“
A kiss from the Captain would probably melt my central processor.”
Thorne winked at her. “Oh trust me. It would.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
”
”
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
“
The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
“
The human mind is a story processor, not a logic processor.
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion)
“
Finally, Cinder gulped. "I'm sorry I had to --" She gestured at the unconscious wedding coordinator, then waved her hand like shaking it off. "But she'll be fine, I swear. Maybe a little nauseous when she comes to, but otherwise...And your android...Nainsi, right? I had to disable her. And her backup processor. But any mechanic can return her to defaults in about six seconds, so..." She rubbed anxiously at her wrist. "Oh, and we ran into your captain of the guard in the hallway, and a few other guards, and I may have scared him and he's, um, unconscious. Also. But, really, they'll all be fine. I swear." Her lips twitched into a brief, nervous smile. "Um...hello, again. By the way.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Cress (The Lunar Chronicles, #3))
“
My point is that I am going to figure this out, like I always do. First, we’re going to find a way to get into Artemisia. We’re going to find Cress and rescue Cinder and Wolf. We’re going to overthrow Levana, and by the stars above, we are going to make Cinder a queen so she can pay us a lot of money from her royal coffers and we can all retire very rich and very alive, got it?"
Winter started to clap. "Brilliant speech. Such gumption and bravado."
"And yet strangely lacking in any sort of actual strategy," said Scarlet.
"Oh, good, I'm glad you noticed that too," said Iko. "I was worried my processor might be glitching.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
The vast majority of us imagine ourselves as like literature people or math people. But the truth is that the massive processor known as the human brain is neither a literature organ or a math organ. It is both and more.
”
”
John Green
“
Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.
”
”
Isaac Asimov (I. Asimov: A Memoir)
“
... nothing lasts long. We all come to life and gather allies and build empires and die, all in a single moment - maybe a single pulse of some giant processor somewhere.
”
”
Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1))
“
I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor.
”
”
Neal Stephenson (In the Beginning...Was the Command Line)
“
Bryce had ground the block of obsidian salt down at some point—presumably using her fucking food processor. For something she’d dropped ten grand on, Bryce didn’t treat it with any particular reverence. She’d chucked it into a kitchen cabinet as if it were a bag of chips.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (House of Earth and Blood (Crescent City, #1))
“
But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause "nausea, vomiting, ringing in the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocation, and collapse." Ingesting five grams of TBHQ can kill.
”
”
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals)
“
Others consider us superior because of our cultured ways and intellectual tendencies; our technology lets us drive cars, use word processors and travel great distances by air. Some of us live in air-conditioned houses and we are entertained by the media. We think that we are more intelligent than stone-agers, yet how many modern humans could live successfully in caves, or would know how to light wood fires for cooking, or make clothes and shoes from animal skins or bows and arrows good enough to keep their families fed?
”
”
James E. Lovelock (The Revenge of Gaia)
“
The brain has millions of local processors making important decisions. It is a highly specialized system with critical networks distributed throughout the 1,300 grams of tissue. There is no one boss in the brain. You are certainly not the boss of the brain. Have you ever succeeded in telling your brain to shut up already and go to sleep?
”
”
Michael S. Gazzaniga (Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain)
“
Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of this time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world's most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.
”
”
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
“
In 2004, Jacques Derrida said that a change was under way. Torture damages the inflicter as well as the inflicted. It’s no coincidence that one of the Abu Ghraib torturers came to the military directly from a job as a chicken processor. It might be slow, Derrida said, but eventually the spectacle of our abuse of animals will be intolerable to our sense of who we are.
”
”
Karen Joy Fowler (We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves)
“
Do I get a good-bye kiss too?” said Thorne, stepping in front of Cinder. Scowling, Cinder shoved him away. “Wolf’s not the only one who can throw a right hook around here.” Thorne chuckled and raised a suggestive eyebrow at Iko. The android, still on the floor, shrugged apologetically. “I would love to give you a good-bye kiss, Captain, but that lingering embrace from His Majesty may have fried a few wires, and I’m afraid a kiss from you would melt my central processor.” “Oh, trust me,” said Thorne, winking at her. “It would.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
However, on glimpsing in shop window realized outfit insane. Now am on bus, remember also that corset-ike nature of dress is torture when sitting down. One's rolls of fat are squezzed together like dough being kneaded in a food processor.
”
”
Helen Fielding (Mad About the Boy (Bridget Jones, #3))
“
NASA are idiots. They want to send canned primates to Mars!" Manfred swallows a mouthful of beer, aggressively plonks his glass on the table: "Mars is just dumb mass at the bottom of a gravity well; there isn't even a biosphere there. They should be working on uploading and solving the nanoassembly conformational problem instead. Then we could turn all the available dumb matter into computronium and use it for processing our thoughts. Long-term, it's the only way to go. The solar system is a dead loss right now – dumb all over! Just measure the MIPS per milligram. If it isn't thinking, it isn't working. We need to start with the low-mass bodies, reconfigure them for our own use. Dismantle the moon! Dismantle Mars! Build masses of free-flying nanocomputing processor nodes exchanging data via laser link, each layer running off the waste heat of the next one in. Matrioshka brains, Russian doll Dyson spheres the size of solar systems. Teach dumb matter to do the Turing boogie!
”
”
Charles Stross (Accelerando)
“
She shook his hand, presenting him with a smile worthy of all his neurological processors.
”
”
Scott McElhaney (erinyes)
“
And I suppose you're going to operate the hermium processors when the civis are all sixed? Got an engineering degree in between combat tours and ****ing your cousins, did you?
”
”
Amie Kaufman (Obsidio (The Illuminae Files, #3))
“
If you're picturing Farmer Juan and his family gratefully wiping sweat from their brows when you buy that Ecuadorian banana, picture this instead: the CEO of Dole Inc. in his air-conditioned office in Westlake Village, California. He's worth $1.4 billion; Juan gets about $6 a day. Much money is made in the global reshuffling of food, but the main beneficiaries are processors, brokers, shippers, supermakets, and oil companies.
”
”
Steven L. Hopp (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life)
“
Reading people's bio feels like reading specifications of an assembled computer: X memory, Y processor, Z display...
We are born unique but useless for society. Then we have to acquire and assemble some common things to become useful for the society.
”
”
Shunya
“
There has not been a piece of technology designed to save labor that has not increased labor. Word processors allow you to do what your secretary used to do for you. The Internet, BlackBerries, iPhones, yes they keep you tethered, but that's not the main problem. It's that along with increasing personal productivity, they increase the expectation of productivity. It no longer becomes a bonus to do the work of one and a half men, but the norm. And then when everyone’s working at one hundred and fifty percent capacity, they can fire a third of the workforce and still maintain output.
”
”
Wayne Gladstone (Notes from the Internet Apocalypse)
“
Thus, the sweetened breakfast was born, as was a core industry strategy that food processors would deploy forevermore...Just swap out the problem component for another that wasn't, at the moment, as high on the list of concerns.
”
”
Michael Moss (Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us)
“
If writers write not just with paper and ink or a word processor but with their own life's blood, then I think something like this is perhaps always the case. A book you write out of the depths of who you are, like a dream you dream out of those same depths, is entirely your own creation. All the words your characters speak are words that you alone have put into their mouths, just as every situation they become involved in is one that you alone have concocted for them. But it seems to me that nonetheless that a book you write, like a dream you dream, can have more healing and truth and wisdom in it at least for yourself than you feel in any way responsible for.
”
”
Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)
“
Jobs and Clow agreed that Apple was one of the great brands of the world, probably in the top five based on emotional appeal, but they needed to remind folks what was distinctive about it. So they wanted a brand image campaign, not a set of advertisements featuring products. It was designed to celebrate not what the computers could do, but what creative people could do with the computers. " This wasn't about processor speed or memory," Jobs recalled. " It was about creativity." It was directed not only at potential customers, but also at Apple's own employees: " We at Apple had forgotten who we were. One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are. That was the genesis of that campaign.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.' -- Roy Blount Jr.
”
”
Roy Blount Jr.
“
If you remove a single transistor in the digital computer’s central processor, the computer will fail.
”
”
Michio Kaku (Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100)
“
The only prerequisites for a writer are a word processor and thick skin.
”
”
Mark Bell
“
In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes. Francis
”
”
Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
“
actual brains, which turn out be much more like sensory processors than logic machines.
”
”
George Gilder (Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy)
“
Veniamo alla luce e stringiamo alleanze e conquistiamo imperi e moriamo, tutto in un solo battito di ciglia. O forse in un unico, breve ciclo di un gigantesco processore, chissà dove.
”
”
Robin Sloan (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore (Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore, #1))
“
For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste, and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucketloads of crap. Our analog ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, meters of ink ribbon, and pints of Tippex. Poor sods.
”
”
David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks)
“
Darknet markets remain the most popular Bitcoin use case after speculation and ransomware. In 2014, darknet markets were estimated to have processed more bitcoins than all legitimate payment processors put together.
”
”
David Gerard (Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Ethereum & Smart Contracts)
“
My point is that I am going to figure this out, like I always do. First, we’re going to find a way to get into Artemisia. We’re going to find Cress and rescue Cinder and Wolf. We’re going to overthrow Levana, and by the stars above, we are going to make Cinder a queen so she can pay us a lot of money from her royal coffers and we can all retire very rich and very alive, got it?” Winter started to clap. “Brilliant speech. Such gumption and bravado.” “And yet strangely lacking in any sort of actual strategy,” said Scarlet. “Oh, good, I’m glad you noticed that too,” said Iko. “I was worried my processor might be glitching.” She felt for the back of her head.
”
”
Marissa Meyer (Winter (The Lunar Chronicles, #4))
“
And when I am in a new place, because I see everything, it is like when a computer is doing too many things at the same time and the central processor unit is blocked up and there isn't any space left to think about other things. And when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is even harder because people are not like cows and flowers and grass and they can talk to you and do things that you don't expect, so you have to notice everything that is in the place, and also you have to notice things that might happen as well. And sometimes when I am in a new place and there are lots of people there it is like a computer crashing and I have to close my eyes and put my hands over my ears and groan, which is like pressing CTRL + ALT + DEL and shutting down programs and turning the computer off and rebooting so that I can remember what I am doing and where I am meant to be going.
”
”
Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)
“
The next phase of the Digital Revolution will bring even more new methods of marrying technology with the creative industries, such as media, fashion, music, entertainment, education, literature, and the arts. Much of the first round of innovation involved pouring old wine—books, newspapers, opinion pieces, journals, songs, television shows, movies—into new digital bottles. But new platforms, services, and social networks are increasingly enabling fresh opportunities for individual imagination and collaborative creativity. Role-playing games and interactive plays are merging with collaborative forms of storytelling and augmented realities. This interplay between technology and the arts will eventually result in completely new forms of expression and formats of media. This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
“
Failing to come to terms with the hubris and destructiveness of that process—or, worse, seeing it as a glorious part of America’s supposed greatness—conditions the people of the United States to perpetuate those evils in new forms.
”
”
David J. Silverman (This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving)
“
I kept scrabbling around in myself for this new indescribable emotion, like stirring a crowded silverware drawer for the potato peeler, but no matter how I rattled around, no matter what I moved out of the way, it wasn’t there. The potato peeler is always in the drawer after all. It’s under the spatula, it’s slipped into the fold of the food-processor guarantee -
”
”
Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin)
“
When a field is declared volatile, the compiler and runtime are put on notice that this variable is shared and that operations on it should not be reordered with other memory operations. Volatile variables are not cached in registers or in caches where they are hidden from other processors, so a read of a volatile variable always returns the most recent write by any thread.
”
”
Brian Goetz (Java Concurrency in Practice)
“
Humans have free will. Free will is the ability to make irrational decisions—to act against stimuli. That makes it impossible for a rational AI to ever fully anticipate humans, for even if I had perfect understanding of your inputs, you could still do something completely unpredictable.” I turned my head toward Rig, frowning, trying to make sense of that. “It means you’re weird,” M-Bot added. “Uh…,” I said. “Don’t worry. I like you anyway.” “You said this was a popular theory?” Rig asked. “With me,” M-Bot said. “And there’s a lot written about it?” Rig said. “By me,” M-Bot said. “Earlier today. I wrote seven thousand pages. My processors work very quickly, you realize. Granted, most of what I wrote is just ‘humans are weird’ repeated 3,756,932 times.
”
”
Brandon Sanderson (Skyward (Skyward, #1))
“
A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end. This dreary-sounding definition, unpoetic to a fault, may well turn out to be the best we can do.
”
”
Terry Eagleton (How to Read a Poem)
“
While the idea of equal time for opposing opinions makes sense in a two-party political system, it does not work for science, because science is not about opinion. It is about evidence. It is about claims that can be, and have been, tested through scientific research—experiments, experience, and observation—research that is then subject to critical review by a jury of scientific peers. Claims that have not gone through that process—or have gone through it and failed—are not scientific, and do not deserve equal time in a scientific debate.
”
”
Naomi Oreskes (Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming)
“
We experience our day-to-day lives in story mode. The brain creates a world for us to live in and populates it with allies and villains. It turns the chaos and bleakness of reality into a simple, hopeful tale, and at the centre it places its star – wonderful, precious me – who it sets on a series of goals that become the plots of our lives. Story is what brain does. It is a ‘story processor’, writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, ‘not a logic processor’. Story emerges from human minds as naturally as breath emerges from between human lips.
”
”
Will Storr (The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human and How to Tell Them Better)
“
I have to own up and say that, much as I love my PowerBook, which now does about 97.8 percent of what I used to use the lumbering old desktop dinosaurs for, I’ve given up trying to use it on planes. Yes, yes, I know that there are sorts of power-user strategies you can use to extend your battery life—dimming modes, RAM disks, processor-resting, and so on—but the point is that I really can’t be bothered. I’m perfectly capable of just reading the in-flight magazine if I want to be irritated.
”
”
Douglas Adams (The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time)
“
fact, Nitti has recently proven its effectiveness as the default font in iA Writer, the most popular word processor for the
”
”
Stephen Coles (The Anatomy of Type: A Graphic Guide to 100 Typefaces)
“
Increasing the variety of processors. Different processors may use diverse ways to calculate and analyse data. Using several kinds of processors in a single system may therefore increase its dynamism and creativity. A conversation between a peasant, a priest and a physician may produce novel ideas that would never emerge from a conversation between three hunter-gatherers.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
My mother never stopped cooking. She never stopped nourishing me. On Sundays, her face would disappear into steam from simmering carrots, celery, and onions, as she prepped our soup for the week. Her food processor held a prominent spot on the kitchen counter, mixing homemade sauces. The kitchen always smelled of tahini. She showed me, leading by example, that real food is the right food. It is the only food.
”
”
Kristen Beddard (Bonjour Kale: A Memoir of Paris, Love, and Recipes)
“
The thingy? You want me, the most intelligent cognitive processor in the known worlds, to say thingy?”
“Yes,” I reaffirmed. “That is correct."
Do you stay up nights thinking of ways to humiliate me?" HARV asked.
”
”
John Zakour (The Frost-Haired Vixen (Nuclear Bombshell, #4))
“
Heavy taxation means that a large part of all available capital accumulated in one place – the state coffers – and consequently more and more decisions have to be made by a single processor, namely the government.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
It’s the difference between utility and virtue. Many policy makers now think of education in functional terms. It’s about learning skills that will help students find employment—such as using a word processor or spreadsheet. Yet what about helping people to figure out the meaning of life? Or become good people? Or make a difference to others? Is education for a stage in life, completed once we find jobs, or should it be a lifelong pursuit?
”
”
Alister E. McGrath (If I Had Lunch with C. S. Lewis: Exploring the Ideas of C. S. Lewis on the Meaning of Life)
“
THE GREAT IRONY is that in the beginning, the gut was all there was. “We’re basically a highly evolved earthworm surrounding the intestinal tract,” Khoruts commented as we drove away from his clinic the last day I was there. Eventually, the food processor had to have a brain attached to help it look for food, and limbs to reach that food. That increased its size, so it needed a circulatory system to distribute the fuel that powered the limbs.
”
”
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
I have three Microsoft Windows 10 computers with 4GB of RAM and Intel processors: 1. The first was a free upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and is unusable. 2. The second is a Windows 10 computer with a Celeron processor and is unusable whenever background updates are in progress. 3. The third is a Windows 10 computer with a i3 processor and runs really slow when background updates are in progress. Both Windows 10 computers suffer from horrible lag in normal use.
”
”
Steven Magee
“
Feeding (more on this in chapter 8) Breast pump Breast pads Breast cream (Lansinoh) Breast milk containers Twin nursing pillow Boppy Formula Baby bottles (8-oz. wide neck; 16–20 bottles if you’re doing formula exclusively) Dishwasher baskets Bottle brush High chairs Booster seat Food processor or immersion blender Bottle warmer Bottle drying rack Bowls and spoons Baby food storage containers Keepsakes Baby books Thank-you notes/stationery Newspaper from birthday CD player/dock for music Twin photo albums/frames
”
”
Natalie Díaz (What to Do When You're Having Two: The Twins Survival Guide from Pregnancy Through the First Year)
“
When a customer clicks through the license conditions to play the game, they’re agreeing to add their phone as a node in a distributed server. More players equal more servers—not for themselves, I might add, we never run a server node for any given game on the same host as a client for that game, that would be asking for trouble—but at the back end, we’re in the processor arbitrage market. The game programmers’ biggest problems are maintaining causality and object coherency while minimizing network latency—sorry,
”
”
Charles Stross (Halting State (Halting State, #1))
“
How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing:
1. The biological term is depression, but you don't have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it's a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset.
2. Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don't have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.)
3. Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you're sick with a generic bug.
4. You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon.
5. The literal translation of the word depression: you are broken and devalued and have no further use.
6. No one refurbishes broken robots.
7. Please self-terminate.
”
”
A. Merc Rustad (The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015)
“
These computer simulations try only to duplicate the interactions between the cortex and the thalamus. Huge chunks of the brain are therefore missing. Dr. [Dharmendra] Modha understands the enormity of his project. His ambitious research has allowed him to estimate what it would take to create a working model of the entire human brain, and not just a portion or a pale version of it, complete with all parts of the neocortex and connections to the senses. He envisions using not just a single Blue Gene computer [with over a hundred thousand processors and terabytes of RAM] but thousands of them, which would fill up not just a room but an entire city block. The energy consumption would be so great that you would need a thousand-megawatt nuclear power plant to generate all the electricity. And then, to cool off this monstrous computer so it wouldn't melt, you would need to divert a river and send it through the computer circuits.
It is remarkable that a gigantic, city-size computer is required to simulate a piece of human tissue that weighs three pounds, fits inside your skull, raises your body temperature by only a few degrees, uses twenty watts of power, and needs only a few hamburgers to keep it going.
”
”
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
“
When we think about the future, we hope for a future of progress. That progress can take one of two forms. Horizontal or extensive progress means copying things that work—going from 1 to n. Horizontal progress is easy to imagine because we already know what it looks like. Vertical or intensive progress means doing new things—going from 0 to 1. Vertical progress is harder to imagine because it requires doing something nobody else has ever done. If you take one typewriter and build 100, you have made horizontal progress. If you have a typewriter and build a word processor, you have made vertical progress.
”
”
Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
“
But the most amazing thing is the sight I’m looking at right now, and I don’t need the binoculars to see it either: Michael wearing nothing but board shorts as he lies in the hammock across from mine, reading a book on microprocessing (I do hope the micros and the processors end up happily ever after at the end)
”
”
Meg Cabot (Royal Wedding (The Princess Diaries, #11))
“
There’s almost no more beautiful sight than a simple declarative sentence.
”
”
William Zinsser (Writing with a Word Processor)
“
machines again, and radios, and the latest Chevrolet. General Electric flooded the country with luxury gadgets: food processors, toasters, floor-polishing machines, FM radios, electric blankets, and so on. These were all products promoted by that epitome of the television salesman Ronald Reagan, a popular actor whose work in advertising eventually taught him to sell himself, too. Traditional ideals were put on hold and ‘selling out’ became a catchphrase – you accepted a job that gave you no satisfaction because the pay was good. These were the months and years when British singer Vera Lynn touched American hearts with ‘A kiss won’t mean “Goodbye” but “Hello to love”’. Yes, that’s when it started, with that kiss on Times Square.
”
”
Geert Mak (In America: Travels with John Steinbeck)
“
A kiss.
One-point-three seconds--and gone.
He touched his metal mouth even though he could not feel--neither physical touch nor emotional. Ana had never kissed him on the mouth before. One the cheek, yes, when she'd drunk too much of Wick's Cercian ale. But never on the mouth. Her words echoed through his processors like a virus.
I'll always come back for you. I promise on iron and stars.
It was more than a promise--it was an oath. Unbreakable. Strong like iron and steady like stars.
It was said that such promises could never be broken; the Goddess would not allow it. The probability of a supernatural binding was less than one percent, but the vow stuck with him all the same.
Because Ana had never promised on iron and stars before.
”
”
Ashley Poston (Heart of Iron (Heart of Iron, #1))
“
Suppose she never got into art school, suppose she was not a painter after all? Suppose the talents which others had persuaded her she possessed were to abandon her overnight, or turn out to have been unreal all the time? Suppose she had to take a typing course or live with a word processor? I would die, she thought, I would kill myself or make myself die of grief. Already there was one great deep grief in her life.
”
”
Iris Murdoch (The Green Knight)
“
There were absolutely amazing photographs everywhere, on everyone's Facebook page and everyone's iPhone and Instagram, just floating around in cyberspace for eternity. People took hundreds and thousands of digital pictures; one or two, even twenty or a hundred, were bound to be great. All anyone had to do was click through them all and post the ones they liked, deleting the rest. But using film meant you never knew what was going to be a good picture, let alone a great one, until you were standing there looking at a contact sheet with a magnifying glass and deciding which to print.
Maybe nobody cared anymore, but then again, writers probably felt the same way when word processors were invented. Anyone with a story and a keyboard could write their memoir now, write the great American novel, or tweet a 140-character trope that gets retweeted and it read by hundreds of people every hour of every day.
”
”
Nora Raleigh Baskin (Subway Love)
“
Paul closed his eyes and turned his face to the sun. In spite of everything, it was hard not to take solace from the warmth flooding onto his skin. He stretched the muscles in his arms, his shoulders, his back -- and it felt like he was reaching out from the "self" in his virtual skull to all his mathematical flesh, imprinting the nebulous data with meaning; binding it all together, staking some kind of claim. He felt the stirrings of an erection. Existence was beginning to seduce him. He let himself surrender for a moment to a visceral sense of identity which drowned out all his pale mental images of optical processors, all his abstract reflections on the software's approximations and short-cuts. This body didn't want to evaporate. This body didn't want to bale out. It didn't much care that there was another -- "more real" -- version of itself elsewhere. It wanted to retain its wholeness. It wanted to endure.
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Greg Egan (Permutation City)
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More than anyone else of his time, he made products that were completely innovative, combining the power of poetry and processors. With a ferocity that could make working with him as unsettling as it was inspiring, he also built the world’s most creative company. And he was able to infuse into its DNA the design sensibilities, perfectionism, and imagination that make it likely to be, even decades from now, the company that thrives best at the intersection of artistry and technology.
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
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I don't think there is anything like the awareness of space to process emotion. That space is such an incredible processor. There is no analysis equal to the processing capacity of open awareness. When you are trying to analyze something, you don't realize that the analyzer itself is part of the problem. Both the problem and the analyzer are constructions of the mind. But direct, open, naked awareness is not a construction of the mind but the nature of the mind itself, and therefore the greatest processor ever.
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Tenzin Wangyal (Awakening the Luminous Mind: Tibetan Meditation for Inner Peace and Joy)
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of activity in different sorts of substrate – organic, electronic, or otherwise? Could a machine communicate with humans on an unlimited set of topics through fluent use of a human language? Could a language-using machine give the appearance of understanding sentences and coming up with ideas while in truth being as devoid of thought and as empty inside as a nineteenth-century adding machine or a twentieth-century word processor? How might we distinguish between a genuinely conscious and intelligent mind and a cleverly constructed but hollow language-using facade? Are understanding and reasoning incompatible with a materialistic, mechanistic view of living beings? Could a machine ever be said to have made its own decisions? Could a machine have beliefs? Could a machine make mistakes? Could a machine believe it made its own decisions? Could a machine erroneously attribute free will to itself? Could a machine come up with ideas that had not been programmed into it in advance? Could creativity emerge from a set of fixed rules? Are we – even the
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Andrew Hodges (Alan Turing: The Enigma)
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SHRIMP LOUIE SPREAD Hannah’s Note: This is best served well chilled with a basket of crackers on the side. 8 ounces softened cream cheese ½ cup mayonnaise ¼ cup chili sauce (I used Heinz) 1 Tablespoon horseradish (I used Silver Springs) 1/8 teaspoon pepper 6 green onions 2 cups finely chopped cooked salad shrimp*** (measure AFTER chopping) Salt to taste Mix the cream cheese with the mayonnaise. Add the chili sauce, horseradish, and pepper. Mix it up into a smooth sauce. Clean the green onions and cut off the bottoms. Use all of the white part and up to an inch of the green part. Throw the tops away. Mince the onions as finely as you can and add them to the sauce. Stir them in well. Chop the salad shrimp into fine bits. You can do this with a sharp knife, or in the food processor using the steel blade and an on-and-off motion. Mix in the shrimp and check to see how salty the spread is. Add salt if needed. Chill the spread in a covered bowl in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours. You can make it in the morning if you plan to serve it that night. Yield: Makes approximately 3 cups.
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Joanne Fluke (Plum Pudding Murder (Hannah Swensen, #12))
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Needless to say, cooking for a man with such a delicate palate can be challenging and every once in a while I like to make something that isn't served with a glass of milk and a side of applesauce. This can be difficult with a husband with such discriminating taste buds. Difficult, but not impossible, if you're willing to lie. Which I am. During the winter months I love to make soups and one of my favorites is taco soup. It has all of the basic food groups in one bowl; meat, veggies, beans, and Fritos. It's perfection. I've been warming bodies and cleaning colons with this recipe for years. However, when I met my husband he advised he didn't like beans, so he couldn't eat taco soup. This was not the response I hoped for. I decided to make it for him anyway. The first time I did I debated whether to add beans. I knew he wouldn't eat it if I did, but I also knew the beans were what gave it the strong flavor. I decided the only way to maintain the integrity of the soup was to sacrifice mine. I lied to him about the ingredients. Because my husband is not only picky but also observant, I knew I couldn't just dump the beans into the soup undetected. Rather, I had to go incognito. For that, I implored the use of the food processor, who was happy to accommodate after sitting in the cabinet untouched for years. I dumped the cans of beans in the processor and pureed them into a paste. I then dumped the paste into the taco soup mixture, returning the food processor to the cabinet where it would sit untouched for another six months. When it came time to eat, I dished out a heaping bowl of soup and handed it to my husband. We sat down to eat and I anxiously awaited his verdict, knowing he was eating a heaping bowl of deceit. “This is delicious. What's in it?” he asked, in between mouthfuls of soup. “It's just a mixture of taco ingredients,” I innocently replied, focusing on the layer of Fritos covering my bowl. “Whatever it is, it's amazing,” he responded, quickly devouring each bite. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to slap the spoon out of his hand and yell “That's beans, bitch!” However, I refrained because I'm classy (and because I didn't want to clean up the mess).
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Jen Mann (I Just Want to Be Alone (I Just Want to Pee Alone Book 2))
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Take the 2013 film Monsters University. Even when using an industrial grade computing processor, it would have taken an average of 29 hours for each of the film’s 120,000-plus frames to be rendered. In total, that would have meant more than two years just to render the entire movie once, assuming not a single render was ever replaced or scene changed. With this challenge in mind, Pixar built a data center of 2,000 conjoined industrial-grade computers with a combined 24,000 cores that, when fully assigned, could render a frame in roughly seven seconds.
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Matthew Ball (The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything)
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Through feedback, said Wiener, Bigelow, and Rosenblueth, a mechanism could embody purpose.
Even today, more than half a century later, that assertion still has the power to fascinate and disturb. It arguably marks the beginning of what are now known as artificial intelligence and cognitive science: the study of mind and brain as information processors. But more than that, it does indeed claim to bridge that ancient gulf between body and mind—between ordinary, passive matter and active, purposeful spirit. Consider that humble thermostat again. It definitely embodies a purpose: to keep the room at a constant temperature. And yet there is nothing you can point to and say, "Here it is—this is the psychological state called purpose." Rather, purpose in the thermostat is a property of the system as a whole and how its components are organized. It is a mental state that is invisible and ineffable, yet a natural phenomenon that is perfectly comprehensible.
And so it is in the mind, Wiener and his colleagues contended. Obviously, the myriad feedback mechanisms that govern the brain are far more complex than any thermostat. But at base, their operation is the same. If we can understand how ordinary matter in the form of a machine can embody purpose, then we can also begin to understand how those three pounds of ordinary matter inside our skulls can embody purpose—and spirit, and will, and volition. Conversely, if we can see living organisms as (enormously complex) feedback systems actively interacting with their environments, then we can begin to comprehend how the ineffable qualities of mind are not separate from the body but rather inextricably bound up in it.
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M. Mitchell Waldrop (The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal)
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For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt. When one is writing—really writing—it is as if one is given a fatline to the gods. No true poet has been able to explain the exhilaration one feels when the mind becomes an instrument as surely as does the pen or thought processor, ordering and expressing the revelations flowing in from somewhere else. My muse had fled.
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Dan Simmons (Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1))
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What differentiates mediocre people from exceptional ones is how deeply they process. Most people are surface-level processors, but the best of the best go much deeper. Long-term thinking versus short-term thinking is the difference between a grand master and an amateur. Surface-level processors are looking for a quick fix. They are thinking only one move ahead, and their goal is to make the issue disappear for now. Deep-level processors look beneath the surface for causes. They are thinking several moves ahead and planning a sequence of moves to make sure the issue doesn’t happen again.
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Patrick Bet-David (Your Next Five Moves: Master the Art of Business Strategy)
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For the weekend before, we had had a blowout of tarts, a tart bender, tart madness- even, I dare say, a Tart-a-pa-looza, if you will forgive one final usage of the construction before we at last bury that cruelly beaten dead pop-culture horse. Tarte aux Pêches, Tarte aux Limettes, Tarte aux Poires, Tarte aux Cerises. Tarte aux Fromage Frais, both with and without Pruneaux. Tarte aux Citron et aux Amandes, Tarte aux Poires à la Bourdalue, and Tarte aux Fraises, which is not "Tart with Freshes," as the name of the Tarte aux Fromage Frais ("Tart with Fresh Cheese," of course) might suggest, but rather Tart with Strawberries, which was a fine little French lesson. (Why are strawberries, in particular, named for freshness? Why not blackberries? Or say, river trout? I love playing amateur- not to say totally ignorant- etymologist....)
I made two kinds of pastry in a kitchen so hot that, even with the aid of a food processor, the butter started melting before I could get it incorporated into the dough. Which work resulted in eight tart crusts, perhaps not paragons of the form, but good enough. I made eight fillings for my eight tart crusts. I creamed butter and broke eggs and beat batter until it formed "the ribbon." I poached pears and cherries and plums in red wine.
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Julie Powell (Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously)
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Yet very few people realize how badly they write and how badly this hurts them and their career and their company. People are judged on the basis of who they appear to be in their writing, and if what they write is pompous or fuzzy or disorganized they will be perceived as all those things. Bad writing makes bright people look dumb.
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William Zinsser (Writing with a Word Processor)
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To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The
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Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
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food processor with the honey. Blend while slowly adding milk to thin the mixture. Watch carefully, as you may need more or less than the ½ cup of milk. You are looking for the texture of soft-serve ice cream. Once this texture is achieved, transfer to a bowl and place in the freezer for at least 3 hours or overnight. Before serving, add mix-ins, if desired, like chopped nuts, dark chocolate chips, or peanut butter. Top with fresh berries. Chef Tips: • For chocolate ice cream, add 2 tablespoons of natural (non-alkalized) cocoa powder at the end before you chill the “ice cream.” As you blend the mixture, make sure there are no lumps. You may have to first pass the cocoa powder through a sieve
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Uma Naidoo (This Is Your Brain on Food: An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More (An Indispensible ... Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More))
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PAVLOVA 6 egg whites at room temperature (out of the fridge for at least an hour) 1 cup superfine sugar, divided (if you don’t have superfine sugar, you can pulse regular sugar in your food processor) 1 teaspoon cornstarch Squeeze of lemon juice 1 teaspoon vanilla Toppings 1 cup whipping cream 1 teaspoon vanilla 2 teaspoons sugar Sliced strawberries Honey Preheat oven to 300 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and draw a circle 8 to 9 inches in diameter. In a medium bowl, whisk together egg whites and ¾ cup of the sugar until light and fluffy (3 to 5 minutes). In a small bowl, mix together remaining sugar, cornstarch, lemon, and vanilla. Add to egg whites and continue beating until glossy peaks form.
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Jodi Picoult (Mad Honey)
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Thus three conclusions emerge from the eye story: (1) it is easier to inherit a ‘vision acquisition device’ than a full-blown hard-wired visual analyser; (2) the visual analyser, once ‘set up’, is refractory to radical restructuring—hence the existence of a critical period in its development in cats; (3) the eye seems to have evolved in steps from a light-sensitive, innervated cell to our complex organ by common evolutionary mechanisms. Something similar may have been taking place in evolution of the language organ, and may be occurring during individual development. An argument, put forward forcefully by Noam Chomsky and his followers, refers to the ‘poverty of stimulus’. Most permutations of word order and grammatical items in a sentence leads to incomprehensible gibberish. There is no way that children could learn without some internal ‘guide’ which sentence is grammatical and which is not, only on the basis of heard examples. To make matters worse, many parents do not correct their children’s grammatical mistakes (they seem to be much more worried about the utterance of four-letter words). Recent investigations clearly confirm that children’s ‘instinctive’ understanding of grammatical intricacies, between the ages 2 and 4, is far better than one would expect from a conventional learning mechanism. Thus there seems to be a ‘language acquisition device’ (LAD) in the brain, which must be triggered by linguistic input so that its working ultimately leads to proper language. It is the LAD, and not a fully developed linguistic processor, which seems to be innate.
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John Maynard Smith (The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language)
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If life has accelerated, and we have become overwhelmed by information to the point that we are less and less able to focus on any of it, why has there been so little pushback? Why haven’t we tried to slow things down to a pace where we can think clearly? I was able to find the first part of an answer to this—and it’s only the first part—when I went to interview Professor Earl Miller. He has won some of the top awards in neuroscience in the world, and he was working at the cutting edge of brain research when I went to see him in his office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He told me bluntly that instead of acknowledging our limitations and trying to live within them, we have—en masse—fallen for an enormous delusion. There’s one key fact, he said, that every human being needs to understand—and everything else he was going to explain flows from that. “Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time. To pretend this was the case, we took a term that was never meant to be applied to human beings at all. In the 1960s, computer scientists invented machines with more than one processor, so they really could do two things (or more) simultaneously. They called this machine-power “multitasking.” Then we took the concept and applied it to ourselves.
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Johann Hari (Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—and How to Think Deeply Again)
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PREACHER’S WIFE PINEAPPLE CASSEROLE (Betts Hager) Ingredients 2 (20-ounce) cans pineapple chunks packed in juice, well-drained 3/4 cup sugar 6 tablespoons self-rising flour (see Note below) 2 cups grated Cheddar cheese 4 ounces Ritz crackers 1 stick butter, melted NOTE: Be sure to use self-rising flour, not all-purpose, as it already has the other necessary ingredients included. Instructions Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray a 2-quart or 8 x 8-inch baking dish with cooking spray. In a medium bowl, mix the sugar and flour. Then, add pineapple and cheese and stir until there are no more dry particles. Spoon this mixture into the prepared baking dish. Crush crackers by pulsing in a food processor and add the melted butter with the machine running until it has the texture of wet sand. Add the crushed cracker mixture to the top of the casserole. Bake about 25 minutes until the top is lightly browned.
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Tonya Kappes (Beaches, Bungalows & Burglaries (Camper & Criminals, #1))
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As noted in About ESC Electrol Specialties Company began fabricating CIP System components as a vendor to one of the nations largest suppliers of cleaning chemicals to the Dairy industry more than 50 years ago. This vendor was a major provider of the engineering services, components and skilled personnel required to design and install CIPable automaed processes, for dairies initialy, and later food and beverage processors. This vendor was actively involved with new facility construction, but more importantly, also developed and applied the methodos of applying such new technology equally well to "recycle old dairies" via rennovation projects planned to provide the exisitng facility increased capacity, efficiency and quality capabilities, and keep it running during the rennovation process. This vendor worked on a design and install" basis and used its own wsanitary welding crews, even Internationally, through the mid 70s.
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John Franks
“
He was almost at his door when Vik’s earsplitting shriek resounded down the corridor. Tom was glad for the excuse to sprint back toward him. “Vik?”
He reached Vik’s doorway as Vik was backing out of it. “Tom,” he breathed, “it’s an abomination.”
Confused, Tom stepped past him into the bunk. Then he gawked, too.
Instead of a standard trainee bunk of two small beds with drawers underneath them and totally bare walls, Vik’s bunk was virtually covered with images of their friend Wyatt Enslow. There were posters all over the wall with Wyatt’s solemn, oval face on them. She wore her customary scowl, her dark eyes tracking their every move through the bunk. There was a giant marble statue of a sad-looking Vik with a boot on top of its head. The Vik statue clutched two very, very tiny hands together in a gesture of supplication, its eyes trained upward on the unseen stomper, an inscription at its base, WHY, OH WHY, DID I CROSS WYATT ENSLOW?
Tom began to laugh.
“She didn’t do it to the bunk,” Vik insisted. “She must’ve done something to our processors.”
That much was obvious. If Wyatt was good at anything, it was pulling off tricks with the neural processors, which could pretty much be manipulated to show them anything. This was some sort of illusion she was making them see, and Tom heartily approved.
He stepped closer to the walls to admire some of the photos pinned there, freeze-frames of some of Vik’s more embarrassing moments at the Spire: that time Vik got a computer virus that convinced him he was a sheep, and he’d crawled around on his hands and knees chewing on plants in the arboretum. Another was Vik gaping in dismay as Wyatt won the war games.
“My hands do not look like that.” Vik jabbed a finger at the statue and its abnormally tiny hands. Wyatt had relentlessly mocked Vik for having small, delicate hands ever since Tom had informed her it was the proper way to counter one of Vik’s nicknames for her, “Man Hands.” Vik had mostly abandoned that nickname for “Evil Wench,” and Tom suspected it was due to the delicate-hands gibe.
Just then, Vik’s new roommate bustled into the bunk.
He was a tall, slim guy with curly black hair and a pointy look to his face. Tom had seen him around, and he called up his profile from memory:
NAME: Giuseppe Nichols
RANK: USIF, Grade IV Middle, Alexander Division
ORIGIN: New York, NY
ACHIEVEMENTS: Runner-up, Van Cliburn International Piano Competition
IP: 2053:db7:lj71::291:ll3:6e8
SECURITY STATUS: Top Secret LANDLOCK-4
Giuseppe must’ve been able to see the bunk template, too, because he stuttered to a stop, staring up at the statue. “Did you really program a giant statue of yourself into your bunk template? That’s so narcissistic.”
Tom smothered his laughter. “Wow. He already has your number, man.”
Vik shot him a look of death as Tom backed out of the bunk.
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S.J. Kincaid
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PORK AND BEANS BREAD Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 15-ounce can of pork and beans (I used Van Camp’s) 4 eggs, beaten (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 cup vegetable oil (not canola, not olive—use vegetable oil) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 cups white (granulated) sugar 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon baking powder ½ teaspoon salt 1 and ½ teaspoons ground cinnamon 1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts (measure after chopping—I used pecans) 3 cups all-purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) Prepare your pans. Spray two 9-inch by 5-inch by 3-inch-deep loaf pans with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray. Don’t drain the pork and beans. Pour them into a food processor or a blender, juice and all, and process them until they’re pureed smooth with no lumps. Place the beaten eggs in a large mixing bowl. Stir in the pureed pork and beans and mix them in well. Add the vegetable oil and the vanilla extract. Mix well. Add the sugar and mix it in. Then mix in the baking soda, baking powder, salt and cinnamon. Stir until everything is incorporated. Stir in the chopped nuts. Add the flour in one-cup increments, stirring after each addition. Spoon half of the batter into one loaf pan and the other half of the batter into the second loaf pan. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 50 to 60 minutes. Test the bread with a long food pick inserted in the center. If it comes out sticky, the bread needs to bake a bit more. If it comes out dry, remove the pans from the oven and place them on a wire rack to cool for 20 minutes. Run the sharp blade of a knife around inside of all four sides of the pan to loosen the bread, and then tip it out onto the wire rack. Cool the bread completely, and then wrap it in plastic wrap. At this point the bread can be frozen in a freezer bag for up to 3 months. Hannah and Lisa’s Note: If you don’t tell anyone the name of this bread, they probably won’t ever guess it’s made with pork and beans.
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Joanne Fluke (Plum Pudding Murder (Hannah Swensen, #12))
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It’s not me telling you,” she said. “It’s neuroscience that would say that our capacity to multitask is virtually nonexistent. Multitasking is a computer-derived term. We have one processor. We can’t do it.” “I think that when I’m sitting at my desk feverishly doing seventeen things at once that I’m being clever and efficient, but you’re saying I’m actually wasting my time?” “Yes, because when you’re moving from this project to this project, your mind flits back to the original project, and it can’t pick it up where it left off. So it has to take a few steps back and then ramp up again, and that’s where the productivity loss is.” This problem was, of course, exacerbated in the age of what had been dubbed the “info-blitzkrieg,” where it took superhuman strength to ignore the siren call of the latest tweet, or the blinking red light on the BlackBerry. Scientists had even come up with a term for this condition: “continuous partial attention.” It was a syndrome with which I was intimately familiar, even after all my meditating.
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Dan Harris (10% Happier)
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C. P. Snow was right about the need to respect both of “the two cultures,” science and the humanities. But even more important today is understanding how they intersect. Those who helped lead the technology revolution were people in the tradition of Ada, who could combine science and the humanities. From her father came a poetic streak and from her mother a mathematical one, and it instilled in her a love for what she called “poetical science.” Her father defended the Luddites who smashed mechanical looms, but Ada loved how punch cards instructed those looms to weave beautiful patterns, and she envisioned how this wondrous combination of art and technology could be manifest in computers.
(...)
This innovation will come from people who are able to link beauty to engineering, humanity to technology, and poetry to processors. In other words, it will come from the spiritual heirs of Ada Lovelace, creators who can flourish where the arts intersect with the sciences and who have a rebellious sense of wonder that opens them to the beauty of both.
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Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
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BONNIE BROWNIE COOKIE BARS Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 4 one-ounce squares semi-sweet chocolate (or 3/4 cup chocolate chips) 3/4 cup butter (one and a half sticks) 1½ cups white (granulated) sugar 3 beaten eggs (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 1 cup flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) 1/2 cup chopped cashews 1/2 cup chopped butterscotch chips 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips (I used Ghirardelli) Prepare a 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan by lining it with a piece of foil large enough to flap over the sides. Spray the foil-lined pan with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray. Microwave the chocolate squares and butter in a microwave-safe mixing bowl on HIGH for 1 minute. Stir. (Since chocolate frequently maintains its shape even when melted, you have to stir to make sure.) If it’s not melted, microwave for an additional 20 seconds and stir again. Repeat if necessary. Stir the sugar into the chocolate mixture. Feel the bowl. If it’s not so hot it’ll cook the eggs, add them now, stirring thoroughly. Mix in the vanilla extract. Mix in the flour, and stir just until it’s moistened. Put the cashews, butterscotch chips, and chocolate chips in the bowl of a food processor, and chop them together with the steel blade. (If you don’t have a food processor, you don’t have to buy one for this recipe—just chop everything up as well as you can with a sharp knife.) Mix in the chopped ingredients, give a final stir by hand, and spread the batter out in your prepared pan. Smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Bake at 350 degrees F. for 30 minutes. Cool the Bonnie Brownie Cookie Bars in the pan on a metal rack. When they’re thoroughly cool, grasp the edges of the foil and lift the brownies out of the pan. Place them facedown on a cutting board, peel the foil off the back, and cut them into brownie-sized pieces. Place the squares on a plate and dust lightly with powdered sugar if you wish. Hannah’s Note: If you’re a chocoholic, or if you’re making these for Mother, frost them with Neverfail Fudge Frosting before you cut them.
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Joanne Fluke (Cream Puff Murder (Hannah Swensen, #11))
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GRAHAM CRACKER CAKE Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. ½ cup salted butter, softened (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) ¾ cup white (granulated) sugar 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 large eggs 2 teaspoons baking powder ¼ teaspoon salt 2 and ¼ cups graham cracker crumbs 1 cup whole milk 1 cup chopped nuts (measure after chopping—I used walnuts) 8 and ¾ ounce can crushed pineapple WITH juice ¼ cup white (granulated) sugar Hannah’s Note: You can either crush your own graham cracker crumbs by placing graham crackers in a bag and rolling the bag with a rolling pin, crushing them in the food processor by using the steel blade, or you can buy ready-made graham cracker crumbs at the store. Spray a 9-inch square baking pan with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray and sprinkle the inside with flour. Shake out excess flour. You may also use Pam spray for baking, which contains a coating of flour. Both will work well. In an electric mixer, cream the butter and the sugar, adding the sugar gradually with the mixer on MEDIUM speed. Add the vanilla extract and mix it in thoroughly. Beat in the eggs, one at a time, incorporating the first egg before you add the second. Add the baking powder and the salt, beating until they’re thoroughly mixed. Mix in half of the graham cracker crumbs with half of the milk. Beat well. Mix in the other half of the graham cracker crumbs with the remaining half of the milk. Remove the bowl from the mixer and fold in the chopped nuts by hand. Pour the Graham Cracker Cake batter into the prepared pan and smooth the top with a rubber spatula. Bake your cake at 350 degrees F. for 30 minutes. Take your cake out of the oven, turn off the oven, and place the cake on a wire rack to await its topping. In a saucepan on the stovetop, combine the contents of the can of crushed pineapple and juice with the white sugar. Cook the pineapple mixture over MEDIUM HIGH heat, stirring constantly until it boils. Turn the burner down to LOW and cook the pineapple mixture for an additional 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Pour the hot pineapple sauce over the hot cake. Cool in the pan. Serve the Graham Cracker Cake with sweetened whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.
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Joanne Fluke (Blackberry Pie Murder (Hannah Swensen, #17))
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GINGER-ORANGE CHEESECAKE Makes 8 servings 1½ cups graham cracker crumbs ⅓ cup butter, melted ⅓ cup white sugar 32 ounces cream cheese, softened ⅔ cup white sugar, plus 2 tablespoons 1 cup sour cream, divided 1 tablespoon grated orange peel 4 eggs 2 cups clementine wedges ½ cup finely chopped crystallized ginger Preparation Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Mix graham cracker crumbs, butter, and ⅓ cup sugar together. Press on bottom of 9² x 3² springform pan and just enough up sides to seal bottom. Place cream cheese, ⅔ cup sugar, ½ cup sour cream, and orange peel in food processor. Cover and process about 3 minutes or until smooth. Add eggs. Cover and process until well blended. Spread over crust. Bake 1 hour 20 minutes, or until center is set. Cool on wire rack for 15 minutes. Using spatula around edges to loosen, remove side of pan. Refrigerate uncovered 3 hours or until chilled, then cover and continue refrigerating at least 4 hours, but not longer than 48 hours. Mix ½ cup sour cream and 2 tablespoons sugar and spread over top of cheesecake. Top with fresh fruit and crystallized ginger. Store uneaten portion covered with foil in fridge. TWELVE BIANCA Though I wanted to turn and bolt, I didn’t.
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J.T. Geissinger (Burn for You (Slow Burn, #1))
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The market's second wild trait-almost-cycles-is prefigured in the story of Joseph. Pharaoh dreamed that seven fat cattle were feeding in the meadows, when seven lean kine rose out of the Nile and ate them. Likewise, seven scraggly ears of corn consumed seven plump ears. Joseph, a Hebrew slave, called the dreams prophetic: Seven years of famine would follow seven years of prosperity. He advised Pharaoh to stockpile grain for bad times to come. And when all passed as prophesied, "Joseph opened all the storehouses, and sold unto the Egyptians...And all countries came into Egypt to Joseph to buy corn; because that the famine was so sore in all lands." Given the profits he and Pharaoh must have made, one might call Joseph the first international arbitrageur. That pattern, familiar from Hurst's work on the Nile, also appears in markets. A big 3 percent change in IBM's stock one day might precede a 2 percent jump another day, then a 1.5 percent change, then a 3.5 percent move-as if the first big jumps were continuing to echo down the succeeding days' trading. Of course, this is not a regular or predictable pattern. But the appearance of one is strong. Behind it is the influence of long-range dependence in an otherwise random process-or, put another way, a long-term memory through which the past continues to influence the random fluctuations of the present.
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Benoît B. Mandelbrot (The (Mis)Behavior of Markets)
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Bycatch and discards are a fact of life to a fisherman. There is no fishing method that catches only the quarry. ...The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that about a third of what is caught worldwide, some 29 million tons, goes over the side. This takes what is hauled from the sea to around 132 million tons a year. Add to that the number of organisms that are killed or damaged by net, line, or trap and are never landed--such as whales, porpoises, turtles, and birds--and the number of animals destroyed on the bottom, and the total catch by fishermen reaches something more like 220 million tons a year. Consider that much of the weight of palatable fish is head, cartilage, bone, and offal, which goes over the side or is thrown away by processors. Consider also that about 44 million tons of fish are caught to make industrial products and food for farmed fish. Consider that some of the palatable fish caught will be turned into products for other than human consumption--as cat food, for instance. Consider that there may be an element of waste because some fish will not sell. Taking all these things into account, it is possible to conclude that the amount of protein eaten by someone or something is maybe less than 20 percent of the 104 million tons landed, and only 10 percent of the amount of marine animals destroyed annually in the oceans. These are rough figures, but, given a wide margin of error, they are about right. So catching wild fish is a wasteful business.
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Charles Clover (The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat)
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According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. Capitalism processes data by directly connecting all producers and consumers to one another, and allowing them to exchange information freely and make decisions independently. For example, how do you determine the price of bread in a free market? Well, every bakery may produce as much bread as it likes, and charge for it as much as it wants. The customers are equally free to buy as much bread as they can afford, or take their business to the competitor. It isn’t illegal to charge $1,000 for a baguette, but nobody is likely to buy it.
On a much grander scale, if investors predict increased demand for bread, they will buy shares of biotech firms that genetically engineer more prolific wheat strains. The inflow of capital will enable the firms to speed up their research, thereby providing more wheat faster, and averting bread shortages. Even if one biotech giant adopts a flawed theory and reaches an impasse, its more successful competitors will achieve the hoped-for breakthrough. Free-market capitalism thus distributes the work of analysing data and making decisions between many independent but interconnected processors. As the Austrian economics guru Friedrich Hayek explained, ‘In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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#1. No Escape and feature keys
Today’s Apple Event confirmed many of the rumors surrounding the lengthy-awaited refresh of the Macbook Pro line. The Escape and Function keys at the laptops had been deserted in choose of a hint bar that changed relying at the software that is getting used. The last the Macbook Pro got a chief update was a shocking 4 years in the past and many guides are celebrating the brand new design. However, the lack of bodily Escape and Function keys is a disaster for one major set of Apple’s customers — Developers.
Let’s test numbers:
There are ~ 19 million developers inside the global. And Apple has managed to promote ~19 million Macs over the past four quarters. What a twist of fate!
Yes, builders are drawn toward Apple products mainly for software program reasons: the Unix-like running gadget and the proprietary development atmosphere. But builders want to have a useful keyboard to make use of that software and now they don’t. Why Tim Cook, why?
This isn’t to say that the contact bar is an inherently awful concept. You should locate it on pinnacle of the Esc and feature keys as opposed to doing away with them completely! Something like this:
#2 Power. Almost no improvement for RAM and a processor
The 2016 MacBook Pro ships with RAM and processor specifications that are nearly equal to the 2010 model. Deja vu?
RAM:
At least it appears like that, because the MacBook Pro has had alternatives of as much as 16 GB of RAM in view that 2010. The best difference now's that you pay for the update.
Processors:
The MacBook Pro had options with 2.4 gigahertz twin-middle processors again in 2010. Anything new in 2016? Not absolutely, well… nope.
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Marry Boyce (تاریخ زردشت / جلد دوم / هخامنشیان)
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TIO TITO’S SUBLIME LIME BAR COOKIES Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. ½ cup finely-chopped coconut (measure after chopping—pack it down when you measure it) 1 cup cold salted butter (2 sticks, 8 ounces, ½ pound) ½ cup powdered (confectioners) sugar (no need to sift unless it’s got big lumps) 2 cups all-purpose flour (pack it down when you measure it) 4 beaten eggs (just whip them up with a fork) 2 cups white (granulated) sugar cup lime juice (freshly squeezed is best) cup vodka (I used Tito’s Handmade Vodka) ½ teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking powder ½ cup all-purpose flour (pack it down when you measure it) Powdered (confectioners) sugar to sprinkle on top Coconut Crust: To get your half-cup of finely-chopped coconut, you will need to put approximately ¾ cup of shredded coconut in the bowl of a food processor. (The coconut will pack down more when it’s finely-chopped so you’ll need more of the stuff out of the package to get the half-cup you need for this recipe.) Chop the shredded coconut up finely with the steel blade. Pour it out into a bowl and measure out ½ cup, packing it down when you measure it. Return the half-cup of finely chopped coconut to the food processor. (You can also do this by spreading out the shredded coconut on a cutting board and chopping it finely by hand.) Cut each stick of butter into eight pieces and arrange them in the bowl of the food processor on top of the chopped coconut. Sprinkle the powdered sugar and the flour on top of that. Zoop it all up with an on-and-off motion of the steel blade until it resembles coarse cornmeal. Prepare a 9-inch by 13-inch rectangular cake pan by spraying it with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray. Alternatively, for even easier removal, line the cake pan with heavy-duty foil and spray that with Pam. (Then all you have to do is lift the bar cookies out when they’re cool, peel off the foil, and cut them up into pieces.) Sprinkle the crust mixture into the prepared cake pan and spread it out with your fingers. Pat it down with a large spatula or with the palms of your impeccably clean hands. Hannah’s 1st Note: If your butter is a bit too soft, you may end up with a mass that balls up and clings to the food processor bowl. That’s okay. Just scoop it up and spread it out in the bottom of your prepared pan. (You can also do this in a bowl with a fork or a pie crust blender if you prefer.) Hannah’s 2nd Note: Don’t wash your food processor quite yet. You’ll need it to make the lime layer. (The same applies to your bowl and fork if you make the crust by hand.) Bake your coconut crust at 350 degrees F. for 15 minutes. While your crust is baking, prepare the lime layer. Lime Layer: Combine the eggs with the white sugar. (You can use your food processor and the steel blade to do this, or you can do it by hand in a bowl.) Add the lime juice, vodka, salt, and baking powder. Mix thoroughly. Add the flour and mix until everything is incorporated. (This mixture will be runny—it’s supposed to be.) When your crust has baked for 15 minutes, remove the pan from the oven and set it on a cold stovetop burner or a wire rack. Don’t shut off the oven! Just leave it on at 350 degrees F. Pour the lime layer mixture on top of the crust you just baked. Use potholders to pick up the pan and return it to the oven. Bake your Sublime Lime Bar Cookies for an additional 30 minutes. Remove the pan from the oven and cool your lime bars in the pan on a cold stovetop burner or a wire rack. When the pan has cooled to room temperature, cover it with foil and refrigerate it until you’re ready to serve. Cut the bars into brownie-sized pieces, place them on a pretty platter, and sprinkle them lightly with powdered sugar. Yum! Hannah’s 3rd Note: If you would prefer not to use alcohol in these bar cookies, simply substitute whole milk for the vodka. This recipe works both ways and I can honestly tell you that I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t like my Sublime Lime Bar Cookies!
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Joanne Fluke (Blackberry Pie Murder (Hannah Swensen, #17))
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This extreme situation in which all data is processed and all decisions are made by a single central processor is called communism. In a communist economy, people allegedly work according to their abilities, and receive according to their needs. In other words, the government takes 100 per cent of your profits, decides what you need and then supplies these needs. Though no country ever realised this scheme in its extreme form, the Soviet Union and its satellites came as close as they could. They abandoned the principle of distributed data processing, and switched to a model of centralised data processing. All information from throughout the Soviet Union flowed to a single location in Moscow, where all the important decisions were made. Producers and consumers could not communicate directly, and had to obey government orders.
For instance, the Soviet economics ministry might decide that the price of bread in all shops should be exactly two roubles and four kopeks, that a particular kolkhoz in the Odessa oblast should switch from growing wheat to raising chickens, and that the Red October bakery in Moscow should produce 3.5 million loaves of bread per day, and not a single loaf more. Meanwhile the Soviet science ministry forced all Soviet biotech laboratories to adopt the theories of Trofim Lysenko – the infamous head of the Lenin Academy for Agricultural Sciences. Lysenko rejected the dominant genetic theories of his day. He insisted that if an organism acquired some new trait during its lifetime, this quality could pass directly to its descendants. This idea flew in the face of Darwinian orthodoxy, but it dovetailed nicely with communist educational principles. It implied that if you could train wheat plants to withstand cold weather, their progenies will also be cold-resistant. Lysenko accordingly sent billions of counter-revolutionary wheat plants to be re-educated in Siberia – and the Soviet Union was soon forced to import more and more flour from the United States.
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Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
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CRANBERRY SCONES Preheat oven to 425 degrees F., rack in the middle position. 3 cups all-purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) 2 Tablespoons white (granulated) sugar 2 teaspoons cream of tartar (important) 1 teaspoon baking powder 1 teaspoon baking soda ½ teaspoon salt ½ cup softened salted butter (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) 2 large eggs, beaten (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 cup unflavored yogurt (8 ounces) 1 cup sweetened dried cranberries (Craisins, or their equivalent) ½ cup whole milk Use a medium-size mixing bowl to combine the flour, sugar, cream of tartar, baking powder, baking soda, and salt. Stir them all up together. Cut in the salted butter just as you would for piecrust dough. Hannah’s Note: If you have a food processor, you can use it for the first step. Cut ½ cup COLD salted butter into 8 chunks. Layer them with the dry ingredients in the bowl of the food processor. Process with the steel blade until the mixture has the texture of cornmeal. Transfer the mixture to a medium-sized mixing bowl and proceed to the second step. Stir in the beaten eggs and the unflavored yogurt. Then add the sweetened dried cranberries and mix everything up together. Add the milk and stir until everything is combined. Drop the scones by soup spoonfuls onto a greased (or sprayed with Pam or another nonstick baking spray) baking sheet, 12 large scones to a sheet. You can also drop these scones on parchment paper if you prefer. Once the scones are on the baking sheet, you can wet your fingers and shape them into more perfect rounds. (If you do this and there are any leftovers, you can slice them in half and toast them for breakfast the next morning.) Bake the scones at 425 degrees F. for 12 to 14 minutes, or until they’re golden brown on top. Cool the scones for at least five minutes on the cookie sheet, and then remove them with a spatula. Serve them in a towel-lined basket so they stay warm. Yield: Makes 12 large and delicious scones.
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Joanne Fluke (Plum Pudding Murder (Hannah Swensen, #12))
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STRAWBERRY SHORTBREAD BAR COOKIES Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position. Hannah’s 1st Note: These are really easy and fast to make. Almost everyone loves them, including Baby Bethie, and they’re not even chocolate! 3 cups all purpose flour (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) ¾ cup powdered (confectioner’s) sugar (don’t sift un- less it’s got big lumps) 1 and ½ cups salted butter, softened (3 sticks, 12 ounces, ¾ pound) 1 can (21 ounces) strawberry pie filling (I used Comstock)*** *** - If you can’t find strawberry pie filling, you can use another berry filling, like raspberry, or blueberry. You can also use pie fillings of larger fruits like peach, apple, or whatever. If you do that, cut the fruit pieces into smaller pieces so that each bar cookie will have some. I just put my apple or peach pie filling in the food processor with the steel blade and zoop it up just short of being pureed. I’m not sure about using lemon pie filling. I haven’t tried that yet. FIRST STEP: Mix the flour and the powdered sugar together in a medium-sized bowl. Cut in the softened butter with a two knives or a pastry cutter until the resulting mixture resembles bread crumbs or coarse corn meal. (You can also do this in a food processor using cold butter cut into chunks that you layer between the powdered sugar and flour mixture and process with the steel blade, using an on-and-off pulsing motion.) Spread HALF of this mixture (approximately 3 cups will be fine) into a greased (or sprayed with Pam or another nonstick cooking spray) 9-inch by 13-inch pan. (That’s a standard size rectangular cake pan.) Bake at 350 degrees F. for 12 to 15 minutes, or until the edges are just beginning to turn golden brown. Remove the pan to a wire rack or a cold burner on the stove, but DON’T TURN OFF THE OVEN! Let the crust cool for 5 minutes. SECOND STEP: Spread the pie filling over the top of the crust you just baked. Sprinkle the crust with the other half of the crust mixture you saved. Try to do this as evenly as possible. Don’t worry about little gaps in the topping. It will spread out and fill in a bit as it bakes. Gently press the top crust down with the flat blade of a metal spatula. Bake the cookie bars at 350 degrees F. for another 30 to 35 minutes, or until the top is lightly golden. Turn off the oven and remove the pan to a wire rack or a cold burner to cool completely. When the bars are completely cool, cover the pan with foil and refrigerate them until you’re ready to cut them. (Chilling them makes them easier to cut.) When you’re ready to serve them, cut the Strawberry Shortbread Bar Cookies into brownie-sized pieces, arrange them on a pretty platter, and if you like, sprinkle the top with extra powdered sugar.
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Joanne Fluke (Devil's Food Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #14))