Propulsion Quotes

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

That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they'd never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind's first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle--behold, the Running Man. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and to avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her, and with her you ran off to start a new life together. You had to love running, or you wouldn't live to love anything else. And like everyhing else we ove--everything we sentimentally call our 'passions' and 'desires' it's really an encoded ancestral necessity. We were born to run; we were born because we run. We're all Running People, as the Tarahumara have always known.
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain.
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
She is sixteen and her skin is the darkness before the black, the plum of the day’s light, her breasts like sunsets trapped beneath her skin, but for all her youth and beauty she has a sour distrusting expression that only dissolves under the weight of immense pleasure. Her dreams are spare, lack the propulsion of a mission, her ambition is without traction. Her fiercest hope? That she will find a man. What she doesn’t yet know: the cold, the backbreaking drudgery of the factorias, the loneliness of Diaspora, that she will never again live in Santo Domingo, her own heart. What else she doesn’t know: that the man next to her would end up being her husband and the father of her two children, that after two years together he would leave her, her third and final heartbreak, and she would never love again.
Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)
Q. Your idea of the perfect day … A. Sleep in. Meet Buzz Aldrin for brunch. Head over to Jet Propulsion Lab and watch them control the Curiosity Mars rover. Dinner with the writing staff of Doctor Who.
Andy Weir (The Martian)
If you want to solve a big problem, you need to go from taking credit, to sharing credit, to multiplying credit. The systems that all work, multiply credit. Multiplying credit is just another way of making everyone in the system feel ownership. And the byproduct is both resilience and propulsion.
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
She’s lonely, and she’s one of those kids for whom loneliness has become a sort of fearless propulsion, forcing her forward at an ever-accelerating pace, searching for a way to make the loneliness stop.
Seanan McGuire (Middlegame (Alchemical Journeys, #1))
Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life—the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.
Maria Popova (Figuring)
[John] Kobak explained, 'The way you learn anything is that something fails, and you figure out how not to have it fail again.
Robert S. Arrighi (Pursuit of Power: NASA's Propulsion Systems Laboratory No. 1 and 2 (NASA History Series))
She was made after the time of ribs and mud. By papal decree there were to be no more people born of the ground or from the marrow of bones. All would be created from the propulsions and mounts performed underneath bedsheets- rare exception granted for immaculate conceptions. The mixing pits were sledged and the cutting tables, where ribs were extracted from pigs and goats, were sawed in half. Although the monks were devout and obedient to the thunder of Rome, the wool of their robes was soaked not only by the salt of sweat but also by that of tears. The monks rolled down their heavy sleeves, hid their slaughter knives in the burlap of their scrips, and wiped the hoes clean. They closed the factory down, chained the doors with Vatican-crested locks, and marched off in holy formation. Three lines, their faces staring down in humility, closing their eyes when walking over puddles, avoiding their unshaven reflections.
Salvador Plascencia (The People of Paper)
I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion.
Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run?)
The forest of Tantrevalles shades a deep dank soil; somewhere under this mold lies the carcass of a snake which in better times used the name Visbhume; he no longer tippety-taps and moves and jerks to the rhythms of a propulsive inner music; and sometimes one wonders in cases like this: here is the dead thing; where has the music gone?
Jack Vance (The Green Pearl (Lyonesse, #2))
As Washington, Adams, and Jefferson reached the cusp of adulthood, each exhibited a passion for independence. Each hungered for emancipation from the entanglements of childhood and sought to carve out an autonomous existence. The handmaiden to each young man's zeal for self-mastery was a propulsive ambition that drove him to yearn for more than his father had attained, for more even than his father had ever hoped to achieve.
John Ferling (Setting the World Ablaze: Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and the American Revolution)
In what do you believe? In September's slight motion of particulars, in the weight of birds, in lust, propulsion, maps that lie.
Stacie Cassarino (Zero at the Bone)
You know what I like about driving? The forward motion of it, the propulsion of it, like you might go anywhere.
Jennifer Niven (All the Bright Places)
This was the fundamental problem with rockets—and no one had ever discovered any alternative for deep-space propulsion. It was just as difficult to lose speed as to acquire it, and carrying the necessary propellant for deceleration did not merely double the difficulty of a mission; it squared it.
Arthur C. Clarke (The Songs Of Distant Earth)
Voyages to the outer solar system are controlled from a single place on the planet Earth, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena, California.
Carl Sagan (Cosmos)
A bird's wing, comrades,' he said, 'is an organ of propulsion and not of manipulation. It should therefore be regarded as a leg. The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.
George Orwell
Good with tools,” Herr Siedler is saying. “Smart beyond your years. There are places for a boy like you. General Heissmeyer’s schools. Best of the best. Teach the mechanical sciences too. Code breaking, rocket propulsion, all the latest.
Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See)
Innovative technologies such as cold fusion, and radical energy sources, including sonoluminescent-triggered fusion and anti-gravitational propulsion, are either being withheld or blocked by governments, old-fashioned science academia and multinational corporations.
Takaaki Musha (The Orphan Conspiracies: 29 Conspiracy Theories from The Orphan Trilogy)
Many scientists flatly denied the possibility. They pointed out that Discovery, the fastest ship ever designed, would take twenty thousand years to reach Alpha Centauri — and millions of years to travel any appreciable distance across the Galaxy. Even if, during the centuries to come, propulsion systems improved out of all recognition, in the end they would meet the impassable barrier of the speed of light, which no material object could exceed.
Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey (Space Odyssey, #1))
Charlus takes the narrator's chin and slides his magnetized fingers up to the ears "like a barber's fingers." This trivial gesture, which I begin, is continued by another part of myself; without anything interrupting it physically, it branches off, shifts from a simple function to a dazzling meaning, that of the demand for love. Meaning (destiny) electrifies my hand: I am about to tear open the other's opaque body, oblige the other (whether there is a response, a withdrawal, or mere acceptance) to enter into the interplay of meaning: I am about to make the other speak. In the lover's realm, there is no acting out: no propulsion, perhaps even no pleasure -- nothing but signs, a frenzied activity of language: to institute, on each furtive occasion, the system (the paradigm) of demand and response.
Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments)
Ours is an age of onrushing turbo-capitalism, wherein the present feels more abbreviated than it used to be – at least for the world's privileged classes who live surrounded by technological time-savers that often compound the sensation of not having enough time. Consequently, one of the most pressing challenges of our age is how to adjust rapidly eroding attention spans to the slow erosions of environmental justice. If, under neoliberalism, the gulf between the enclaved rich and outcast poor has become ever more pronounced, ours is also an era of enclaved time wherein for many speed has become self-justifying, propulsive ethic that renders "uneventful" violence (to those who live remote from its attritional lethality) a weak claimant on our time. The attosecond pace of our age, with its restless technologies of infinite promise and infinite disappointment, prompts us to keep flicking and clicking distractedly in an insatiable –often insensate– quest for quicker sensation".
Rob Nixon (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor)
A good quote is a beautiful inspirational spring branch in the reader’s mind; it is a powerful propulsive force too, just like a wind! All men need winds!
Mehmet Murat ildan
German saucers and field propulsion, Pentagon Aliens and
Gray Barker (Saucers of Fire: Nazi UFOs, The Hollow Earth, The Axis Shift, and Other Apocalyptic Assertions From the X-Files of Saucerian Press)
propulsion, spewing out smoke, and three-wheeler taxis,
Edmund de Waal (The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Family's Century of Art and Loss)
Antigravity technology kept it aloft, and its propulsion system produced the faintest purr,
Dean Koontz (The Big Dark Sky)
I was well and truly up the River of Excrement and my canoe had no visible means of propulsion.
Jodi Taylor (Hope for the Best (The Chronicles of St Mary's, #10))
Guy’s whole body was humming. Normally he thought only of his head – his eyes, his smile – and was aware of his body as merely the principle of forward propulsion trundling him along. But now he was all these bright pools of sensuality – his nipples, his half-hard cock, his tingling anus, even his feet. He was glowing all over and he felt the animal in him was longing to shed its clothes.
Edmund White (Our Young Man)
The creative life! Ascension. Passing beyond oneself. Rocketing out into the blue, grasping at flying ladders, mounting, soaring, lifting the world up by the scalp, rousing the angels from their ethereal lairs, drowning in stellar depths, clinging to the tails of comets. Nietzsche had written of it ecstatically —and then swooned forward into the mirror to die in root and flower. «Stairs and contradictory stairs,» he wrote, and then suddenly there was no longer any bottom; the mind, like a splintered diamond, was pulverized by the hammer−blows of truth. There was a time when I acted as my father's keeper. I was left alone for long hours, cooped up in the little booth which we used as an office. While he was drinking with his cronies I was feeding from the bottle of creative life. My companions were the free spirits, the overlords of the soul. The young man sitting there in the mingy yellow light became completely unhinged; he lived in the crevices of great thoughts, crouched like a hermit in the barren folds of a lofty mountain range. From truth he passed to imagination and from imagination to invention. At this last portal, through which there is no return, fear beset him. To venture farther was to wander alone, to rely wholly upon oneself. The purpose of discipline is to promote freedom. But freedom leads to infinity and infinity is terrifying. Then arose the comforting thought of stopping at the brink, of setting down in words the mysteries of impulsion, compulsion, propulsion, of bathing the senses in human odors. To become utterly human, the compassionate fiend incarnate, the locksmith of the great door leading beyond and away and forever isolate. Men founder like ships. Children also. There are children who settle to the bottom at the age of nine, carrying with them the secret of their betrayal. There are perfidious monsters who look at you with the bland, innocent eyes of youth; their crimes are unregistered, because we have no names for them.
Henry Miller (Sexus (The Rosy Crucifixion, #1))
Most of the Navy work on peroxide was not directed towards missiles, but towards what was called "super performance" for fighter planes -an auxiliary rocket propulsion unit that could be brought into play to produce a burst of very high speed- so that when a pilot found six Migs breathing down his neck he could hit the panic button and perform the maneuver known as getting the hell out of here.
John D. Clark (Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants)
Given that humanity must one day flee the solar system to the nearby stars to survive, or perish, the question is: how will we get there? The nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, is over 4 light-years away. Conventional chemical propulsion rockets, the workhorses of the current space program, barely reach 40,000 miles per hour. At that speed it would take 70,000 years just to visit the nearest star.
Michio Kaku (Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration of the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel)
... now I heard in it this sense of propulsion toward a particular goal, like everything in life had buoyed him there. Like even his mistakes, even his darkness, had been taking him toward her.- Veronica Roth in Inertia
Stephanie Perkins (Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories)
Equally important was the fact that the interpretation provided the model for how Tianming had hidden his message in the three stories. He employed two basic methods: dual-layer metaphors and two-dimensional metaphors. The dual-layer metaphors in the stories did not directly point to the real meaning, but to something far simpler. The tenor of this first metaphor became the vehicle for a second metaphor, which pointed to the real intelligence. In the current example, the princess’s boat, the He’ershingenmosiken soap, and the Glutton’s Sea formed a metaphor for a paper boat driven by soap. The paper boat, in turn, pointed to curvature propulsion. Previous attempts at decipherment had failed largely due to people’s habitual belief that the stories only involved a single layer of metaphors to hide the real message. The two-dimensional metaphors were a technique used to resolve the ambiguities introduced by literary devices employed in conveying strategic intelligence. After a dual-layer metaphor, a single-layer supporting metaphor was added to confirm the meaning of the dual-layer metaphor. In the current example, the curved snow-wave paper and the ironing required to flatten it served as a metaphor for curved space, confirming the interpretation of the soap-driven boat. If one viewed the stories as a two-dimensional plane, the dual-layer metaphor only provided one coordinate; the supporting single-layer metaphor provided a second coordinate that fixed the interpretation on the plane. Thus, this single-layer metaphor was also called the bearing coordinate. Viewed by itself, the bearing coordinate seemed meaningless, but once combined with the dual-layer metaphor, it resolved the inherent ambiguities in literary language. “A subtle and sophisticated system,” a PIA specialist said admiringly. All the committee members congratulated Cheng Xin and AA. AA, who had always been looked down on, saw her status greatly elevated among the committee members. Cheng
Liu Cixin (Death's End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3))
Yes, the pursuit of love and the pursuit of wealth have much in common. Both have the potential to inspire, motivate, uplift and kill. But whereas achieving a massive bank balance demonstrably attracts fine physical specimens desperate to give their love in exchange, achieving love tends to do the opposite. It dampens the fire in the steam furnace of ambition, robbing of essential propulsion an already fraught upriver journey to the heart of financial success.
Mohsin Hamid
And to start with I would focus on five of these killer apps that have immediate application to governing today: (1) the ability to adapt when confronted by strangers with superior economic and military might without being hobbled by humiliation; (2) the ability to embrace diversity; (3) the ability to assume ownership over the future and one’s own problems; (4) the ability to get the balance right between the federal and the local—that is, to understand that a healthy society, like a healthy tropical forest, is a network of healthy ecosystems on top of ecosystems, each thriving on its own but nourished by the whole; and, maybe most important, (5) the ability to approach politics and problem-solving in the age of accelerations with a mind-set that is entrepreneurial, hybrid, and heterodox and nondogmatic—mixing and coevolving any ideas or ideologies that will create resilience and propulsion, no matter whose “side” they come from. Of
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
If we are lucky, the end of the sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on... Charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn toward the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast
Ocean Vuong (On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous)
PROJECTILE, n. The final arbiter in international disputes. Formerly these disputes were settled by physical contact of the disputants, with such simple arguments as the rudimentary logic of the times could supply—the sword, the spear, and so forth. With the growth of prudence in military affairs the projectile came more and more into favor, and is now held in high esteem by the most courageous. Its capital defect is that it requires personal attendance at the point of propulsion.
Ambrose Bierce (The Devil's Dictionary)
It has seemed to me that if I had the genius to found the jet propulsion field in the US, and found a multimillion dollar corporation and a world renowned research laboratory, then I should also be able to apply this genius in the magical field.
George Pendle (Strange Angel: The Otherworldly Life of Rocket Scientist John Whiteside Parsons)
The deep space transport uses a new type of propulsion system to send astronauts through space, called solar electric propulsion. The huge solar panels capture sunlight and convert it to electricity. This is used to strip away the electrons from a gas (like xenon), creating ions. An electric field then shoots these charged ions out one end of the engine, creating thrust. Unlike chemical engines, which can only fire for a few minutes, ion engines can slowly accelerate for months or even years.
Michio Kaku (The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality and Our Destiny Beyond Earth)
If polar bears live at the North Pole, why doesn’t Santa use them to pull the sleigh?” Brogan asked, licking mustard off his thumb with the air of someone who thought they’d won the argument, which was dumb, because he never won. Embry was the uncontested champion of arguing in their house. “Are you high?” Embry asked. “Have you seen a fucking polar bear? There’s no way they’re as aerodynamic as reindeer.” “Polar bears make about as much sense as reindeer, seeing as neither of them can actually fly,” Brogan pointed out. “Polar bears are stronger, too. You’d only need half as many to get the job done.” “Polar bears aren’t pack animals. You’d never get all of them attached to the sleigh at once.” “Think how cool it would be, though. A whole troop of polar bears pulling a sleigh. There should be fire somewhere. A secondary propulsion system in case the bears get tired. Like a jet engine.” His eyes went wide with awe, presumably at his own genius. “There should be a jet engine, Embry.
Sidney Bell (Bad Judgment)
Space is often compared to our oceans. Throw a stone at the water and the density smothers its propulsion. Skim the stone across the surface and the propulsion is mostly preserved with minimal drag. This kind of approach could work for NASA's mission to Mars.
Stewart Stafford
I learned about the propulsion system the discs use. They have a particle emitter that first shoots out a particle going three-quarters the speed of light. Then a trillionth of a second later, it shoots out another particle at light speed. The faster particle bounces off the slower particle like a billiard ball and shoots back to the ship, striking it on the side of the disc. This happens trillions of times per second, and each time the light-speed particles hit the ship, they create thrust. When you get trillions of those particle hits per second, it allows the ship to quickly accelerate to near light speed. The emitter can shoot particles from any part of the disc’s round edge, so it is a great design because it can very easily make turns and travel in any direction.
David Wilcock (The Ascension Mysteries: Revealing the Cosmic Battle Between Good and Evil)
Nelson! Stop that this minute!" She turns rigid in the glider but does not rise to see what is making the boy cry. Eccles, sitting by the screen, can see. The Fosnacht boy stands by the swing, holding two red plastic trucks. Angstrom's son, some inches shorter, is batting with an open hand toward the bigger boy's chest, but does not quite dare to move forward a step and actually strike him...Nelson's face turns up toward the porch and he tries to explain, "Pilly have - Pilly -" But just trying to describe the injustice gives it unbearable force, and as if struck from behind he totters forward and slaps the thief's chest and receives a mild shove that makes him sit on the ground. He rolls on his stomach and spins in the grass, revolved by his own incoherent kicking. Eccles' heart seems to twist with the child's body; he knows so well the propulsive power of a wrong, the way the mind batters against it and each futile blow sucks the air emptier until it seems the whole frame of blood and bone must burst in a universe that can be such a vacuum.
John Updike (Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom, #1))
Musk had spent months studying the aerospace industry and the physics behind it. From Cantrell and others, he’d borrowed Rocket Propulsion Elements, Fundamentals of Astrodynamics, and Aerothermodynamics of Gas Turbine and Rocket Propulsion, along with several more seminal texts.
Ashlee Vance (Elon Musk: How the Billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla is Shaping our Future)
One advantage of being in a long-term relationship with someone whom exhibits a strong personality is that when caught in the conduit of their force field, the resultant propulsion propels us to see both them as well as oneself in clearer light, thereby, opening a person’s eyes for constructive personal change.
Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
I once watched a video of a deer being rescued from drowning only to find herself surrounded by humans, and then she ran immediately back into the water. It's what panic looks like. An animal feeling of blind propulsion that aims at survival but doesn't quite get it right. We are so preoccupied with disaster that we step right into it.
Margaret Kimball (And Now I Spill the Family Secrets: An Illustrated Memoir)
Parsons (born Marvel Whiteside Parsons on October 2, 1914 – died June 17, 1952) was an American rocket propulsion researcher at the California Institute of Technology. He was one of the principal founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Aerojet Corp. As an enthusiastic occultist and Thelemite he was one of the first Americans to
Thomas Horn (Forbidden Gates: How Genetics, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Biology, Nanotechnology, and Human Enhancement Herald The Dawn Of TechnoDimensional Spiritual Warfare TEACHER'S GUIDE)
To Rickover the titles and organization charts meant nothing; only the realities of responsibility mattered.45
U.S. Government (Nuclear Navy 1946-1962: History of Navy's Nuclear Propulsion Program - Hyman Rickover, Nimitz, Nautilus, AEC, Nuclear Submarines, Reactors, Atoms for Peace, Thresher, Polaris Missile)
I've learned, through history and experience, that not all progress is gradual or linear. Sometimes it simply goes from one plateau to another. Sometimes we fall back tragically. Sometimes we leap forward and achieve things beyond the realm of what we thought possible. I believe that our job is to provide the force propulsion that will get us to a higher plane.
Kamala Harris (The Truths We Hold: An American Journey)
This is just a form letter,” Jules pointed out. “And as for the test, maybe she went in for a checkup. Women are supposed to do that once a year, right? She’d been in Kenya, and suddenly here she was going to this health clinic with Molly, so she figured, what the heck. Maybe this place gives pregnancy tests as part of their regular annual exam.” “Yeah,” Max said. “Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “Okay. Let’s run with the worst-case scenario. She is pregnant. I know it’s not like her to have a one-night stand, but . . .” Jules said, but then stopped. His words were meant to help, but, Hey, good news—the woman you love may have gotten knocked up from a night of casual sex with a stranger were not going to provide a whole hell of a lot of comfort. It didn’t matter that the idea was less awful than the terrible alternative—that Paul Jimmo had continued to pressure Gina. And he hadn’t taken no for an answer. Which was obviously what Max was thinking, considering the way he was working to grind down his few remaining back teeth. “So,” Jules said. “Looks like our little talk didn’t exactly succeed at putting you in a better place.” It was clear, when Max didn’t respond, that he was concentrating on not leaping through the window and flying—using his rage as a form of propulsion, across the street and blasting a body-shaped hole in the wall of that building where Gina and Molly were being held prisoner—please, heavenly father, let them be in there. And Jules knew that if it turned out that Paul Jimmo had so much as touched Gina without her consent, Max would find his grave, dig up his body, bring him back to life, and then kill the son of a bitch all over again.
Suzanne Brockmann (Breaking Point (Troubleshooters, #9))
My method of equitation consists in distribution of weight by the height of the neck bent at the poll and not at the withers ; propulsion by means of the hocks being brought under the body; and lightness by the loosening of the lower jaw. When we know this, we know everything, and we know^ nothing. We know everything, because these principles are of universal application ; and we know nothing, because they have to be applied practically.
Anonymous
And so, nearly in sight of the capital of Ruthgar, they boarded the odd new skimmer that Ben-hadad had dubbed the Mighty Thruster. Kip had shaken his head. Tisis had muttered, "Boys." Ferkudi had guffawed. Winsen had grinned. Cruxer had blushed and said, "you can't call it that." "We're the Mighty," Ben-hadad said. "The propulsion units are thrusters, that's all". The damn liar. "i guess you'll be the first man to ride the Mighty Thruster?", tisis asked. His brown wrinkled. "That makes it sound..." "Make sure you take a good wide stance, legs apart, or he'll thrown you." "He? i didn't..." "Do you need more instruction? Because I'm getting quite adept at riding a mighty thruster myself," she said. Ben-hadad blanched. "You'll want to make sure you have a good grip, and loosen up your hips a--" "All right! All right!" Hours later, they sped into the mouth of the Great River -- on the good skimmer Blue Falcon
Brent Weeks (The Blood Mirror (Lightbringer, #4))
In one form or the other, the quest for human dignity has proved to be one of the most propulsive elements for wars, civil strife and willing sacrifice. Yet the entitlement to dignity, enshrined among the 'human rights', does not aspire to being the most self-evident, essential need for human survival, such as food, or physical health. Compared to that other candidate for the basic impulse of human existence - self-preservation - it may even be deemed self-indulgent.
Wole Soyinka (Climate of Fear: The Quest for Dignity in a Dehumanized World (Reith Lectures))
Image intensifiers, which ultimately became “night vision” Fiber optics Supertenacity fibers Lasers Molecular alignment metallic alloys Integrated circuits and microminiaturization of logic boards HARP (High Altitude Research Project) Project Horizon (moon base) Portable atomic generators (ion propulsion drive) Irradiated food “Third brain” guidance systems (EBE headbands) Particle beams (“Star Wars” antimissile energy weapons) Electromagnetic propulsion systems Depleted uranium projectiles
Philip J. Corso (The Day After Roswell)
Sometimes, he thought, he preferred trees in winter, rather than their full-leaf summer version – in winter you saw their mighty skeletons, registered their astounding engineering, their random, propulsive growth patterns better; you understood what amazing vegetable beings they were, how ancient, strong and enduring – and how complacently taken for granted they were. An eighty-foot London plane tree was a wonder, a marvel. People should take more note of these everyday giants in their lives, he thought, acknowledge them.
William Boyd (Gabriel's Moon)
U.S. launch vehicles are these days too feeble to get such a spacecraft to Jupiter and beyond in only a few years by rocket propulsion alone. But if we’re clever (and lucky), there’s something else we can do: We can (as Galileo also did, years later) fly close to one world, and have its gravity fling us on to the next. A gravity assist, it’s called. It costs us almost nothing but ingenuity. It’s something like grabbing hold of a post on a moving merry-go-round as it passes—to speed you up and fling you in some new direction. The spacecraft’s acceleration is compensated for by a deceleration in the planet’s orbital motion around the Sun. But because the planet is so massive compared to the spacecraft, it slows down hardly at all. Each Voyager spacecraft picked up a velocity boost of nearly 40,000 miles per hour from Jupiter’s gravity. Jupiter in turn was slowed down in its motion around the Sun. By how much? Five billion years from now, when our Sun becomes a swollen red giant, Jupiter will be one millimeter short of where it would have been had Voyager not flown by it in the late twentieth century.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
Although the objective effect of this matter is not very good, their motivational is understandable. Comrade Bethune has no self-interested motivational and regards the cause of liberation of the people as his own. After several days of hard work, the police finally made the criminals' motivation for committing crimes clear. Their motivational will soon become apparent, and they are completely selfish. planes, cars are made by the motive propulsion. Both types of motives must be interspersed between the lines of which cannot be concealed from readers.
Mark Twain
There were whole habitats where people had had their higher brain functions disengaged, so that they could live like sheep under the care of machines. In others, they’d had their minds implanted into monkeys or dolphins: lost in intricate arboreal power struggles or sorrowful sonar fantasies. Elsewhere, groups of scientists who’d had their minds reshaped by Pattern Jugglers plunged deep into the metastructure of spacetime, concocting elaborate experiments which tinkered with the very fundamentals of existence. One day, it was said, they’d discover a technique for faster-than-light propulsion, passing the secret to their allies who would install the necessary gadgetry in their habitats. The first anyone else would know about it would be when half the Glitter Band suddenly winked out of existence. The Glitter Band, in short, was a place where a reasonably curious human being could easily squander half a lifetime. But I didn’t think Reivich would spend much time there before making his way down to Yellowstone’s surface. He would want to lose himself in Chasm City as quickly as possible. Either way, I wouldn’t be far behind him. Still
Alastair Reynolds (Chasm City (Revelation Space))
Margaret Fuller wondered whether she was "fitted to be loved" -- a word choice both curious and tragic: not "worthy," bespeaking an inherent endowment, but "fitted," as if she could fit herself for love by strain and discipline. With Caroline, with Sam, and now with Waldo, she had pushed and pushed to earn the affection she longed for -- a push that eventually repelled each of its objects. But she could hardly have compartmentalized her nature -- the very nature by which she had reached the stratospheric heights of her achievement. Those accustomed to hard work and self-propulsion, who have risen to the zenith of accomplishment by force of will and magnitude of effort, are most susceptible to the supreme self-damnation of human life -- the belief that love is something to be earned by striving rather than something that comes unbidden like a shepherd's song on a summer evening in the mountains of Bulgaria.
Maria Popova (Figuring)
Moment, momentum, momentous If you reduce sports to its smallest discrete units, its subatomic particles, you're left with protons and electrons and neutrons called moments. They're the building blocks of every season, every game, every series of downs. Two or more moments may accrete into something more, a propulsive energy called momentum, which in turn can snowball into something greater still, that which is momentous. Consider those consecutive moments last Aug. 4 (2012 summer Olympics) in London, when Michael Phelps-in his final Olympic race-caught and then overtook Japan's Takeshi Matsuda on the butterfly leg of the men's 4 x 100 medley relay. Momentum passed to Phelps's U.S. teammate Nathan Adrian, who pulled away on the freestyle leg, sealing a victory that yielded Phelps's 18th gold medal, and 22nd medal overall, more than any other Olympian in history. It was like the conjugation of some Latin verb: moment, momentum, momentous. Or if you prefer: Veni, vidi, vici (we came, we saw, we conquered). From "moments of the year
Steve Rushin
At two hundred fifty feet in length with a surfaced displacement of 2,200 tons, the Samisho was not a small boat. Built to the 0+2+ (1) Yuushio-class standards at Kawasaki’s shipyards in Kobe, she’d begun service in 1992, and last year she’d been brought back to the yards for a retrofit. Now she was state of the art, an engineering and electronics marvel even by U.S. naval standards. She was a diesel boat, but she was fast, capable of a top speed submerged of more than twenty-five knots and a published diving depth in excess of one thousand feet. Her electronic detection systems and countermeasures by Hitachi were better than anything currently in use by any navy in the world, and her new Fuji electric motors and tunnel drive were as quiet as any nuclear submarine’s propulsion system, and much simpler to operate. The Samisho could be safely operated, even on war footing, with fifty men and ten officers—less than half the crew needed to run the Los Angeles-class boats, and one-fourth the crew needed for a sub-hunting surface vessel
David Hagberg (High Flight (Kirk McGarvey, #5))
On Contemporary Jazz—‘Bebop’” (from a handwritten journal dated February 24–May 5, 1947) focuses more intently on the effects of speed and virtuosity on stylistic changes in the jazz idiom, as embodied in the playing of figures such as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk—all of whom Kerouac had seen perform in New York’s Fifty-second Street jazz clubs by the mid-1940s. Flexing his talents as a music writer, Kerouac presents an informed, condensed jazz history of the 1930s and 1940s. He not only recognizes the significance of bebop’s modern, avant-garde revision of jazz’s compositional vocabulary, but views those compositional developments in rhythm and harmony as the virtuosic equivalent of the European classical tradition. If “A Couple of Facts Concerning Laws of Decadence” displays Kerouac’s tendency at times to sentimentalize the premodern, this early essay on bebop valorizes propulsive, forward-looking art, the avant-garde abandon that came to characterize American expressive culture in the decades following World War II.
Jack Kerouac (The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings)
My first question is- do you have a name? "A name? Yes." "Ah!" said the wolf. It wrote several extensive notes. "And what is that name?" "George." "I see," said the wolf. "And how long have you been George?" "How long? As in, how long have I been alive?" "oh, were you here in some way before you were alive?" asked the wolf, interested. "I...don't really know," said George. " I don't think so." "So you don't know if you were here? Or if you were here before your George-time? Is it possible for you to be here, bu not know it?" "My what time? no, I mean, I was born, and then they just named me George." "So you are not George," said the wolf. George is just a name. A word. A propulsion of air modified by the flexing of throat parts." "Well, I am George, but...yes. Yes, and...no." "Is it possible that you became George at a later time, having been originally named that thing?" asked the wolf. " What if the naming had been different, would you still be George?" "I...yes?" "Really?" breathed the wolf in awe. "This is all so confusing." Yet he seemed very pleased with George's answers. " I don't know how you all do it. It seems so marvelously complex to simply...be.
Robert Jackson Bennett (The Troupe)
An inventor's depth and breadth were measured by their work history. The U.S. Patent Trademark Office categorizes technology into four hundred fifty different classes -- exercise, devices, electrical connectors, marine propulsion, and myriad more. Specialists tended to have their patents in a narrow range of classes. A specialist might work for years only on understanding a type of plastic composed of a particular small group of chemical elements. Generalists, meanwhile, might start in masking tape, which would lead to a surgical adhesives project, which spawned an idea for veterinary medicine. Their patents were spread across many classes. The polymaths had depth in a core area -- so they had numerous patents in that area -- but they were not as deep as the specialists. They aslo had breadth, even more than the generalists, having worked across dozens of technology classes. Repeatedly, they took expertise accrued in one domain and applied it in a completely new one, which meant they were constantly learning new technologies. Over the course of their careers, the polymaths' breadth increased markedly as they learned about "the adjacent stuff," while they actually lost a modicum of depth.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
could remember things that she had said. But my attention, concentrated upon the inward region in which these memories of her lingered, was unable to discover her name there. It was there, nevertheless. My thoughts began playing a sort of game with it to grasp its outlines, its initial letter, and so finally to bring the whole name to light. It was labour in vain, I could more or less estimate its mass, its weight, but as for its forms, confronting them with the shadowy captive lurking in the inward night, I said to myself: “It is not that.” Certainly my mind would have been capable of creating the most difficult names. Unfortunately, it had not to create but to reproduce. All action by the mind is easy, if it is not subjected to the test of reality. Here, I was forced to own myself beaten. Finally, in a flash, the name came back to me as a whole: ‘Madame d’Arpajon.’ I am wrong in saying that it came, for it did not, I think, appear to me by a spontaneous propulsion. I do not think either that the many slight memories which associated me with the lady, and to which I did not cease to appeal for help (by such exhortations as: “Come now, it is the lady who is a friend of Mme. de Souvré, who feels for Victor Hugo so artless an admiration, mingled with so much alarm and horror,”)—I do not believe that all these memories, hovering between me and her name, served in any way to bring it to light. In that great game of hide and seek which is played in our memory when we seek to recapture a name, there is not any series of gradual approximations. We see nothing, then suddenly the name appears in its exact form and very different from what we thought we could make out. It is not the name that has come to us. No, I believe rather that, as we go on living, we pass our time in keeping away from the zone in which a name is distinct, and it was by an exercise of my will and attention which increased the acuteness of my inward vision that all of a sudden I had pierced the semi-darkness and seen daylight.
Marcel Proust (In Search Of Lost Time (All 7 Volumes) (ShandonPress))
Feeling the force of the wind harnessed into our propulsion is a thrilling experience, isn’t
Georgina Peel (Urgently, Darcy: A Pride and Prejudice Variation)
A problem was how nature punctuated the seemingly unbroken DNA and RNA strands. No one could see a biological equivalent for the pauses that separate letters in Morse code, or the spaces that separate words. Perhaps every fourth base was a comma. Or maybe (Crick suggested) commas would be unnecessary if some triplets made “sense” and others made “nonsense.” Then again, maybe a sort of tape reader just needed to start at a certain point and count off the nucleotides three by three. Among the mathematicians drawn to this problem were a group at the new Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, meant to be working on aerospace research. To them it looked like a classic problem in Shannon coding theory: “the sequence of nucleotides as an infinite message, written without punctuation, from which any finite portion must be decodable into a sequence of amino acids by suitable insertion of commas.” They constructed a dictionary of codes. They considered the problem of misprints
James Gleick (The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood)
Emerging Possibilities for Space Propulsion Breakthroughs, and it had first appeared in a NASA publication, Interstellar Propulsion Society Newsletter, in July of 1995.
Douglas E. Richards (Quantum Lens)
Emerging Possibilities for Space Propulsion Breakthroughs Originally published in the Interstellar Propulsion Society Newsletter, Vol. I, No. 1, July 1, 1995.  Marc. G. Millis, Space Propulsion Technology Division, NASA Lewis Research Center Cleveland, Ohio “New perspectives on the connection between gravity and electromagnetism have just emerged. A theory published in February 1994 (ref 11) suggests that inertia is nothing but an electromagnetic illusion. This theory builds on an earlier work (ref 12) that asserts that gravity is nothing other than an electromagnetic side-effect. Both of these works rely on the perspective that all matter is fundamentally made up of electrically charged particles, and they rely on the existence of Zero Point Energy. Zero Point Energy (ZPE) is the term used to describe the random electromagnetic oscillations that are left in a vacuum after all other energy has been removed (ref 13). This can be explained in terms of quantum theory, where there exists energy even in the absolute lowest state of a harmonic oscillator. The lowest state of an electromagnetic oscillation is equal to one-half the Planck constant times the frequency. If all the energy for all the possible frequencies is summed up, the result is an enormous energy density, ranging from 1036 to 1070 Joules/m3. In simplistic terms there is enough energy in a cubic centimeter of the empty vacuum to boil away Earth's oceans. First predicted in 1948, ZPE has been linked to a number of experimental observations. Examples include the Casimir effect (ref 14), Van der Waal forces (ref 15), the Lamb-Retherford Shift (ref 10, p. 427), explanations of the Planck blackbody radiation spectrum (ref 16), the stability of the ground state of the hydrogen atom from radiative collapse (ref 17), and the effect of cavities to inhibit or enhance the spontaneous emission from excited atoms (ref 18). Regarding the inertia and gravity theories mentioned earlier, they take the perspective that all matter is fundamentally constructed of electrically charged particles and that these particles are constantly interacting with this ZPE background. From this perspective the property of inertia, the resistance to change of a particle's velocity, is described as a high- frequency electromagnetic drag against the Zero Point Fluctuations. Gravity, the attraction between masses, is described as Van der Waals forces between oscillating dipoles, where these dipoles are the charged particles that have been set into oscillation by the ZPE background. It should be noted that these theories were not written in the context of propulsion and do not yet provide direct clues for how to electromagnetically manipulate inertia or gravity. Also, these theories are still too new to have either been confirmed or discounted. Despite these uncertainties, typical of any fledgling theory, these theories do provide new approaches to search for breakthrough propulsion physics.
Douglas E. Richards (Quantum Lens)
An example of the first type is the self-guided torpedo, or the interceptor missile. The target or goal is known—an enemy ship or plane. The objective is to reach it. Such machines must “know” the target they are shooting for. They must have some sort of propulsion system that propels them forward in the general direction of the target. They must be equipped with “sense organs” (radar, sonar, heat perceptors, etc.), which bring information from the target. These “sense organs” keep the machine informed when it is on the correct course (positive feedback) and when it commits an error and gets off course (negative feedback). The machine does not react or respond to positive feedback. It is doing the correct thing already and “just keeps on doing what it is doing.” There must be a corrective device, however, that will respond to negative feedback. When negative feedback informs the mechanism that it is “off the beam,” too far to the right, the corrective mechanism automatically causes the rudder to move so that it will steer the machine back to the left. If it “overcorrects” and heads too far to the left, this mistake is made known through negative feedback, and the corrective device moves the rudder so it will steer the machine back to the right. The torpedo accomplishes its goal by going forward, making errors, and continually correcting them. By a series of zigzags it literally gropes its way to the goal. Dr. Norbert Wiener, who pioneered the development of goal-seeking mechanisms in World War II, believes that something very similar to the foregoing happens in the human nervous system whenever you perform any purposeful activity—even in such a simple goal-seeking situation as picking up a pen from a desk.
Maxwell Maltz (Psycho-Cybernetics: Updated and Expanded (The Psycho-Cybernetics Series))
I got another beer. I didn't want to - that was not a lie. I didn't want to. But I felt a desire for it that was separate from wanting, a yearning that came from the body, strong and clear and propulsive.
Julie Buntin (Marlena)
been studying alternative propulsion technologies for interstellar travel [and] said they had, for example, determined that Einstein’s equations dealing with relativity theory were incorrect. I asked him to clarify that. Did he mean that Skunk Works employed theoretical physicists, ‘Einstein types,’ to look for alternative means of space travel? Rich said ‘Yes,’ [then] went on to say that they had proved that Einstein was wrong. He made a mistake. “I didn’t know how that set with other people in the room, but
Timothy Good (Earth: An Alien Enterprise)
known as Aztlan was to obtain gold and to enrich cultures and races that preceded the Mayas, [and] the forefathers of Aztecs were the people of Aztlan and that the great floods drove them from their original, ancestral homeland.” The aliens needed gold—and later silver—exclusively as part of their craft’s propulsion system.
Timothy Good (Earth: An Alien Enterprise)
Before I could give it too much thought, my attention snagged on Darius as he charged across the pitch like a stampeding rhino, tackling a member of the other team so hard that I heard something crack. My breath caught in my throat as the Starlight player groaned on the ground while Darius snatched the ball from him and launched it across the pitch with the force of a torpedo. A timer was counting down as the Starlight player failed to get up and Darius raced away from him without a backwards glance. I knew it was part of the game but it was insanely brutal. Although if I was being totally honest, watching all of them brawl like that and seeing the power they exuded even while they were losing, was totally hot too. Darius’s muscles pumped fiercely as he sprinted away from me and I found myself staring at his legs which were splattered with mud and somehow looked even better because of it. “Olef you’re Out!” Prestos yelled but the Starlight player still didn’t move. A pair of medics jogged onto the pitch and gave him a quick inspection. “Broken back!” one of them yelled. “This is a long heal, call in a sub once his time out is up.” My lips parted, I stared on in shock and I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard. “Did he just say that Darius broke that guy’s back?” I asked in disbelief. “That’s the risk you take when you play,” Orion said darkly as he walked past me to regain his seat. Darcy raised her eyebrows at me and I returned my gaze to the match just as Geraldine tore up the pitch with a rumble of writhing earth magic, knocking the Starlight Waterguard off of her feet and forcing her to drop the ball. A huge -5 flashed into place on the Starlight scoreboard and I leapt from my seat in excitement to applaud my friend. “Go Geraldine!” I screamed and she flashed me a smile as she somehow managed to hear me. Seth almost missed the ball as it was thrown to him next while he was distracted by scratching his head. He managed to wrangle it with a gust of air magic and started sprinting for the Pit as the timer above us ticked down to ten seconds. The crowd started counting down, “Nine! Eight! Seven-” Seth leapt into the air, propelling himself forward with his magic but the two air Elementals on the opposing team threw their own magic up to counter him. “Three! Two-” Seth gritted his teeth as he threw even more power into his propulsion but he was out of time. The ball in his arms exploded in a blast of pure air which snapped his head back and sent him tumbling out of the sky. He hit the ground hard as the crowd oooohed in disappointment. For three whole seconds my heart didn’t beat at all as I stared at his prone body in the mud, wondering if he was dead. Seth coughed, pushing himself into a sitting position just as Darius appeared to offer him a hand up. He shook his head to clear it and my eyebrows rose all the way into my hairline. “This game is crazy,” Darcy breathed, her eyes wide with the thrill of it. “I think I love it,” I agreed. (tory)
Caroline Peckham (Ruthless Fae (Zodiac Academy, #2))
Why New England? Perry Miller once wrote that Virginia, no less than Massachusetts, found its "energizing propulsion" in religion. Miller insisted that Virginia's idea of itself as a trading colony "was conceived in the bed of religion," and that its publicly announced motives of evangelizing Indians and stopping the imperial designs of French and Spanish papists were more than disguises draped over the tobacco trade.
Andrew Delbanco (The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (The William E. Massey Sr. Lectures in the History of American Civilization Book 11))
We might encourage investigating nuclear propulsion on commercial ships, the current source of 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions—double the amount generated by airplane traffic.
Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary)
A generation or two earlier, watertenders had been called firemen or stokers and were responsible for firing and maintaining the coal furnaces that heated the water in the boilers to produce steam. Fuel oil now powered most surface ships, and watertenders saw to the oil-fed fires and boilers in the engine room. These engines produced steam for propulsion and generated electrical power for the ship’s lights and equipment.
Walter R. Borneman (Brothers Down: Pearl Harbor and the Fate of the Many Brothers Aboard the USS Arizona)
Everyone is now so eager to see the government "reveal" this long-awaited information that no one questions the reality of the basic facts and the political motivations that could inspire a manipulation of those facts. Trying to outsmart the CIA and the Pentagon has become such a national pastime that lawsuits against federal agencies under the Freedom of Information Act have begun to accumulate. All that has been shown so far is that these agencies were involved – often covertly – in many aspects of the UFO problem. I suspect that they are still involved. Discovering the secret of the UFO propulsion mechanism could be such a military breakthrough that any research project connected with it would enjoy the highest level of classification. But these UFO enthusiasts who are so anxious to expose the government have not reflected that they may be playing into the hands of a more sophisticated coverup of the real situation. Because of their eagerness to believe any indication that the authorities already possess the proof of UFO reality, many enthusiasts provide an ideal conduit for anyone wishing to spread the extraterrestrial gospel. The purpose of such an exercise need not be complex or strategically important. It could be something as mundane as a political diversion, or a test of the reliability of information channels under simulated crisis conditions, or a decoy for paramilitary operations. None of these rumors is likely to lead us any closer to a solution that can only be obtained by careful, intelligent, and perhaps tedious scientific research. The truth is that the UFOs may not be spacecraft at all. And the government may simply be hiding the fact that, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on air defense, it has no more clues to the nature of the phenomenon today than it did in the forties when it began its investigations.
Jacques F. Vallée (Dimensions: A Casebook of Alien Contact)
Then the girl screamed—and the scream went beating against the blank walls of the street as in a chamber of torture, an animal scream of terror. She tore her arm loose and sprang back, then screamed inarticulate sounds: “No! No! Not your kind of world!” Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river—and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
Free speech is the cornerstone of a society that aspires to genuine progress. It encourages the exploration of unconventional ideas, paving the way for paradigm shifts and breakthroughs that propel us forward. By embracing the diversity of thought, we ensure that our collective journey is marked by continual discovery, innovation, and the dynamic evolution of the human experience.
James William Steven Parker
How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors’ backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you’d ever be hassled for going too fast. That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running. They remembered that running was mankind’s first fine art, our original act of inspired creation. Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
So what was it that was radiating?  What was inside the box?  The green hue suggested a relationship to their sunken alien ship.  And if it were, could the object inside be the alien craft’s propulsion system?  Or was it something else?
Michael C. Grumley (Echo (Breakthrough #6))
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Cesium!" Understanding came to Hank Mahenili. Any informed engineer knew the importance of this element. "Just what is cesium, Dad? And what is it used for?" "Technically, son, its atomic number is 55, and its atomic weight is 132.91. Its use?" Mr. Brewster smiled. "I’ll tell you this, we’ll never get to the moon without it." "You mean it’s used in rocket propulsion?" Biff asked. "That’s right, Biff. It’s a high-thrust, long-life rocket propulsion fuel. Most costly." "More than gold?" Li asked eagerly. "Much more, Li. If you and Biff had about ten pounds of it between you, you’d have your education paid at any college you wanted to go to—M.I.T., Cal Tech—any of them." "Wow! Must be worth more than a thousand dollars a pound, then," Biff said, his voice filled with amazement.
Andy Adams (The Biff Brewster Mysteries (Halcyon Classics))
the craft was already within the Moon’s gravitational sphere of influence making it harder to ‘reverse’. The engine could also have been damaged in the explosion and restarting might cause an even worse disaster. So Mission Control opted for a ‘free return’, essentially using the Moon’s gravity to hitch a ride and slingshot them back towards Earth. First, Apollo 13 needed to be realigned; it had left its initial free return trajectory earlier in the mission as it lined up for its planned lunar landing. Using a small burn of the Lunar Module’s descent propulsion system, the crew got the spacecraft back on track for its return journey. Now they started their nerve-shredding journey round the dark side of the Moon. It was a trip that would demand incredible ingenuity under extreme pressure from the crew, flight controllers, and ground crew if the men were to make it back alive. More problems The Lunar Module ‘lifeboat’ only had enough battery power to sustain two people for two days, not three people for the four days it would take the men to return to Earth. The life support and communication systems had to be powered down to the lowest levels possible. Everything that wasn’t essential was turned off. The drama was being shown on TV but no more live broadcasts were made.
Collins Maps (Extreme Survivors: 60 of the World’s Most Extreme Survival Stories)
No, especially if you’re in command. You never stop working and you’re on-call twenty-four hours a day. Just running the ship properly can fill up all your time. You’re responsible for its safe navigation, its readiness for combat, its propulsion, hotel systems, damage control, crew morale, personnel, training, diplomacy ashore, and a hundred other things. Just changes to the goddamned software are enough to drive you crazy. I delegate that to the kids, who live and breathe it. We go through continual training evolutions and drills, absorb new systems, implement new directives. There’s so much paperwork and so many things to study that you just don’t have the time to read at leisure, certainly not if you’re the captain.
Mark Helprin (The Oceans and the Stars: A Sea Story, A War Story, A Love Story (A Novel))
By changing the strength of synaptic connections, animals learn.1 Learning confers a huge evolutionary advantage, because the animal can adapt to a range of circumstances. Learning also speeds up the rate of evolution itself. Initially, neurons were organized into nerve nets, which are distributed throughout the organism and serve to coordinate activities such as eating and digestion or the timed contraction of muscle cells across a wide area. The graceful propulsion of jellyfish is the result of a nerve net. Jellyfish have no brains at all.
Stuart Russell (Human Compatible: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control)
Behind the glass windows on the far side of the wall are the San Gabriel Mountains. This view from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory never gets old.
Lauren Kung Jessen (Red String Theory)
Whether it is fortunate or not, self-replicating machines and von Neumann probes remain beyond our reach. Creating them requires great leaps in miniaturization, propulsion systems, and advanced artificial intelligence, but we cannot deny that we are inching toward a moment in history when our relationship with technology will be fundamentally altered, as the creatures of our imagination slowly begin to take real form, and we are faced with the responsibility to not only create but also care for them.
Benjamín Labatut (The MANIAC)
As though ignition had been triggered on an enormous rocket, Arizona’s skin blew open and vented a propulsive force, so enormous, that it raised its thirty-seven ton hull over thirty feet above waterline.
Edward McGrath (Second to the Last to Leave USS Arizona - SIGNED Copy - Interactive Edition: Memoir of a Sailor - The Lauren F. Bruner Story)
Way before we were scratching pictures on caves or beating rhythms on hollow trees, we were perfecting the art of combining our breath and mind and muscles into fluid self-propulsion over wild terrain. And when our ancestors finally did make their first cave paintings, what were the first designs? A downward slash, lightning bolts through the bottom and middle—behold, the Running Man.
Christopher McDougall (Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen)
In this lonely five days in New York I've been as low and high as I ever have, miserable and exhilarated, drunk on freedom and fear and the city's collective, propulsive desire for more. In these streets where anger hums in the air, where cars keep driving straight towards you as you cross on a corner, where there's no real expectation that you're safe. Here, I can imagine dying, or else living forever
Emma Dibdin (The Room by the Lake)
The short clip replays over and over again. “Dr. Jonathan Wheeler at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has analyzed the chemical signatures in this image and tells me this is a Direct Fusion Drive. It’s something we can model on paper but cannot yet build. The exhaust plume is a form of plasma hotter than the surface of the Sun.
Peter Cawdron (Ghosts)
Save it, pup,” cried Dick, pointing to the child, which had been caught in an eddy, and was for a few moments hovering on the edge of the stream that rushed impetuously towards the fall. The noble Newfoundland did not require to be told what to do. It seems a natural instinct in this sagacious species of dog to save man or beast that chances to be struggling in the water, and many are the authentic stories related of Newfoundland dogs saving life in eases of shipwreck. Indeed, they are regularly trained to the work in some countries; and nobly, fearlessly, disinterestedly do they discharge their trust, often in the midst of appalling dangers. Crusoe sprang from the bank with such impetus that his broad chest ploughed up the water like the bow of a boat, and the energetic workings of his muscles were indicated by the force of each successive propulsion as he shot ahead. In a few seconds he reached the child and caught it by the hair. Then he turned to swim back, but the stream had got hold of him. Bravely he struggled, and lifted the child breast-high out of the water in his powerful efforts to stem the current. In vain. Each moment he was carried inch by inch down until he was on the brink of the fall, which, though not high, was a large body of water and fell with a heavy roar. He raised himself high out of the stream with the vigour of his last struggle, and then fell back into the abyss.
R.M. Ballantyne (The Dog Crusoe and His Master: A Story of Adventure in the Western Prairies)
It is the first book, maybe the only book to talk about how the problem of climate change can be addressed in a positive sense." - Dr. David Schimel, Senior Research Scientist, Jet Propulsion Lab NASA
Dr. David Schimel - Senior Research Scientist Jet Propulsion Lab NASA
It is the first book, maybe the only book to talk about how the problem of climate change can be addressed in a positive sense.
Dr. David Schimel Senior Research Scientist Jet Propulsion Lab NASA
Never talk to waiters like that," Kit said. "Can I help it," he said, "if I only went one year to finishing school?" "It isn't manners," she said like a sensible schoolteacher quietly disciplining a small boy, "it just isn't smart." I thought of the time I first told him not to say ain't. He took this the same way, a little peeved but making mental notes. I noticed he was never too much of an egotist to take criticism when he knew it would help. It was part of his genius for self-propulsion. I was beginning to see what Kit had for Sammy. Of course she stood for something never within his reach before. But it was more than that. Sammy seemed to know that his career was entering a new cycle where polish paid off. You could almost see him filing off the rough edges against the sharp blade of her mind.
Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run?)
Tug or tow boats are vessels that push or pull other vessels such as barges, oil platforms, or disabled ships. They are also used to help maneuver larger ships that do not have the capability to do so for themselves, in tight quarters, rivers or in coming alongside piers. Obviously tugboats have powerful engines for their size and are sturdy enough to withstand high stress on their construction. The earlier tugboats had steam engines, however now they mostly have diesel engines. In addition many harbor tugs are been fitted with firefighting equipment allowing them to assist in firefighting. Harbor tugs that are highly maneuverable and used to assist ships in their docking procedure. Pusher tugs or notch tugs nest into the stern of specially designed barges. When locked together they are frequently considered ships and are required to show the navigational lights of a towing vessel pushing ahead or compliant with those required of ships. There are seagoing tugs that tow oil rigs, oceangoing barges etc. The US Navy frequently uses the larger seagoing tugs they identify as fleet tugs. River tugs are also referred to as towboats or push boats, depending on what they are called on to do, however they have a severely limited freeboard and are dangerous on open waters. The tasks tugboats undertake are varied and the list is endless. Tugboats help fight fires and in cold climates are sometimes used as icebreakers. A relatively new innovation for marine propulsion is the “Voith Schneider Propeller System” which is highly maneuverable, allowing the boat to change its direction instantly. This system is now widely used on harbor tugs.
Hank Bracker (Suppressed I Rise)
I have spent a lot of time, in America and abroad, covering the struggles of different groups to assert ownership over their societies and the consequences of their lack of it. And I am forever struck at how quickly ownership can change behaviors and enable adaptation, self-propulsion, resilience, and healthy interdependencies. In
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)