Project X Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Project X. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it–our life–hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. ‘But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! If only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. ‘The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
Marcel Proust
until you become completely obsessed with your mission, no one will take you seriously. Until the world understands that you're not going away—that you are 100 percent committed and have complete and utter conviction and will persist in pursuing your project—you will not get the attention you need and the support you want.
Grant Cardone (The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure)
in order to get to the next level of whatever you're doing, you must think and act in a wildly different way than you previously have been. You cannot get to the next phase of a project without a grander mind-set, more acceleration, and extra horsepower.
Grant Cardone (The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure)
think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International))
The Joke...Audience as reflexive cast; 35 mm. X2 cameras;variable length; black and white, silent. Parody of Hollis Frampton’s ‘audience-specific events,’ two Ikegami EC-35 video cameras in theater record the film’s audience and project the resultant raster onto screen - the theater audience watching itself watch itself get the obvious ‘joke’ and become increasingly self-conscious and uncomfortable and hostile supposedly comprises the film’s involuted ‘antinarrative’ flow. Incandenza’s first truly controversial project, Film & Kartridge Kulcher’s Sperber credited it with ‘unwittingly sounding the death-knell of post-postsctructural film in terms of sheer annoyance.
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
They took one look at Zip2’s code and began rewriting the vast majority of the software. Musk bristled at some of their changes, but the computer scientists needed just a fraction of the lines of code that Musk used to get their jobs done. They had a knack for dividing software projects into chunks that could be altered and refined whereas Musk fell into the classic self-taught coder trap of writing what developers call hairballs—big, monolithic hunks of code that could go berserk for mysterious reasons.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
Everyone hated Calculus. Quadratic equations, parabolas, logarithms, trigonometry - you name it. It was like floating in an endless, frictionless void traveling at x miles per hour at a descension rate of one half the speed of gravity. Solve for x.
Andrew Sturm (The Kirkwood Project)
Of course the Eridian language has no words for colors. Why would it? I never thought of colors as a mysterious thing. But if you’ve never heard of them before, I guess they’re pretty weird. We have names for frequency ranges in the electromagnetic spectrum. Then again, my students all have eyes and they were still amazed when I told them “x-rays,” “microwaves,” “Wi-Fi,” and “purple” were all just wavelengths of light.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
Then again, my students all have eyes and they were still amazed when I told them “x-rays,” “microwaves,” “Wi-Fi,” and “purple” were all just wavelengths of light.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
The quandary with life is you’re halfway through before you realize it’s a do-it-yourself project.
Spike Carlsen (Cabin Lessons: A Nail-by-Nail Tale: Building Our Dream Cottage from 2x4s, Blisters, and Love)
There can be no question that Musk has mastered the art of getting the most out of his employees. Interview three dozen SpaceX engineers and each one of them will have picked up on a managerial nuance that Musk has used to get people to meet his deadlines. One example from Brogan: Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The ideal SpaceX employee is someone like Steve Davis, the director of advanced projects at SpaceX. “He’s been working sixteen hours a day every day for years,” Brogan said. “He gets more done than eleven people working together.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Inventing the Future)
Moonshots, by their definition, live in that gray area between audacious projects and pure science fiction. Instead of mere 10 percent gains, they aim for 10x (meaning ten times) improvements—that’s a 1000 percent increase in performance.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
As but one example, the title of this book comes from a 1968 article that appeared in the prestigious Archives of General Psychiatry, in which psychiatrists Walter Bromberg and Frank Simon described schizophrenia as a “protest psychosis” whereby black men developed “hostile and aggressive feelings” and “delusional anti-whiteness” after listening to the words of Malcolm X, joining the Black Muslims, or aligning with groups that preached militant resistance to white society. According to the authors, the men required psychiatric treatment because their symptoms threatened not only their own sanity, but the social order of white America. Bromberg and Simon argued that black men who “espoused African or Islamic” ideologies, adopted “Islamic names” that were changed in such a way so as to deny “the previous Anglicization of their names” in fact demonstrated a “delusional anti-whiteness” that manifest as “paranoid projections of the Negroes to the Caucasian group.”10
Jonathan M. Metzl (The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease)
now know about the involvement of Union Carbide in the Manhattan Project, the TNT Area, Area 51, and the Roswell Crash (where Carbide glue was found), we can assume that “nukes” and “saucers” were the exact same project. After Carbide’s Tech Center in South Charleston, West Virginia built the first atomic reactor in the late 1920s, and had
Gray Barker (Saucers of Fire: Nazi UFOs, The Hollow Earth, The Axis Shift, and Other Apocalyptic Assertions From the X-Files of Saucerian Press)
Saying the nation has progressed racially is usually a statement of ideology, one that has been used all too often to obscure the opposite reality of racist progress.
Ibram X. Kendi (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
As an entrepreneur, here are a few things that are easy to document: Why did we want to work on this project? How did we get our first beta testers? How did we get our first customers? Why did we decide to work on that specific project? What do we want to accomplish in the next X years? What struggles did we face working in the X industry? What are our learnings after X months of being entrepreneurs?
Guillaume Moubeche (The $150M secret)
The X chromosome does most of the heavy developmental lifting, while the little Y has been shedding its associated genes at a rate of about five every one million years, committing suicide in slow motion. It’s now down to less than 100 genes. By comparison, the X chromosome carries about 1,500 genes, all necessary participants in embryonic construction projects. These are not showing any signs of decay.
John Medina (Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School)
The lab has smaller equipment bolted to the table. I see an 8000x microscope, an autoclave, a bank of test tubes, sets of supply drawers, a sample fridge, a furnace, pipettes—wait a minute. Why do I know all those terms?
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
We have names for frequency ranges in the electromagnetic spectrum. Then again, my students all have eyes and they were still amazed when I told them “x-rays,” “microwaves,” “Wi-Fi,” and “purple” were all just wavelengths of light.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
Her name can’t really be Myrtle Combat, can it?” “Of course not,” Erica replied. “Her real name is Prudence Buttercup, but that made her sound more like an interior decorator than an assassin. So she changed it. Lots of female assassins have pseudonyms: Dinah Mite, Barb Dwyer, Kay Ottic.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
This iteration of the racial-progress refrain ... focuses our attention on how the United States has come a long way (the past) and how America has a long way to go (the future). This past/future logic has compelled generation after generation to overlook the present - indeed, the presence of racism.
Ibram X. Kendi (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
I’m supposed to hire two more team members out of whatever law enforcement branch I can entice them from, but I haven’t really bothered. Seeing as how every case I have is like a bad episode of The X-Files, but without the actual monsters, aliens and government conspiracies, I just don’t see the need to deal with more personalities.
Jeremy Robinson (Project Nemesis (Nemesis Saga #1))
Vischer’s idea of a back and forth between projecting the self and internalizing the world—what he called a “direct continuation of the external sensation into an internal one”—influenced generations of philosophers, psychologists, and aesthetic theorists. To describe his radical new concept, he used the German word Einfühlung, literally “feeling-in.” When psychological works influenced by Vischer began to be translated into English in the early twentieth century, the language needed a new term for this new idea, and translators invented the word empathy. It is pretty shocking to realize that empathy is barely a hundred years old, about the same age as X-rays and lie-detector tests.
Damion Searls (The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, and The Power of Seeing)
The guiding principle at SpaceX is to embrace your work and get stuff done. People who await guidance or detailed instructions languish. The same goes for workers who crave feedback. And the absolute worst thing that someone can do is inform Musk that what he’s asking is impossible. An employee could be telling Musk that there’s no way to get the cost on something like that actuator down to where he wants it or that there is simply not enough time to build a part by Musk’s deadline. “Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
I think that life would suddenly seem wonderful to us if we were threatened to die as you say. Just think of how many projects, travels, love affairs, studies, it—our life—hides from us, made invisible by our laziness which, certain of a future, delays them incessantly. But let all this threaten to become impossible for ever, how beautiful it would become again! Ah! if only the cataclysm doesn’t happen this time, we won’t miss visiting the new galleries of the Louvre, throwing ourselves at the feet of Miss X, making a trip to India. The cataclysm doesn’t happen, we don’t do any of it, because we find ourselves back in the heart of normal life, where negligence deadens desire. And yet we shouldn’t have needed the cataclysm to love life today. It would have been enough to think that we are humans, and that death may come this evening.
Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life (Vintage International))
For the Chrome project, we created a sub-OKR to turbocharge JavaScript. The goal was to make applications on the web work as smoothly as downloads on a desktop. We set a moonshot goal of 10x improvement and named the project “V8,” after the high-performance car engine. We were fortunate to find a Danish programmer named Lars Bak, who’d built virtual machines for Sun Microsystems and held more than a dozen patents. Lars is one of the great artists in his field. He came to us and said, without an ounce of bravado, “I can do something that is much, much faster.” Within four months, he had JavaScript running ten times as fast as it ran on Firefox. Within two years, it was more than twenty times faster—incredible progress. (Sometimes a stretch goal is not as wildly aspirational as it may seem. As Lars later told Steven Levy in In the Plex, “We sort of underestimated what we could do.”)
John Doerr (Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs)
My gratitude goes as well to the other data scientists I pestered and to the institutions that collect and maintain their data: Karlyn Bowman, Daniel Cox (PRRI), Tamar Epner (Social Progress Index), Christopher Fariss, Chelsea Follett (HumanProgress), Andrew Gelman, Yair Ghitza, April Ingram (Science Heroes), Jill Janocha (Bureau of Labor Statistics), Gayle Kelch (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Alaina Kolosh (National Safety Council), Kalev Leetaru (Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone), Monty Marshall (Polity Project), Bruce Meyer, Branko Milanović (World Bank), Robert Muggah (Homicide Monitor), Pippa Norris (World Values Survey), Thomas Olshanski (US Fire Administration/FEMA), Amy Pearce (Science Heroes), Mark Perry, Therese Pettersson (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Stephen Radelet, Auke Rijpma (OECD Clio Infra), Hannah Ritchie (Our World in Data), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Google Trends), James X. Sullivan, Sam Taub (Uppsala Conflict Data Program), Kyla Thomas, Jennifer Truman (Bureau of Justice Statistics), Jean Twenge, Bas van Leeuwen (OECD Clio Infra), Carlos Vilalta, Christian Welzel (World Values Survey), Justin Wolfers, and Billy Woodward (Science Heroes). David Deutsch, Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Kevin Kelly, John Mueller, Roslyn Pinker, Max Roser, and Bruce Schneier read a draft of the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
These ideas persisted into the twentieth century and drove government programs that attempted to regulate Black women’s reproductive lives. State and federally funded family-planning programs engaged in massive campaigns to sterilize Black women. For example, between 1933 and 1976, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina approved the involuntary sterilizations of more than 7,500 people—affecting Black people at a disproportionate rate—on the grounds that they were “mentally defective.”44 In 1973, a federal district judge presided over a case of two Black sisters from Montgomery, Alabama, who were sterilized at ages twelve and fourteen when government-paid nurses pushed their illiterate mother into signing a consent form with an X.45 The judge, Gerhard Gesell, in ruling against this practice, noted that “over the last few years, an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs.
Nikole Hannah-Jones (The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story)
During his time working for the head of strategy at the bank in the early 1990s, Musk had been asked to take a look at the company’s third-world debt portfolio. This pool of money went by the depressing name of “less-developed country debt,” and Bank of Nova Scotia had billions of dollars of it. Countries throughout South America and elsewhere had defaulted in the years prior, forcing the bank to write down some of its debt value. Musk’s boss wanted him to dig into the bank’s holdings as a learning experiment and try to determine how much the debt was actually worth. While pursuing this project, Musk stumbled upon what seemed like an obvious business opportunity. The United States had tried to help reduce the debt burden of a number of developing countries through so-called Brady bonds, in which the U.S. government basically backstopped the debt of countries like Brazil and Argentina. Musk noticed an arbitrage play. “I calculated the backstop value, and it was something like fifty cents on the dollar, while the actual debt was trading at twenty-five cents,” Musk said. “This was like the biggest opportunity ever, and nobody seemed to realize it.” Musk tried to remain cool and calm as he rang Goldman Sachs, one of the main traders in this market, and probed around about what he had seen. He inquired as to how much Brazilian debt might be available at the 25-cents price. “The guy said, ‘How much do you want?’ and I came up with some ridiculous number like ten billion dollars,” Musk said. When the trader confirmed that was doable, Musk hung up the phone. “I was thinking that they had to be fucking crazy because you could double your money. Everything was backed by Uncle Sam. It was a no-brainer.” Musk had spent the summer earning about fourteen dollars an hour and getting chewed out for using the executive coffee machine, among other status infractions, and figured his moment to shine and make a big bonus had arrived. He sprinted up to his boss’s office and pitched the opportunity of a lifetime. “You can make billions of dollars for free,” he said. His boss told Musk to write up a report, which soon got passed up to the bank’s CEO, who promptly rejected the proposal, saying the bank had been burned on Brazilian and Argentinian debt before and didn’t want to mess with it again. “I tried to tell them that’s not the point,” Musk said. “The point is that it’s fucking backed by Uncle Sam. It doesn’t matter what the South Americans do. You cannot lose unless you think the U.S. Treasury is going to default. But they still didn’t do it, and I was stunned. Later in life, as I competed against the banks, I would think back to this moment, and it gave me confidence. All the bankers did was copy what everyone else did. If everyone else ran off a bloody cliff, they’d run right off a cliff with them. If there was a giant pile of gold sitting in the middle of the room and nobody was picking it up, they wouldn’t pick it up, either.” In
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
of pages recently visited. WebKit was originally created as a fork of KHTML as the layout engine for Safari; it is portable to many other computing platforms. Mac OS X and Windows are supported by the project.[3] WebKit's WebCore and JavaScriptCore components are available under the GNU Lesser General Public License, and the rest of WebKit is available under a
Anonymous
like to thank the many people who have assisted and supported me in this work. First, thanks to the Johns Hopkins University Press and its editors, who have believed in me from the fi rst: thanks to Anders Richter, who shepherded me through the publication of the fi rst edition, and to Jacqueline Wehmueller, who inherited me from Andy after his retirement and encouraged me to write a second and now a third edition of the book. She has been a constant and steadfast source of inspiration and support for this and many other projects. Immeasurable thanks is owed to my teachers and mentors at Johns Hopkins, Paul R. McHugh and J. Raymond DePaulo, and to my psychiatric colleagues (from whom I never stop learning), especially Jimmy Potash, Melvin McInnis, Dean MacKinnon, Jennifer Payne, John Lipsey, and Karen Swartz. Thanks to Trish Caruana, LCSW, and Sharon Estabrook, OTR, for teaching me the extraordinary importance of their respective disciplines, clinical social work and occupational therapy, to the comprehensive treatment of persons with mood disorders. And thanks, of course, to my partner, Jay Allen Rubin, for much more than I could ever put into words. x ■ pre face
Anonymous
Walk into any mosque, temple, church, or synagogue and you will find differing examples, different ways of interpreting God. The One True God is hard to find when a mishmash of human traits is constantly being projected.
Gudjon Bergmann (More Likely to Quote Star Wars than the Bible: Generation X and Our Frustrating Search for Rational Spirituality)
The side of the Cube (x) which were delivered by the Coupling Equation of the GPG even acts as a Projection Constant on the pyramidal dimensions by converting the base area (having RC squared units) into height squared (having meter squared units).
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
As impossible as it may sound, but the CEC uses a calibration gear of 1,000 teeth to project a one day's measure of time (PI) onto a right triangle alongside the speed of light value (x=2.99792458) while uttering thereby the time it takes light to reach Earth coming from the Sun (8.3 minutes).
Ibrahim Ibrahim (Quotable: My Worldview)
In the late 1990s, Parachute was the market leader with more than 50 per cent market share. Fresh from its success in taking market share in toothpaste away from Colgate using Pepsodent, HUL entered the coconut oil category to take on Marico. Dadiseth, the then chairman of HUL, had warned Mariwala to sell Marico to HUL or face dire consequences. Mariwala decided to take on the challenge. Even the capital markets believed that Marico stood no chance against the might of HUL which resulted in Marico’s price-to-earnings ratio dipping to as low as 7x, as against 13x during its listing in 1996. As part of its plans to take on Marico, HUL relaunched Nihar in 1998, acquired Cococare from Redcon and positioned both brands as price challengers to Parachute. In addition, HUL also increased advertising and promotion spends for its brands. In one quarter in FY2000, HUL’s advertising and promotional (A&P) spend on coconut oil alone was an amount which was almost equivalent to Marico’s full year A&P budget (around Rs 30 crore). As Milind Sarwate, former CFO of Marico, recalls, ‘Marico’s response was typically entrepreneurial and desi. We quickly realized that we have our key resource engine under threat. So, we re-prioritized and focused entirely on Parachute. We gave the project a war flavour. For example, the business conference on this issue saw Mariconians dressed as soldiers. The project was called operation Parachute ki Kasam. The leadership galvanized the whole team. It was exhilarating as the team realized the gravity of the situation and sprang into action. We were able to recover lost ground and turn the tables, so much so that eventually Marico acquired the aggressor brand, Nihar.’ Marico retaliated by relaunching Parachute: (a) with a new packaging; (b) with a new tag line highlighting its purity (Shuddhata ki Seal—or the seal of purity); (c) by widening its distribution; and (d) by launching an internal sales force initiative. Within twelve months, Parachute regained its lost share, thus limiting HUL’s growth. Despite several relaunches, Nihar failed against Parachute. Eventually, HUL dropped the brand Nihar off its power brand list before selling it off to Marico in 2006. Since then, Parachute has been the undisputed leader in the coconut oil category. This leadership has ensured that when one visits the hair oil section in a retail store, about 80 per cent of the shelves are occupied by Marico-branded hair oil.
Saurabh Mukherjea (The Unusual Billionaires)
In the ancient china, a man came to an emperor with his invention of chess, he demonstrated it to his king, and king was very impressed with his invention and asked him what he expects as a reward.  The man told the king, he wants grain of rice to be placed on square doubling the grain rice on each subsequent square. King thought it to be very humble and modest reward and asked his servant to fulfill the request, by the time the rice grains filled the first half of the chess board, he had more than 4 billion rice grains, by the time the servant got to 64th square, the man had more than (18x10^18) or more than all the wealth of the land.
Amin Nagpure (IOT Enabled: Internet of Things Enabled, Includes Sample Project using Nodejs with Arduino Uno Board)
There’s the potential that Tesla is setting itself up to capitalize on a situation like the one Apple found itself in when it first introduced the iPhone. Apple’s rivals spent the initial year after the iPhone’s release dismissing the product. Once it became clear Apple had a hit, the competitors had to catch up. Even with the device right in their hands, it took companies like HTC and Samsung years to produce anything comparable. Other once-great companies like Nokia and BlackBerry didn’t withstand the shock. If, and it’s a big if, Tesla’s Model 3 turned into a massive hit—the thing that everyone with enough money wanted because buying something else would just be paying for the past—then the rival automakers would be in a terrible bind. Most of the car companies dabbling in electric vehicles continue to buy bulky, off-the-shelf batteries rather than developing their own technology. No matter how much they wanted to respond to the Model 3, the automakers would need years to come up with a real challenger and even then they might not have a ready supply of batteries for their vehicles. “I think it is going to be a bit like that,” Musk said. “When will the first non-Tesla Gigafactory get built? Probably no sooner than six years from now. The big car companies are so derivative. They want to see it work somewhere else before they will approve the project and move forward. They’re probably more like seven years away. But I hope I’m wrong.” Musk
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
Elon will say, ‘Fine. You’re off the project, and I am now the CEO of the project. I will do your job and be CEO of two companies at the same time. I will deliver it,’” Brogan said. “What’s crazy is that Elon actually does it. Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
(Taken from the scene in which protagonist Rebeka is caught snooping around down in the underground floors of Project Code-X...) “I was just curious as to what was down here,” I said boldly. He studied me, evaluating the situation carefully. His face relaxed. “They say curiosity is the mark of a great scientist,” he mused light-heartedly. “It is often the loss of that child-like curiosity that ends the career of many a great scientist prematurely. Their minds go dead and they are no longer inspired. Once that light goes, they are completely and utterly useless to me.” He had a habit of ruminating aloud, so I said nothing. Then perceiving me again, he took me by the arm. “Well now, Doctor Taft. Let me show you precisely what we are doing down here in the basement," he said, proceeding to guide me around the corridor.
S.J. Robinson (Alpha is the Beginning (Project Code-X Trilogy #1))
(Taken from Chapter Three 'The Bewildered Herd', After the massacre, Rebeka's reflects on her work at Project Code-X...) We were rounded up like frightened animals, who didn’t know what their fate was going to be. I was comforted a little by having Michael’s company. It afforded me some protection from the pandemonium of grief and raw emotion that was all around me. I was able to hide my face from it, and perhaps hide my guilt too. Was I really to blame for all of this? Project Code-X wasn’t just written on my hands, it was carved into my heart and flowing through my veins. It was my life’s work, my ambition, my achievement, the pinnacle of my career. I had given my life to it and it had taken my life from me. In truth, I was no more than its slave. Project Code-X wasn’t just a secret Government project; it was a living and breathing entity. It was a life-force, a parasite, an animal, a wild beast that fed on human lives. It drank human blood and fed on human flesh. It sucked you in and spat you out – all in the name of science.
S.J. Robinson (Beta to Psi (Project Code-X Trilogy #2))
During the Second World War, the United States military initiated Project X-Ray, a top secret program in which bats were trained to carry and deliver explosive devices. Ultimately the project was scrapped after hundreds of bats escaped from the test range, incinerated several army buildings, and took up residence beneath a large fuel tank.
Kenneth Oppel (Sunwing (The Silverwing Trilogy Book 2))
An editor's life isn't all that glamorous. She (and it’s usually a she) works in a 10’ x 10’ office all day, every day. She has to attend boring acquisition meetings with a bunch of other editors who are pitching their pet projects
Andy Ross (The Literary Agent's Guide to Writing a Non-Fiction Book Proposal)
Instead of saying, “Part of the reason I wasn’t able to get this in on time was that you waited until Friday afternoon to ask me to work on it,” say, “I’m totally committed to ensuring that this doesn’t happen again. We’ve identified three things that I need to do differently: [x, y, and z]. Something else that would be really helpful to me is if I had more lead time on the more complicated projects. If I can get the assignments on Wednesday instead of Friday, that would enable me to balance new projects with my current projects and other hard-to-move commitments. I don’t know to what extent that’s possible on your end. What are your thoughts on that?
Douglas Stone (Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most)
Sort out your priorities for the session and identify what the outcome will be. This is not the same as identifying what the decision will be i.e. the outcome may be that a decision will be made regarding the method of banding books in the guided reading store, not that the decision to use method X will be the outcome. Helpful elements for a variety of meeting types are Brainstorming (or the more politically correct: Thought Showers) which are good for enthusing and bonding a team, and Workshopping where all work together to produce a finished project/plan/strategy.
Carole Lorimer (The Seven Deadly Demons of Deputy Headship)
When integrationists use segregation and separation interchangeably, they are using the vocabulary of Jim Crow. Segregationists blurred the lines between segregation and separation by projecting their policies as standing “on the platform of equal accommodations for each race but separate,” to quote Atlanta newspaper editor Henry W. Grady in 1885.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
I asked him was three hundred and sixty degrees, then, the maximum of degrees in anything? He said “Yes.” I said, “Well, why is it that Masons go only to thirty-three degrees?” He had no satisfactory answer. But for me, the answer was that Masonry, actually, is only thirty-three degrees of the religion of Islam, which is the full projection, forever denied to Masons, although they know it exists.
Malcolm X (The Autobiography of Malcolm X)
The projected benevolence of the Plessy ruling and the Atlanta Compromise seemed to bring a finality to the disorder of the “Negro problem.” Indeed, the finality of the “Negro problem” as the nineteenth century closed meant a United States dead set on playing down the southern horrors of discrimination and playing up what was wrong with Black people.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
Scientists planning the next phase of the human genome project are being forced to confront a treacherous issue: the genetic differences between human races,” science writer Nicholas Wade reported in The New York Times not long after Clinton’s announcement.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
1200 to 1500 Square Feet: Min. Price per square feet - 30*40, 30*50 : Plots - Dec, 2023 : Possession Date - Tumkur Road, Bangalore :Location - PROJECT AREA: 20 Acres - Budget: 36.99 Lakhs Onwards - RERA ID: Coming Soon
providentwoodfield.org.in
Now, describe, in a single written sentence, your intended successful outcome for this problem or situation. In other words, what would need to happen for you to check this project off as “done”? It could be as simple as “Take the Hawaii vacation,” “Handle situation with customer X,” “Resolve college situation with Susan,” “Clarify new divisional management structure,” “Implement new investment strategy,” or “Research options for dealing with Manuel’s reading issue.” All clear? Great. Now write down the very next physical action required to move the situation forward. If you had nothing else to do in your life but get closure on this, what visible action would you take right now? Would you call or text someone? Write an e-mail? Take pen and paper and brainstorm about it? Surf the Web for data? Buy nails at the hardware store? Talk about it face-to-face with your partner, your assistant, your attorney, or your boss? What? Got the answer to that?
David Allen (Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity)
It was also a checklist, but it didn’t specify construction tasks; it specified communication tasks. For the way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another—on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another’s concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction—who had to share (or “submit”) particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed.
Atul Gawande (The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right)
working on projects without a clear focus will pay the bills for a while, it won't establish you as a leader in your field (pro tip: leaders command higher fees). If you want to be the go-to person for “X”, then you need to make sure your work improves people's businesses.
Nathan Powell (The Creative Professional's Guide: How to Write Better Proposals)
Where a typical manager may set the deadline for the employee, Musk guides his engineers into taking ownership of their own delivery dates. “He doesn’t say, ‘You have to do this by Friday at two P.M.,’” Brogan said. “He says, ‘I need the impossible done by Friday at two P.M. Can you do it?’ Then, when you say yes, you are not working hard because he told you to. You’re working hard for yourself. It’s a distinction you can feel. You have signed up to do your own work.” And by recruiting hundreds of bright, self-motivated people, SpaceX has maximized the power of the individual. One person putting in a sixteen-hour day ends up being much more effective than two people working eight-hour days together. The individual doesn’t have to hold meetings, reach a consensus, or bring other people up to speed on a project. He just keeps working and working and working. The
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future)
The Zookeeper’s Wife is the story of Jan and Antonina Zabinski, Polish Christian zookeepers who, horrified by Nazi racism, managed to save more than three hundred people. Author Diane Ackerman writes movingly about Polish émigré Eva Hoffman’s psychic earthquake of having to shed her name in order to save her life: “Nothing much has happened, except a small, seismic mental shift. The twist in our names takes them a tiny distance from us—but it is a gap into which the infinite hobgoblin of abstraction enters.” Suddenly Eva Hoffman’s given name, and that of her sister, no longer exists even though “they were as surely us as our eyes or hands.” The new names were actually “identification tags, disembodied signs pointing to objects that happen to be my sister and myself. We walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names that make us strangers to ourselves.” DISCOVERING WHO YOU ARE Our names, our identities, our figuring out “This is who I am” are a huge part of discovering our dreams. And haven’t many of us said, “I’ll start dreaming once I wrap up with X, Y, or Z project.” At the same time, we are asking ourselves, “Why do I keep putting things off? There’s so much to do but I can’t get anything done.” Perhaps we have it backwards. Perhaps having goals for ourselves is not something to do after we’ve wrapped up X, Y, and Z projects. Perhaps daring to dream is a goal we need to pursue now, because it’s key to getting those X, Y, and Z projects done. Psychologist Timothy Pychyl writes in an article titled “Teenagers, Identity Crises, and Procrastination” that if we can’t answer the questions “Who am I?” and “What am I?” we’re more likely to procrastinate. In other words, the more people know who they are, the less likely they are to procrastinate. Pychyl explains the interconnectedness between identity and agency as follows: “Identity is that knowledge of who we are. . . . Agency is the belief that we are in control of our decisions and responsible for our outcomes. . . . It means we make a difference, we make things happen, we act on the world. Thus, being an active agent depends on identity, or knowing who we are.” Perhaps, then, the best thing we can do is to put our busyness to the side, and instead focus on our identity and our dreams—or, as management consultant Robin Dickinson said after he read Pychyl’s study, “Focus on your To-Be List, before the To-Do List.” When we return to that to-do list we might just find we’re actually beginning to get things done.
Whitney Johnson (Dare, Dream, Do: Remarkable Things Happen When You Dare to Dream)
IV. Real techies don’t worry about forced eugenics. I learned this from a real techie in the cafeteria of a software company. The project team is having lunch and discussing how long it would take to wipe out a disease inherited recessively on the X chromosome. First come calculations of inheritance probabilities. Given a population of a given size, one of the engineers arrives at a wipe-out date. Immediately another suggests that the date could be moved forward by various manipulations of the inheritance patterns. For example, he says, there could be an education campaign. The six team members then fall over one another with further suggestions. They start with rewards to discourage carriers from breeding. Immediately they move to fines for those who reproduce the disease. Then they go for what they call “more effective” measures: Jail for breeding. Induced abortion. Forced sterilization. Now they’re hot. The calculations are flying. Years and years fall from the final doom-date of the disease. Finally, they get to the ultimate solution. “It’s straightforward,” someone says. “Just kill every carrier.” Everyone responds to this last suggestion with great enthusiasm. One generation and—bang—the disease is gone. Quietly, I say, “You know, that’s what the Nazis did.” They all look at me in disgust. It’s the look boys give a girl who has interrupted a burping contest. One says, “This is something my wife would say.” When he says “wife,” there is no love, warmth, or goodness in it. In this engineer’s mouth, “wife” means wet diapers and dirty dishes. It means someone angry with you for losing track of time and missing dinner. Someone sentimental. In his mind (for the moment), “wife” signifies all programming-party-pooping, illogical things in the universe. Still, I persist. “It started as just an idea for the Nazis, too, you know.” The engineer makes a reply that sounds like a retch. “This is how I know you’re not a real techie,” he says.
Ellen Ullman (Life in Code: A Personal History of Technology)
If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say and why? Are there any quotes you think of often or live your life by? The quote I live by is “By any means necessary.” It’s from Malcolm X. When I was in college, I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X and was blown away by the determination and commitment that Malcolm X had to his people and to fight against a system that was not designed to support or help him or his people. He really made strides in bringing civil rights to the forefront of the American people. It was a very moving book, and I remember reading it a few times. As I started my label, I wanted to create a slogan with this concept, and I wanted to use this idea of “by any means necessary” as a way of life. When we started [my label] Dim Mak back in 1996, I didn’t have any money to launch the label, as I only had $ 400 to my name. So I would find any way possible to make sure these records came out. I did whatever I could with the tools in front of me with no excuses and no complaining. You gotta find a way to get your project done; you gotta think outside the box. My team also lives and works by the mantra of “by any means necessary,” and because of that, we can get things done that others might not. I feel lucky to have such a great team that will share this way of life with me.
Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
If Prof. X is paid by the government to invent weapons to kill people, some will inevitably wonder about the moral character of Prof. X. If Prof. Y claims that Prof. Z the parapsychologist is untrustworthy, some will wonder if Prof. Y himself can be trusted fully, and if science is truly "impartial." In a world of TOP SECRET stamps and FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, some will inevitably wonder how much is being hidden from them by the Citadel, as the Manhattan Project was hidden in the 1940s and C.I.A. drug research was hidden in the 1960s and 1970s.
Robert Anton Wilson (The New Inquisition: Irrational Rationalism and the Citadel of Science)
we reevaluate the goal and discuss what needs to change to improve our confidence. These are typical actions: Remove an impediment (“Let’s buy a new build server to replace the broken one!”) Help a bottleneck (“Let’s all do testing today!”) Reduce scope (“If we remove feature X from this release, we can still reach the goal!”) Adjust the goal (“This goal is no longer realistic; let’s define a new goal that we actually believe in!”) Work harder (“Who can come in on Saturday?”)
Henrik Kniberg (Lean from the Trenches: Managing Large-Scale Projects with Kanban)
This practice would be built upon by Taylor’s colleague Henry Gantt, who in the 1910s developed the Gantt charts that would help organize many of the twentieth century’s most ambitious construction projects, from the Hoover Dam to the Interstate Highway System. A century later, Gantt charts still adorn the walls and screens of project managers at firms like Amazon, IKEA, and SpaceX.
Brian Christian (Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions)
Had anyone from Detroit stopped by Tesla Motors at this point, they would have ended up in hysterics. The sum total of the company’s automotive expertise was that a couple of the guys at Tesla really liked cars and another one had created a series of science fair projects based on technology that the automotive industry considered ridiculous. What’s more, the founding team had no intention of turning to Detroit for advice on how to build a car company. No, Tesla would do what every other Silicon Valley start-up had done before it, which was hire a bunch of young, hungry engineers and figure things out as they went along.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
It is about x as illustrated by y to be told in a z.
Marion Roach Smith (The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life)
The Wolf. The single most productive engineer you’ll meet. You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are engineers, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics: They appear to exist outside of the well-defined process that we’ve defined to get things done, but they appear to suffer no consequences for not following these rules. Everyone knows they’re the Wolf, but no one ever calls them the Wolf. They have a manager, but no one really knows who it is. They have a lot of meetings, but none of them are scheduled. Inviting them to your meeting is a crap shoot. They understand how “the system” works, they understand how to use “the system” to their advantage, and they understand why “the system” exists, but they think “the system” is a bit of a joke. You can ask a Wolf to become a manager, but they’ll resist it. If you happen to convince them to do it, they will do a fine job, but they won’t stay in that role long. In fact, they’ll likely quit managing when you least expect it. Lastly, and most importantly, the Wolf generates disproportionate value for the company with their unparalleled ability to identify and rapidly work on projects essential to the future of the company.
Michael Lopp (Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager)
And because I need to make sure we actually get tickets for the right train, and I trust Jawa to do that, not you. I don’t want to end up in Canada.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
Of course not!” Cyrus said, like I was a fool. “Penelope’s the grenade launcher! What kind of dimwit names a flamethrower Penelope?
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
Grandma!” she exclaimed. “Please don’t strangle my boyfriend!
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
Focus on the next step, not the next thousand steps. Use your willpower to move your attention away from the overwhelming aspects of a project and narrow it down to the next actionable task you can get started on. Lower your perfectionistic standards. Decrease your initial resistance to getting started by lowering your standards. For example, aim to meditate for one minute, not 20 minutes. Follow the two-minute rule. If a task takes less than two minutes to complete, do it immediately. Set an implementation intention. Use the formula, “If situation X arises, then I will perform response Y.” A common example: “If I get home after work, then I’ll immediately start studying for my upcoming math exam.” Focus on the process, not the outcome. Set a timer for 20 to 30 minutes and focus on the process of working on a dreaded task for that predetermined amount of time.
Nils Salzgeber (Stop Procrastinating: A Simple Guide to Hacking Laziness, Building Self Discipline, and Overcoming Procrastination)
Instead, there had already been an active conspiracy theory claiming that shape-shifting reptilian aliens from the planet Flumbo were secretly taking the place of normal human beings. The Flumbonians had been accused of being behind everything from crashing the stock market to rigging the Super Bowl to ruining the last season of Game of Thrones.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
COURAGEOUS QUESTIONS What is the problem we have that no one talks about? What do we do that really annoys our customers? What is the greatest obstacle to your productivity? What must I do better as a leader if we are to be successful? What do you think we could do differently next time to help this project (or person) succeed? What recommendations do you have before we start on this conversion? What are you most afraid of with this program/project/process? What is the biggest source of conflict you’re having working with X department? (How might we be contributing to the issue?) What’s sabotaging our success?
Karin Hurt (Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates)
Who’d you think they were trying to kill in your office?” Zoe asked. “You?” “I am the principal of the academy. It’s completely understandable that someone would want to kill me and not a student.” “I guess that’s true,” Mike said. “I can think of plenty of students who’ve wanted you dead.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
More broadly, anti-crack fervor created a general tough-on-crime climate that led to more arrests, more convictions, and longer sentences. The result was a boom in the U.S. prison population. According to the Sentencing Project, there were 40,900 people incarcerated in 1980 for drug offenses. That number swelled to 489,000 by 2013. People of color absorbed much of the explosion in incarceration. In 1980, they comprised more than 40 percent of the state and federal prison population. By 2010, that number had grown to 68 percent—despite people of color accounting for just around 30 percent of the total U.S. population. What did the nation get for the widespread warehousing of citizens?
Donovan X. Ramsey (When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era)
I had already forked over $1,000 for a preparatory course, feeding the U.S. test-prep and private tutoring industry that would grow to $12 billion in 2014 and is projected to reach $17.5 billion in 2020.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
Choose a dojo. There’s Ross Jeffries and the school of Speed Seduction, where subliminal language patterns are used to get a girl aroused. Or Mystery and the Mystery Method, in which social dynamics are manipulated to snag the most desirable woman in a club. Or David DeAngelo and Double Your Dating, in which he advocates keeping the upper hand over a woman through a combination of humor and arrogance that he calls cocky funny. Or Gunwitch and Gunwitch Method, in which the only thing students have to do is project animalistic sexuality and escalate physical contact until the woman stops them. His crude motto: “Make the ho say no.” Or there’s David X, David Shade, Rick H., Major Mark, and Juggler—the newest guru on the scene, who appeared online one day claiming he could pick up women better and faster than any other PUA simply by reading his grocery list. Then there are the inner-circle teachers, like Steve P. and Rasputin, who reveal their techniques only to those they deem worthy. Yes, there are plenty of mentors to choose from, each with his own methods and disciples, each operating under the belief that his way is the way. And the giants do battle constantly
Neil Strauss (The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists)
The world projects possibilities and restrictions onto people based on identity variables (age, race, gender, etc.). We need to explore the sneaky ways we’ve internalized those stories. Internalized identity rules sound like “Because I am X, I cannot also be/do Y.” For example: • Because I am a mother, I cannot take a pole dancing class. • Because I am forty years old, I cannot become a student. • Because I am well-known in my community, I cannot go to therapy. • Because I do CrossFit, I cannot do Zumba. • Because I am a man, I cannot ask my partner to hold me.
Alexandra H. Solomon (Love Every Day: 365 Relational Self-Awareness Practices to Help Your Relationship Heal, Grow, and Thrive)
The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence.
Lauren Berlant (The Affect Theory Reader)
If I can match x with y, therefore, I am conscious.
Joey Lawsin (The Biotronics Project)
Dr. Stadler,” asked one of them, pointing at the building on the knoll, “is it true that you consider Project X the greatest achievement of the State Science Institute?” There was a dead drop of silence. “Project . . . X . . . ?” said Dr. Stadler. He knew that something was ominously wrong in the tone of his voice, because he saw the heads of the newsmen go up, as at the sound of an alarm; he saw them waiting, their pencils poised. For one instant, while he felt the muscles of his face cracking into the fraud of a smile, he felt a formless, an almost supernatural terror, as if he sensed again the silent working of some smooth machine, as if he were caught in it, part of it and doing its irrevocable will. “Project X?” he said softly, in the mysterious tone of a conspirator. “Well, gentlemen, the value—and the motive—of any achievement of the State Science Institute are not to be doubted, since it is a nonprofit venture—need I say more?
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
although he slipped at the end and landed straddling a branch with a squeak of pain that indicated he had just severely impacted his private parts.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
It is worth noting that Elon Musk enjoys certain privileges that may not be available to everyone. For instance, he is situated in the United States, which is a developed country with a large population of over 300 million people, and where funding opportunities are relatively more abundant. His previous entrepreneurial successes have also placed him in favourable positions to secure funding for his ambitious projects.
Tiisetso Maloma (Innovate Like Elon Musk: Easily Participate in Innovation with Guidelines from Tesla and SpaceX: A Simple Understanding of First Principle Thinking and Vertical Integration)
It’s not easy to recognize, in real time, when you’re throwing good money after bad—which is why I think analyzing progress should be a “team sport.” You have to be willing to solicit input from people who have different perspectives on the project. To overcome the “sunk costs” fallacy, this helps to change the default incentive (to keep going) so people can feel good about saying it’s time to stop. Astro Teller, head of the radical innovation company called X at Alphabet (Google’s parent company), gives failure bonuses to employees who admit a project isn’t working.
Amy C. Edmondson (Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well)
The job interview is perhaps the most obvious example of this sort of unpaid emotional labour: here the candidate must appear sufficiently confident and enthusiastic to satisfy a selection panel assessing "presentation" and "personality", as if these were objective scientific criteria. So the interview, regardless of the job, becomes a kind of talent show audition hinging on generic questions about change, teamwork etc. (the equivalents of the standard repertoire of X Factor ballads), while the interviewee must project an all-purpose positivity by extemporising around this script without revealing its artificiality. The candidate must project the right image and hit the right notes, and must put his 'heart and soul' into every performance, even for the most dreary role.
Ivor Southwood (Non Stop Inertia)
When presenting the results of a project, for example, someone could say either “I found X” or “The results show X.” “I found” makes it clear who did the work. The person speaking put the effort in and they should get credit.
Jonah Berger (Magic Words)
And to survive you had to shut off parts of yourself, what you felt, what you reacted to. God, what do I know? Maybe it was all projection. My own broken heart mapped onto a newborn.
Gregg Andrew Hurwitz (Prodigal Son (Orphan X, #6))
Erica!” Mary snapped. “Here’s a piece of advice: If you don’t have something nice to say…” “… then say it directly to the person who screwed up so they won’t make the same mistake again,” Erica finished. “Yeah, I know it.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
Michelangelo continued to take on projects far beyond—impossibly beyond—his skill level. Most people are afraid to commit fully to the 10x process because it inevitably requires letting go of your current identity, circumstances, and comfort zone.
Dan Sullivan (10x Is Easier Than 2x: How World-Class Entrepreneurs Achieve More by Doing Less)
Hey!” the woman who ran the petting zoo shouted. “Who’s throwing ducks at the llamas?
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
Dr. Ferris smiled. “No private businessman or greedy industrialist would have financed Project X,” he said softly, in the tone of an idle, informal discussion. “He couldn’t have afforded it. It’s an enormous investment, with no prospect of material gain. What profit could he expect from it? There are no profits henceforth to be derived from that farm.” He pointed at the dark strip in the distance. “But, as you have so well observed, Project X had to be a non-profit venture. Contrary to a business firm, the State Science Institute had no trouble in obtaining funds for the Project. You have not heard of the Institute having any financial difficulties in the past two years, have you? And it used to be such a problem—getting them to vote the funds necessary for the advancement of science. They always demanded gadgets for their cash, as you used to say. Well, here was a gadget which some people in power could fully appreciate. They got the others to vote for it. It wasn’t difficult. In fact, a great many of those others felt safe in voting money for a project that was secret— they felt certain it was important, since they were not considered important enough to be let in on it. There were, of course, a few skeptics and doubters. But they gave in when they were reminded that the head of the State Science Institute was Dr. Robert Stadler—whose judgment and integrity they could not doubt.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Dad had bought a stack of these biographies, towering over one hundred now. Martin Luther King Jr. Frederick Douglass. Mary McLeod Bethune. Richard Allen. Ida B. Wells. Dad kept urging me to pull from the tower for every writing project.
Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist)
A person’s behavior might not be motivated by any particular thought or feeling, but still we make all kinds of assumptions, deciding, “This person must think x about me.” Even though these are just projections of our anxiety onto someone else, we teach ourselves to dislike and even hate them, firmly believing in the truth of our assumptions.
Haemin Sunim (Love for Imperfect Things / The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down)
As in most Northern cities fielding black migrants, housing remained a pernicious obstacle in the 1950s. Suburban tracts constructed on a vast scale for soldiers returning from World War II—and backed by Federal Housing Administration (FHA) grants—were generally closed to Negro veterans. “Restrictive covenants” limited ownership to whites only, including recent immigrants from Europe. In developments like the 17,000 tract houses of Levittown, built on Long Island between 1947 and 1951, federally subsidized housing generated equity wealth and spawned a new generation of white middle-class Americans. Shut out of Levittown—the prototype for postwar suburbia—and other such developments for decades, Negro veterans were belatedly granted lesser subsidies for scatter-site housing in generally depressed areas. Moreover, the government subsidized public housing for Negroes that were not owner-occupied—like the homes for whites in suburbia—but rented to low-income families in inner-city areas. These federally backed housing projects capped family earning for eligibility at little more than minimum wage. The U.S. government essentially ran a two-tier program, encouraging a permanent Negro underclass of renters while operating the FHA-backed suburban home ownership program to stimulate a dramatic growth of the white middle class.
Les Payne (The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X)
You mean the Blackbird, right? Those never hit Hypersonic speeds.” “No, they didn’t, but this one has some advantages over the originals,” Dan said, “including a new engine design we pulled from the X-39 project.” “There’s an X-39?” “Not anymore,” Isaacs said bluntly. “They’re missing their engines.
Evan Currie (Semper Fi (Superhuman, #3))
What does it mean to do a great job versus an average or poor job? Can you give me some examples? Can you share your impressions of how you think Project X or Meeting Y went? Why do you think that? I noticed that Z happened the other day. . . . Is that normal or should I be concerned? What keeps you up at night? Why? How do you determine which things to prioritize?
Julie Zhuo (The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You)
was wondering if she could get your husband’s recipe for the potato salad he served when we visited you last month. I know it’s classified, but you can trust us. We’re willing to trade you our recipe for apple cobbler in return.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
We work hard at X to make it safe to fail. Teams kill their ideas as soon as the evidence is on the table because they're rewarded for it. They get applause from their peers. Hugs and high fives from their manager, me in particular. They get promoted for it. We have bonused every single person on teams that ended their projects, from teams as small as two to teams of more than 30.48
Amy C. Edmondson (The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth)
bands. I started out decently well, employing a Nook-Bhan-San move called “Fast as Lightning.” This wasn’t really an attack. Instead, I just darted about quickly in an unpredictable pattern, hoping that my opponent might grow tired of chasing me around before she got the chance to hurt me. It wasn’t the sort of technique that earned you an A, but then, it was a lot less painful than staying put and getting punched in the nose. Unfortunately, my opponent responded with a move called “Even Faster Than Lightning” where she simply moved quicker than I did,
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
The piece I know is that he put a price on Ripley’s head. As of noon today, the first person to take out the kid gets twenty million dollars.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
I’m betting that Zoe is with Ben Ripley right now. Along with two other associates, Mike Brezinski and Erica Hale. And they are currently at Poor Richard’s Sandwich Shoppe at 104 Market Street in Philadelphia. “Uh-oh,” Mike said.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
Only two of the bombs I defused were nuclear.
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
But if we leave right now, averaging sixty miles an hour, it should only take us eight hours to get there.” “Twenty hours,” Erica corrected. “Who taught you math?” “Oops,” Alexander said. “Well, that’s certainly longer, but we can still make the best of it. I’ll download some audiobooks, we can sing show tunes, maybe I can even find a place around here that sells Travel Bingo…
Stuart Gibbs (Spy School Project X)
Applying his own elegant algebra of politics, Sumner warned that well-intentioned social progressives often coerced unwitting average citizens into funding dubious social projects. Sumner wrote: “As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine…what A, B, and C shall do for X.” But what about C? There was nothing wrong with A and B helping X. What was wrong was the law, and the indenturing of C to the cause. C was the forgotten man, the man who paid, “the man who never is thought of.
Amity Shlaes (The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression)
What’s going on is data or death. GoogleX demands that all their projects be measurable and testable. They won’t start a project if they don’t have ways to judge its progress. And they do judge its progress—repeatedly. Sometimes
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))