Payload Quotes

I eat a bunch of spinach, but only to clean out my pipes to make room for more ribs, fool! I will submit to fruit and zucchini, yes, with gusto, so that my steak-eating machine will continue to masticate delicious charred flesh at an optimal running speed. By consuming kale, I am buying myself bonus years of life, during which I can eat a shit-ton more delicious meat. You don’t put oil in your truck because it tastes good. You do it so your truck can continue burning sweet gasoline and hauling a manly payload.

SpaceX has been testing reusable rockets that can carry payloads to space and land back on Earth, on their launchpads, with precision.

A Nation State or Cyber-Mercenary won’t hack e-voting machines one by one. This takes too long and will have minimal impact. Instead, they’ll take an easier approach like spear phishing the manufacturer with malware and poison the voting machine update pre-election and allow the manufacturer to update each individual machine with a self-deleting payload that will target the tabulation process.

between 400 and 500 kilometers above the earth. Every time a rocket went up, the whole of that bulky and very expensive first stage was destroyed—burned out, to fall forever into the oceans. Supposing, Bull mused, you could punch your second and third stages, plus the payload, up those first 150 kilometers from the barrel of a giant gun? In theory, he pleaded with the money men, it was possible, easier, and cheaper, and the gun could be used over and over again. It was his first real brush with politicians and bureaucrats, and he failed, mainly because of his personality.

In 2013, the International Academy of Astronautics issued a 350-page report projecting that with enough funding and research, a space elevator capable of carrying multiple twenty-ton payloads might be possible by 2035. Price estimates usually range from $10 billion to $50 billion—a fraction of the $150 billion that went into the International Space Station.

Like conventional weapons, most digital weapons have two parts—the missile, or delivery system, responsible for spreading the malicious payload and installing it onto machines, and the payload itself, which performs the actual attack, such as stealing data or doing other things to infected machines. In this case, the payload was the malicious code that targeted the Siemens software and PLCs.

The first few dozen flight crews were soon too sick to continue working, having hovered 200m above the reactor in temperatures up to 200°C, dropping bags one by one by hand, and leaning out of the door to estimate the drop-point. The helicopter’s designers soon devised a clever system for dropping around 8 bags per flight by using a net hanging from beneath the fuselage, allowing them to release the whole payload via a lever in the cockpit.191

Long-range missiles with hybrid thermonuclear and necromantic payloads. Grafted and crossbred infantry divisions. Strategic alliances with folkloric, extraplanar, and subterranean entities. Field deployment of weaponized paleofauna. Large-scale saturation of target areas with invasive fungal and floral xeno organisms. Megadeaths and mega-undeaths. This is the Cold War now. An American president must be found who, whatever his other qualifications, is prepared to maintain our competitiveness in this area. I’m afraid that that person is you.

The technological audacity of the Apollo program, with it's largely symbolic payload, was also sinking into the trivialisation that Guy Debord had identified the decade before as the underside of media spectacle. When Commander Alan Shepard strapped a six iron to a lunar excavation tool and whacked two golf balls across the Fra Mauro Highlands, he became, for a spell, nothing more than a tourist, that agent of commodification whose freedom of movement, as Debord had written, is "nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.

Everybody knows, but many deny, that eating red meat gives one character. Strength, stamina, stick-to-it-iveness, constitution, not to mention a healthful, glowing pelt. But take a seat for a second. Listen. I eat salad. How’s that for a punch in the nuts, ladies? What’s more, as I sit typing this on a Santa Fe patio, I just now ate a bowl of oatmeal. That’s right. Because I’m a real human animal, not a television character. You see, despite the beautifully Ron Swanson–like notion that one should exist solely on beef, pork, and wild game, the reality remains that our bodies need more varied foodstuffs that facilitate health and digestive functions, but you don’t have to like it. I eat a bunch of spinach, but only to clean out my pipes to make room for more ribs, fool! I will submit to fruit and zucchini, yes, with gusto, so that my steak-eating machine will continue to masticate delicious charred flesh at an optimal running speed. By consuming kale, I am buying myself bonus years of life, during which I can eat a shit-ton more delicious meat. You don’t put oil in your truck because it tastes good. You do it so your truck can continue burning sweet gasoline and hauling a manly payload.

I will confess that in the interest of narrative I secretly hoped I'd find a payload of southern gothic: deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land, abandonments, blow jobs, suicides, hidden addictions, the tragically early death of a beautiful bride, racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of a prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder. If any of this stuff lay hidden in my family history, I had the distinct sense I'd find it in those twine-bound boxes in the attic. And I did: all of it and more.

It isn't just the idea of a woman in a truck. At this point, they're everywhere. The statisticians tell us today's woman is as likely to buy a truck as a minivan. One cheers the suffrage, but the effect is dilutive. My head doesn't snap around the way it used to. Ignoring for the moment that my head (or the gray hairs upon it) may be the problem, I think it's not about women in trucks, it's about certain women in certain trucks. Not so long ago I was fueling my lame tan sedan at the Gas-N-Go when a woman roared across the lot in a dusty pickup and pulled up to park by the yellow cage in which they lock up the LP bottles. She dismounted wearing scuffed boots and dirty jeans and a T-shirt that was overwashed and faded, and at the very sight of her I made an involuntary noise that went, approximately, ohf...! I suppose ohf...! reflects as poorly on my character as wolf whistle, but I swear it escaped without premeditation. Strictly a spinal reflex. [...] The woman plucking her eyebrows in the vanity mirror of her waxed F-150 Lariat does not elicit the reflex. Even less so if her payload includes soccer gear or nothing at all. That woman at the Gas-N-Go? I checked the back of her truck. Hay bales and a coon dog crate. Ohf...!

He decided to start with a smaller rocket that would not be too costly. “We’re going to be doing dumb things, but let’s just not do dumb things on a large scale,” he told Cantrell. Instead of launching large payloads, as Lockheed and Boeing did, Musk would create a less expensive rocket for the smaller satellites that were being made possible by advances in microprocessors. He focused on one key metric: what it cost to get each pound of payload into orbit. That goal of maximizing boost for the buck would guide his obsession with increasing the thrust of the engines, reducing the mass of the rockets, and making them reusable.

Quickly, reality set in. It was obvious that we had suffered heavy casualties, but I still did not know exactly what caused the attack. Shortly thereafter, someone reported to me that a large truck had penetrated our perimeter south of the BLT’s headquarters from the direction of the airport’s main terminal. The driver had rammed through the sergeant of the guard’s post in front of the BLT building’s entrance and detonated the truck’s payload in the lobby. The explosive force of the blast caused the concrete, steel-reinforced four-story structure, which was considered one of the strongest buildings in Lebanon, to completely collapse. Its total devastation was astounding. I took in this carnage as cries for help pierced the air.

Silverstein, one of those leading the charge toward more far-ranging flights than Mercury, had been looking for a suitable name for a payload for the Saturn rockets. None suggested by his associates seemed appropriate. One day, while consulting a book on mythology, Silverstein found what he wanted. He later said, “I thought the image of the god Apollo riding his chariot across the sun gave the best representation of the grand scale of the proposed program.” Occasionally he asked his Headquarters colleagues for their opinions. When no one objected, the chariot driver Apollo (according to ancient Greek myths, the god of music, prophecy, medicine, light, and progress became the name of the proposed circumlunar spaceships. At the opening of the conference on 28 July 1960, Dryden announced that “the next spacecraft beyond Mercury will be called Apollo.

Why can’t we use wood?” Jacob asked. I knew he was thinking of the thick pine woods to the east of the cottage, and how quickly we could cut down a dozen trees and haul them back to Father. But Father shook his head. “Wood’s not strong enough for what’s coming.” What was coming? We knew better than to ask Father, but we talked about it on the long walk back from the bay, Woof trotting obediently at our heels and Flick plodding along in front of us, the cart creaking beneath the weight of the stones we had gathered. “It’s the war,” Jacob said. He looked over toward the mainland as he said it. You can’t see the mainland from the island—even on a clear day, it’s too far, over the horizon of the sea—but sometimes at night you can see the orange glow of the fires reflecting back at you from the clouds, or see the planes flying far overhead with their payload of bombs and gas. “It’s getting closer,” he said, and I nodded.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

Our two taco specials get shoved up on the serving counter, crispy, cheesy goodness in brown plastic baskets lined with parchment paper, sour cream and guacamole exactly where they should be. On the side. There is a perfect ratio of sour cream, guac, and salsa on a shredded chicken tostada. No one can make it happen for you. Many restaurants have tried. All have failed. Only the mouth knows its own pleasure, and calibration like Taco Heaven cannot be mass produced. It simply cannot. Taco Heaven is a sensory explosion of flavor that defies logic. First, you have to eye the amount of spiced meat, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, and tomatillos. You must consider the size and crispiness of the shells. Some people–I call them blasphemers–like soft tacos. I am sitting across from Exhibit A. We won’t talk about soft tacos. They don’t make it to Taco Heaven. People who eat soft tacos live in Taco Purgatory, never fully understanding their moral failings, repeating the same mistakes again and again for all eternity. Like Perky and dating. Once you inventory your meat, lettuce, tomato, and shell quality, the real construction begins. Making your way to Taco Heaven is like a mechanical engineer building a bridge in your mouth. Measurements must be exact. Payloads are all about formulas and precision. One miscalculation and it all fails. Taco Death is worse than Taco Purgatory, because the only reason for Taco Death is miscalculation. And that’s all on you. “Oh, God,” Fiona groans through a mouthful of abomination. “You’re doing it, aren’t you?” “Doing what?” I ask primly, knowing damn well what she’s talking about. “You treat eating tacos like you’re the star of some Mythbusters show.” “Do not.” “Do too.” “Even if I do–and I am notconceding the point–it would be a worthwhile venture.” “You are as weird about your tacos as Perky is about her coffee.” “Take it back! I am not that weird.” “You are.” “Am not.” “This is why Perky and I swore we would never come here with you again.” Fiona grabs my guacamole and smears the rounded scoop all over the outside of her soft taco. I shriek. “How can you do that?” I gasp, the murder of the perfect ratio a painful, almost palpable blow. The mashed avocado has a death rattle that rings in my ears. Smug, tight lips give me a grimace. “See? A normal person would shout, ‘Hey! That’s mine!’ but you’re more offended that I’ve desecrated my inferior taco wrapping with the wrong amount of guac.” “Because it’s wrong.” “You should have gone to MIT, Mal. You need a job that involves nothing but pure math for the sake of calculating stupid shit no one else cares about.” “So glad to know that a preschool teacher holds such high regard for math,” I snark back. And MIT didn’t give me the kind of merit aid package I got from Brown, I don’t add. “Was that supposed to sting?” She takes the rest of my guacamole, grabs a spoon, and starts eating it straight out of the little white paper scoop container thing. “How can you do that? It’s like people who dip their french fries in mayonnaise.” I shudder, standing to get in line to buy more guac. “I dip my french fries in mayo!” “More evidence of your madness, Fi. Get help now. It may not be too late.” I stick my finger in her face. “And by the way, you and Perky talk about my taco habits behind my back? Some friends!” I hmph and turn toward the counter.

But come on—tell me the proposal story, anyway.” She raised an eyebrow. “Really?” “Really. Just keep in mind that I’m a guy, which means I’m genetically predisposed to think that whatever mushy romantic tale you’re about to tell me is highly cheesy.” Rylann laughed. “I’ll keep it simple, then.” She rested her drink on the table. “Well, you already heard how Kyle picked me up at the courthouse after my trial. He said he wanted to surprise me with a vacation because I’d been working so hard, but that we needed to drive to Champaign first to meet with his former mentor, the head of the U of I Department of Computer Sciences, to discuss some project Kyle was working on for a client.” She held up a sparkly hand, nearly blinding Cade and probably half of the other Starbucks patrons. “In hindsight, yes, that sounds a little fishy, but what do I know about all this network security stuff? He had his laptop out, there was some talk about malicious payloads and Trojan horse attacks—it all sounded legitimate enough at the time.” “Remind me, while I’m acting U.S. attorney, not to assign you to any cybercrime cases.” “Anyhow. . . we get to Champaign, which as it so happens, is where Kyle and I first met ten years ago. And the limo turns onto the street where I used to live while in law school, and Kyle asks the driver to pull over because he wants to see the place for old time’s sake. So we get out of the limo, and he’s making this big speech about the night we met and how he walked me home on the very sidewalk we were standing on—I’ll fast-forward here in light of your aversion to the mushy stuff—and I’m laughing to myself because, well, we’re standing on the wrong side of the street. So naturally, I point that out, and he tells me that nope, I’m wrong, because he remembers everything about that night, so to prove my point I walk across the street to show him and”—she paused here— “and I see a jewelry box, sitting on the sidewalk, in the exact spot where we had our first kiss. Then I turn around and see Kyle down on one knee.” She waved her hand, her eyes a little misty. “So there you go. The whole mushy, cheesy tale. Gag away.” Cade picked up his coffee cup and took a sip. “That was actually pretty smooth.” Rylann grinned. “I know. Former cyber-menace to society or not, that man is a keeper

consider the fate of the space shuttle’s external tanks (ETs). Dwarfing the vehicle itself, the ET was the largest and most prominent feature of the space shuttle as it stood on the pad. It remained attached to the shuttle—or perhaps it makes as much sense to say that the shuttle remained attached to it—long after the two strap-on boosters had fallen away. The ET and the shuttle remained connected all the way out of the atmosphere and into space. Only after the system had attained orbital velocity was the tank jettisoned and allowed to fall into the atmosphere, where it was destroyed on reentry. At a modest marginal cost, the ETs could have been kept in orbit indefinitely. The mass of the ET at separation, including residual propellants, was about twice that of the largest possible shuttle payload. Not destroying them would have roughly tripled the total mass launched into orbit by the shuttle. ETs could have been connected to build units that would have humbled today’s International Space Station. The residual oxygen and hydrogen sloshing around in them could have been combined to generate electricity and produce tons of water, a commodity that is vastly expensive and desirable in space. But in spite of hard work and passionate advocacy by space experts who wished to see the tanks put to use, NASA—for reasons both technical and political—sent each of them to fiery destruction in the atmosphere.

Her body encouraged his to release its potent payload sooner rather than later.

In October, 1957, Russia electrified the world with her first Sputnik. Built on plans stolen from the United States after World War II, Sputnik I, with a payload weighing 184 pounds, was successfully launched into orbit October 4th.

Stuxnet managed to slip through and infect them anyway, with devastating results. Officially, no country ever took responsibility for the cyberattack. Speculation was rife in the media, but the West maintained plausible deniability. However, Kendra knew better. It was Echelon programmers who had coded the malware, while Israeli agents inside Iran had delivered the actual payload. It was all done in an attempt to prevent Iran from

powerful chemotherapy agents enclosed in microscopic nanoparticles are injected intravenously. These circulate with the blood in every tissue and organ in the body, but the chemotherapy drugs are inactive because they are trapped inside the nanoparticles. After eliminating all of the tumor that can be seen on the MR, the surgeon then refocuses the ultrasound to the surrounding brain to activate the nanoparticles, which release their pharmacological payload in the precise area around the tumor where residual microscopic extensions of the tumor have infiltrated. This allows very high concentrations of the drugs to be delivered focally to the brain while minimizing systemic side effects. The remainder of the chemo-laden nanoparticles will be excreted.

They were assembling a rocket there. It was a big rocket. It all more or less made sense. There was no cargo too big to be barged up the Columbia River and then trucked the last few miles to Moses Lake. There was no airplane that couldn’t be accommodated by that runway. There was no object that the aerospace machine shops of the Seattle area couldn’t build. And from this latitude, the same as Baikonur, a well-worn and understood flight plan could take payloads to Izzy. A mere four days later, Doob stood in the bed of a rusty pickup truck with a random assortment of space rednecks, hoisting a longnecked beer bottle into the sky in emulation of the rocket lifting off from the pad. They all hooted and screamed as they watched it arc gracefully downrange and take off in the general direction of Boise. And the next morning, when they had all sobered up, they got busy building another rocket.

The bulkheads were close together, the ceilings low above their helmets. Not much space in there to waste aboard the older ships. Every millimeter of plating cost money in the old days, before the New Economic System usurped the old. Every possible bit of space went to the carrying of cargo, or ‘payload’ as it was called.

At midday, they’ll release the payload and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will be roughly doubled, providing a nice, cosy blanket around your darling little planet and you guys never need feel chilly again. Just watch while I play…

Uzgob: Approachin’ target area, Gimzod. Why the zog ain’t ’em bomb bay doorz open yet? Gimzod: Beg pardon, boss, but we’re ’avin’ some trouble down ’ere wiv the payload… Uzgob: Then get the bommbadeer boyz to fix it! Gimzod: Can’t do that, boss, seein’ as ’ow the payload already ate ’em…

For a moment I was assaulted by the nightmare vision of DC as a wrecked, blackened graveyard of twisted steel girders and crumbling concrete. It had happened to Nagasaki and to Hiroshima. People, normal families, couples, children, had been going about their daily lives. A plane had appeared far above them, in the sky; most of them hadn’t even seen it. Its payload dropped from its belly while the children played and people chatted, and it never even reached the ground. ​The transition from “normal everyday” to total annihilation had happened in fractions of a second.

Using analyses proprietary to Protogen and not yet shared with the Martian team, we have determined beyond any credible doubt that what you are seeing now is not a naturally formed planetesimal, but a weapon. Specifically, a weapon designed to carry its payload through the depths of interplanetary space and deliver it safely onto Earth two and one third billion years ago, when life itself was in its earliest stages.

The design for the Space Shuttle called for the creation of reusable solid rocket boosters, massive cone-tipped cylinders that would lift the Shuttle to 150,000 feet before falling away and floating to the ground on parachutes for recovery and reuse. This worked surprisingly well. The boosters were built in Brigham County, Utah, and shipped to Florida for takeoff. After each use, they’d be recovered from the open ocean, freighted to port, refurbished and, once again, shipped to Florida. The boosters were about 150 feet long, but they were precisely 12.17 feet in diameter—because they had to fit on a special railway flatcar for those overland shipments. The aerospace engineers who sat down to design those solid rocket boosters had a lot of parameters to juggle—the pull of gravity, the efficiency of rocket fuel, the weight of the payload. But mixed in with those parameters, immutable and inarguable was the width of a railcar, which was foreordained by the width of the Roman chariot wheelbase, which was, in turn, determined by the metalbeating know-how of Roman blacksmiths. Infrastructure casts a long shadow.

The central figure in such an odyssey is not an engineer, a conductor, a dispatcher, or a trainmaster— the multiple, replaceable, and redundant human beings—but the coal train itself, which, power and payload, end to end, will be integral all the way from mine to destination, no matter who is in or around it, or whose tracks it is running on.

The result of the Muenzenberg payload’s dissemination throughout American society is now clear. A healthy, happy, productive nation of citizens, blended in the great Melting Pot, had set aside their differences when they became Americans. After Muenzenberg’s influence op, the same people were converted into a confused mass of self-interest groups, torn apart by PC divisions of race, gender, ethnicity, income, class, language, sexuality.

You don’t put oil in your truck because it tastes good. You do it so your truck can continue burning sweet gasoline and hauling a manly payload.

Then I’ll wind it up as fast as I can,” Wagoner said. “What it all comes to is that the whole structure of space flight as it stands now is creaking, obsolescent, over-elaborate, decaying. The field is static; no, worse than that, it’s losing ground. By this time, our ships ought to be sleeker and faster, and able to carry bigger payloads. We ought to have done away with this dichotomy between ships that can land on a planet, and ships that can fly from one planet to another.

It’s talk like this that thrills and amazes people in the aerospace industry, who have long been hoping that some company would come along and truly revolutionize space travel. Aeronautics experts will point out that twenty years after the Wright brothers started their experiments, air travel had become routine. The launch business, by contrast, appears to have frozen. We’ve been to the moon, sent research vehicles to Mars, and explored the solar system, but all of these things are still immensely expensive one-off projects. “The cost remains extraordinarily high because of the rocket equation,” said Carol Stoker, the planetary scientist at NASA. Thanks to military and government contracts from agencies like NASA, the aerospace industry has historically had massive budgets to work with and tried to make the biggest, most reliable machines it could. The business has been tuned to strive for maximum performance, so that the aerospace contractors can say they met their requirements. That strategy makes sense if you’re trying to send up a $1 billion military satellite for the U.S. government and simply cannot afford for the payload to blow up.

A stock Gulfstream G650, a top-of-the-line business jet, cruises at altitudes up to 50,000 feet. If a G650 were retrofitted with a low-bypass military engine such as the Pratt & Whitney F100, it could lift a payload of 13 tons to 60,000 feet, an altitude that would likely be adequate for the minimal deployment described in Phase 3. A fleet of just twenty aircraft acquired within a few years at a cost of $1.5 billion should enable sufficient radiative forcing to produce large-scale climatic effects that are just barely detectable.

I’d been infected, not only with a virus of unknown origin, but with a payload encoding the most powerful genome-modifying system ever created. Almost certainly it had been designed, not to make me sick, but to infect some or all of the cells in my body, potentially editing and rewriting portions of my DNA.

By late morning, Joe was cruising east on the state highway that bordered the Thunderhead Ranch all the way to the Bighorn Mountains. It was one of those schizophrenic spring/summer/winter May days when storm clouds shot across the sky in fast motion dumping both slashing rain and wet snow as if ditching their payloads in a panic, then darting away leaving sunshine and confusion, only

The third component of this assault remained unreachable. The last word from the Belgorod-class submarine was when it vanished under the polar ice cap, sailing its thirty-thousand-ton bulk toward the search zone. Its code name was Siniykit, chosen for the largest oceangoing creature—the blue whale—which was fitting as the submarine was nearly two hundred meters in length. The boat needed to be that large to hold its arsenal of six massive Poseidon 2M39 torpedoes. The stealth weapons were the latest in Russia’s underwater arsenal, tested for the first time in 2023. The bus-size weapons were more drones than torpedoes, capable of remote operation, with a range of ten thousand kilometers. Powered by a nuclear reactor, the torpedoes were capable of carrying up to a 100-megaton payload. Such beasts were designed as a second-strike nuclear option, to devastate a coastline and trigger a radioactive tsunami. It was the reason the boat had earned its nickname the “Doomsday Sub.

In the airman’s world, a B-17 pilot sat in the five-foot cube of his cockpit with “an oxygen mask full of drool” amid the roar of four engines. He fiddled with 130 switches, dials, gauges, levers, and pedals long enough to dump his payload of bombs—“big ugly dead things,” in one officer’s phrase—and then fled for home. In this world, Germany was known as “the Land of Doom.

Hayworth, the former Margarita Carmen Cansino, was, of course, one of the brightest stars of the forties and early fifties, so much so that the crew of the Enola Gay is rumored to have used her pinup decal as “nose art” for either the bomber or its payload, Little Boy, before dropping it on Hiroshima. Welles

How to Deal with Them The only way you are going to survive the tank’s onslaught is to be methodical and calm as much as you can. First is that you have to brace yourself. Look at them in the eye as they are about to deliver a verbal beatdown. Manage your breathing and temper here as you want to be as calm as possible when the tank is delivering their verbal payload. As the tank starts belting out their opinions, you must interrupt their attack. You can do this by slowly saying their name over and over again until you get their attention. The goal here is to slowly increase the tone of your voice so the tank can get the idea that you mean business.

Government sales constituted 100 percent of the market for integrated circuits until 1964, and the federal government remained the largest buyer of chips for several years after that. The military had started funding research on new types of electric circuits in the early 1950s, when the tyranny of numbers first emerged. The problems inherent in complex circuits containing large numbers of individual components were particularly severe in defense applications. Such circuits tended to be big and heavy, but the services needed equipment that was light and portable. “The general rule of thumb in a missile was that one extra pound of payload cost $100,000 worth of extra fuel,” Noyce recalled. “The shipping cost of sending up a 50-pound computer was too high even for the Pentagon.” Further, space-age weapons had to be absolutely reliable—a goal that was inordinately difficult to achieve in a circuit with several thousand components and several thousand hand-soldered connections. When the Air Force ordered electronic equipment for the Minuteman I, the first modern intercontinental ballistic missile, specifications called for every single component—not just every radio but every transistor and every resistor in every radio—to have its own individual progress chart on which production, installation, checking, and rechecking could be recorded. Testing, retesting, and re-retesting more than doubled the cost of each electronic part.

For the better part of seven decades, watching rockets launch from Cape Canaveral has been a major tourist attraction, a favorite activity of locals, and a taken-for-granted part of Florida life. Few experiences in this lifetime are as awe-inspiring as watching a rocket launch not more than five miles from the launch site. When NASA lights the fuse on these babies, the solid rocket boosters blast the payload into space with several million pounds of thrust. Words cannot adequately describe the sight, sound, and feel of one of these events-- like the Grand Canyon and oral sex, it must be experienced to be appreciated.

Two miles above Oahu, Lieutenant Shojiro Kondo, the Nakajima bombardier for lead pilot Tadashi Kusumi, found a target and commenced release of his payload. It contained 132 solid pounds of toxic, pale yellow cast crystals that formed the explosive, TriNitroAnisole. Starting its descent, the warhead picked up speed and moved with purpose—averaging over 377 feet per second. Its kinetic energy increased, as it sought the target. Within 26 seconds, it would be found.

On Feb. 26, the IAF launched airstrikes against what it said were terrorist camps in Pakistan. Pakistan retaliated with fighter planes dropping their payloads in Kashmir and, in an ensuing air battle, shot down an Indian MiG-21 warplane and captured its pilot. India claims the MiG-21 pilot shot down a more advanced Pakistan F-16 fighter aircraft before his own aircraft was downed — but Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership vehemently denied this.

To say that prediction is the purpose of a scientific theory is to confuse means with ends. It is like saying that the purpose of a spaceship is to burn fuel. In fact, burning fuel is only one of many things a spaceship has to do to accomplish its real purpose, which is to transport its payload from one point in space to another. Passing experimental tests is only one of many things a theory has to do to achieve the real purpose of science, which is to explain the world.

It’s a combination of the pseudouridine incorporating into the RNA and the toxicity of the lipids and the toxicity of the complexes as a whole, which is separate from the toxicity of the spike. So, we’ve really got three categories of toxicities. We got the payload toxicity—that’s your spike issues. We got the cationic lipid and associated nanoplex toxicity. And we have the toxicity of the pseudouridine incorporating molecule, which is not really a natural RNA; it’s something else altogether.

But the worst part was the final realization: that the act of transporting something with Absolom essentially branched our universe—it created an alternate timeline where the payload was deposited. This is consistent with the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, which is the idea that we are constantly creating copies of our universe, even as we speak.

Fittingly, the rabies virus is shaped like a bullet: a cylindrical shell of glycoproteins and lipids that carries, in its rounded tip, a malevolent payload of helical RNA. On entering a living thing, it eschews the bloodstream, the default route of nearly all viruses but a path heavily guarded by immuno-protective sentries. Instead, like almost no other virus known to science, rabies sets its course through the nervous system, creeping upstream at one to two centimeters per day (on average) through the axoplasm, the transmission lines that conduct electrical impulses to and from the brain.

And because our parents pay the tab, such mental connections carry a destructive payload: consumption and production are not correlated.

Most significant, he’s been testing rockets that can push their payload to space and then return to Earth and land with supreme accuracy on a pad floating at sea or even their original launchpad. Instead of having its rockets break apart after crashing into the sea, SpaceX will use reverse thrusters to lower them down softly and reuse them.

Each person fills their wheelbarrow of life with routine colliery and guerdons culled from a few diamond moments, all of which ingested payload forms the grist of life.

Within days, an independent analysis by German security experts proved decisively that Street View’s cars were extracting unencrypted personal information from homes. Google was forced to concede that it had intercepted and stored “payload data,” personal information grabbed from unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions. As its apologetic blog post noted, “In some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.” Technical experts in Canada, France, and the Netherlands discovered that the payload data included names, telephone numbers, credit information, passwords, messages, e-mails, and chat transcripts, as well as records of online dating, pornography, browsing behavior, medical information, location data, photos, and video and audio files. They concluded that such data packets could be stitched together for a detailed profile of an identifiable person.39

Our first day’s run out of Pampatar was our best day’s run to date on the whole voyage from San Diego—171 miles. That’s over the twenty-four hours noon to noon. The second day’s run beat it—174 miles. On the evening of the third day out we were at anchor in Frederiksted, on the island of St. Croix. That’s 420 miles in sixty hours. That’s the crossing of the Caribbean Sea, from south to north, in two and a half days. That’s flying. Total fuel consumption—one pint of diesel oil to charge batteries. Breakages, nil; and that was a fully loaded trimaran—loaded to traditional, oceangoing monohull standards and more. There were, don’t forget, three months’ supplies of canned food for three men on board, plus the remaining dried and packaged food, say six weeks’ supply, plus eighty-two gallons of cheap diesel fuel and eighty-two gallons of fresh water, plus all our personal effects, the three of us, together with the ship’s equipment. That was a total payload of around four tons. I suggest that this is the most important statistic, besides the speed of the passage, in this account. I suggest that, together with the safety factors built into Outward Leg—the self-righting system, and the cool-tubes to prevent capsize—we realized at St. Croix that what we had under our feet was one of the fastest, and one of the safest, cruising vessels afloat under sail. Hitherto multihulls had been considered as either hair-shirt racing craft, for speed-drunk masochists with tiny appetites, or boxy floating sheds for short cruises and always downwind, because they were thought—and quite rightly in most instances—to have the windward ability of Carnegie Hall.

REAL FATHERS Fathers who protect their children deserve appreciation. These are gatherers of food who fend off starvation. Fees are paid in full; there's never depreciation. Daughters and toddlers are safe under their nation. They prove that their children come first. Payroll to payload, they're there to play their verse. Main role, second role, they're there to nurse. Male role, great role, they stop the abandonment curse. Their kids' needs are satisfied, they're never hollow. Their kids feel prioritised, the rest follow.  

let Jenna know now.” Eva nodded and called it in. “Okay," said Jenna. "There’s no point heading to West Gate by foot from your position. It’ll take fifteen minutes or more. Hold your position until that patrol unit has moved on.

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in 1994 Oman was approached by the Bosnian Serb leader, Radovan Karadzic, to discuss a special need. Karadzic, currently on trial for war crimes including the Srebrenica genocide, wanted to acquire something that would fundamentally alter the conduct of the Balkans conflict: a weapon of mass destruction.64 Karadzic believed that Oman could use his connections in the Russian military to deliver a so-called ‘vakuum’ or elipton bomb. The device, roughly suitcase size with a kiloton payload powered by nuclear material – either red mercury or osmium – was known to be immensely powerful.

Human beings are impossibly complex tarballs of muscle, blood, bone, breath, and electrical pulses that travel through nerves and neurons; we are bundles of electrical pulses carrying payloads, pings hitting servers. And our identities are inextricably connected to our environments: No story can be told without a setting.

The demon trap Nightingale had disarmed had had two circles incised near the center—that being where the “payload” was stored. Traditionally, this had been the ghost of a human being tortured slowly to death and their essence trapped at the moment of expiration. We’d found that the Faceless Man had learnt to substitute dogs instead—the effect was the same.

The latter accident occurred during a desperate firefight between the Taliban and American Special Forces. An inexperienced Air Force tactical air controller had just calculated the coordinates of an enemy fighting position and was about to call in an air strike when the batteries died in his precision GPS device, causing its display screen to go dark. Frantically, the air controller put new batteries into the GPS, the numbers flashed back on the screen a moment later, and he directed the B-52 flying overhead to drop its lethal payload on these coordinates. The air controller was unaware, however, that after a battery replacement his GPS automatically defaulted to display the coordinates of its own position. He mistakenly called in these coordinates instead of the Taliban’s position, and the upshot was the first three members of the American military to die in the Afghanistan war were victims of fratricide.