000 kilometres per hour around the centre of the galaxy, while at the same time this speed machine, Earth and sun and the galaxy itself move at 1000 kilometres per second towards the Great Attractor, that most mysterious of gravitational enigmas, this anomaly of mass that pulls to it the Milky Way as if it were a pebble: all this and we think we’re still, and it makes Eliza dizzy just to think about it.

Our simple daily decisions can become our best friend or our worst enemy. They can draw us towards our goals or send us orbiting into a galaxy far, far away. These are the days of our lives. We are offered choices every day; sickness or health, poverty or wealth, happiness or misery, knowledge or ignorance, to jump or to wait, to grow or to die, faith or doubt, for better or worse. Everything in your life exists because you made a series of decisions. Each decision, positive or negative, starts a behavior that over time becomes a habit. It is the little things that we put off doing that cumulatively make an enormous difference–in the end results.

It’s been confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt. Time moves at a different rate for our GPS satellites in orbit than it does down here. Einstein’s equations correct for this discrepancy. Perfectly. This really is how the universe works. The reason it’s so counterintuitive is that we’d have to travel millions and millions of times faster than we do to notice it.” She paused. “As for quantum effects, these are best experienced at the subatomic level. Another realm for which humans have no exposure or experience.” She tilted her head in thought. “It’s like a fish professor teaching other fish—you know, a school of fish,” she added, grinning at her own joke, “his theory of air. The fish instructor could prove it all he wanted, but no matter how smart a fish, the concept would always be counterintuitive to a creature who had only ever experienced water.

I looked up at Josh. His chest rose and fell a little too fast. He had this look on his handsome face—a touch of anxiety, worry, and anticipation around his brow, like he was afraid at any minute all this would be taken from him, like I might suddenly change my mind. I deserved that. This was a shotgun wedding. Josh was the one holding the shotgun. This whole thing was some flash-bang-chaos campaign to hustle me into marriage before I got my bearings. He wanted to lock me down before I freaked out on him and ran. That’s why he’d rushed this. Only, the joke was on him—I wanted to be locked down, and I’d never change my mind. I’d never leave him again. If he wanted this rust bucket of a body so badly, he could have it, and I’d just have to spend the rest of my life making sure he felt secure and loved. I looked at him, my eyes steady, and I took a deep breath. “Joshua, I vow to text you back.” Everyone in the room laughed, my fiancé included, and his face relaxed. I continued. “I will answer every call you make to me for the rest of my life. You’ll never chase me again.” His eyes filled with tears, and he seemed to let go of a breath he’d been holding. “I promise to always go to family day at the station so you know that you’re loved. I vow to support you and follow you anywhere until you’ve found the place that makes you happy. I’ll be your best friend and try and fill that hole in your heart. I’m going to take care of you and cherish you, always and no matter what.” I smiled at him. “I’ll orbit around you and be your universe, because you’ve always been my sun.” He wiped at his eyes, and he had to take a moment before he read his own vows. While I waited, I let his face anchor me. I soaked him in, let his love remind me again and again that I was worth it. He looked at his paper and then seemed to decide he didn’t need it, setting it down on the desk. He gathered up my hands. “Kristen, I vow that no matter what health issues lie ahead, I will love and take care of you. I will show you every day of your life that you’re worth everything. I will carry your worries. All I ask is that you carry your own dog purse.” The room chuckled again. “I promise to love Stuntman Mike and slay your spiders, and keep you from getting hangry.” Now I was laughing through tears. “I will always defend you. I’ll always be on your side.” Then he turned to Sloan. “And I vow to protect and care for you, Sloan, like you’re my sister, for the rest of my life.” This did it. The tears ran down my face, and I was in his arms and weeping before I knew I’d closed the distance. We were both crying. We were all crying, even the witnesses who had no idea how hard the journey had been to get here, the sacrifices that were made for this union. Or who we’d lost along the way.

from what our official accounts allow.28 Schwaller too recognized that whoever built the Sphinx, the Great Pyramid, and the temples at Luxor and Karnak was mathematically and cosmologically astute. From 1936 to 1951, Schwaller and his wife, Isha, herself the author of a series of novels about ancient Egypt (Her-Bak: Egyptian Initiate is the best known), studied the ancient Egyptian monuments. Schwaller found evidence in them for pi, but also for much more: a knowledge of the precession of the equinoxes, of the Pythagorean theorem centuries in advance of Pythagoras, of the circumference of the globe, as well as evidence of ϕ (phi), known as the Golden Section, a mathematical proportion that was again supposedly unknown until it was discovered by the Greeks. As John Anthony West makes clear, the Golden Section is more than an important item in classical architecture. It is, according to Schwaller, the mathematical archetype of the universe, the reason why we have an “asymmetrical” “lumpy” world of galaxies and planets, and not a flattened-out, homogenous one, a question that today occupies contemporary cosmologists.29 In his writings, Schwaller linked phi to planetary orbits, to the architecture of Gothic cathedrals, and to plant and animal forms.

After evidence forced him to give up the beautiful polyhedra, Kepler, in later life, became convinced that the planets play music along their paths. In his 1619 book Harmony of the World he derived the planet’s tunes and concluded that “the Earth sings Mi-Fa-Mi.” It wasn’t his best work. But Kepler’s analysis of the planetary orbits laid a basis for the later studies of Isaac Newton (1643–1727), the first scientist to rigorously use mathematics.

In his book God and the Universe of Faiths, British theologian John Hick makes a compelling argument. Before Copernicus, he says, earthlings believed they occupied the center of the universe—and why not? Earth was the place from which they saw everything else. It was the ground under their feet, and as far as they could tell everything revolved around them. Then Copernicus proposed a new map of the universe with the sun at the center and all the planets orbiting around it. His proposal raised religious questions as well as scientific ones, but he was right. The sun, not the earth, holds the planets in our solar system together. Hick argues that it is past time for a Copernican revolution in theology, in which God assumes the prime place at the center and Christianity joins the orbit of the great religions circling around. Like the scientific revolution, this one requires the surrender of primary place and privileged view. Absolute truth moves to the center of the system, leaving people of good faith with meaningful perceptions of that truth from their own orbits. This new map does not require anyone to give up the claim to uniqueness. It only requires the acceptance of unique neighbors, who concur that the brightness they see at the center of everything exceeds their ability to possess it. The Franciscan father Richard Rohr had his eye on a different planetary body when he said, “We are all of us pointing toward the same moon, and yet we persist in arguing about who has the best finger.

I seek merely the miraculous, and for that I am positioned in exactly the best of places: a mostly wet, hard sphere in the third planetary orbit from a star called sun, the place where miracles come so cheap that they are routinely discarded. Hard to believe, I know.

At the same time that she was grateful her secret was safe, she couldn’t understand why nobody confronted her. There were so many people in her orbit and yet only two of them ever said anything. One was her friend Ingrid, and the other was Ingrid’s mother. On a sunny spring afternoon when the girls were sixteen, Ingrid and Ingrid’s mother and Sloane were all in the living room at Ingrid’s house and Ingrid’s mother said, Sloane, what is going on? You are emaciated. And Sloane made the usual excuses. She said she was eating so much and she didn’t know what was going on, that perhaps it was a high metabolism. She pretended to always be eating. She had several reliable tricks. Coming into someone else’s home, she would say she was stuffed, that she’d just eaten a burger and fries. That way no one would ask if she wanted something to eat. Faced with a plate she couldn’t avoid, she would move food around, smearing caloric sauces around the plate, mopping them up with bread that she left on the rim. She would cut food into many pieces and hold her fork in the air, so she seemed to be actively consuming. Meanwhile she would drink constantly. Bottles of water, Diet Coke, tea, coffee. She always had a drink in her hand. Her friend Ingrid would ask, Why are you drinking so many drinks? Why do you drink so much coffee, and juice, and water all the time? Why are you drinking so many freaking beverages, Sloane? The answer, the one that Sloane could not tell her best friend, was that she was starving.

Space mocks all who venture into her dark void. Light years scorn humanity with distances that defy belief. Neptune and Pluto are only four to six light hours away from Earth, teasing humanity with the sheer desolation and loneliness that separates stars by entire light years! Whether it’s ten, a hundred, a thousand, a million or a billion light years, the physical distances are obscene. For the best part of a century, crewed missions reached a low Earth orbit and, occasionally, the Moon. Humanity thought it had conquered space when it reached orbit, put landers on Mars and sent probes out among the planets. The solar system laughed. The galaxy sighed. The universe itself didn’t even notice.