Sensor Quotes

Charlotte, darling," Henry said to his wife, who was staring at him in gape-mouthed horror. Jessamine, beside her, was wide eyed. "Sorry I'm late. You know, I think I might nearly have the Sensor working-" Will interrupted. "Henry," he said, "You're on fire. You do know that don't you?

I'm not sure I would label it a 'survivor,'" said Iko, her sensor darkening with disgust. "It looks more like a rotting pumpkin.

Charlotte, darling, Henry said to his wife, who was staring at im in gape-mouthed horror. Jassamine, beside her, was wided eyed. Sorry im late. You know, i think i might nearly have the sensor working- Will interrupted. Henry, he said, your on fire. You do know that, don't you? Oh, yes, Henry said eagerly. The flames were now nearly to his shoulder. I've been working like a man possessed all day. Charlotte, did you hear what i said about the sensor? Charlotte dropped her hand from her mouth. Henry! She shrieked. Your arm! Henry glanced down at his arm, and his mouth dropped open. Bloody hell!

Most helmsmen would’ve been satisfied with a pilot’s wheel or a tiller. Leo had also installed a keyboard, monitor, aviation controls from a Learjet, a dubstep soundboard, and motion-control sensors from a Nintendo Wii. He could turn the ship by pulling on the throttle, fire weapons by sampling an album, or raise sails by shaking his Wii controllers really fast. Even by demigod standards, Leo was seriously ADHD.

If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it can know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them.

LUKE —But O, what now? What light through yonder flashing sensor breaks?

Will interrupted. "Henry," he said, "you're on fire. You do know that, don't you?" "Oh, yeas," Henry said eagerly. The flames were now nearly to his shoulder. "I've been working like a man possessed all day. Charlotte, did you hear what I said about the Sensor?" Charlotte dropped her hand from her mouth. "Henry!" she shrieked. "Your arm!" Henry glanced down at his arm, and his mouth dropped open. "Bloody hell!" was all he had time to say before Will, exhibiting a starling presence of mind, stood up, seized the vase of flowers off the table, and hurled the contents over Henry.

I pulled into the Grand Union parking lot and drove to the end of the mall where the bank was located. I parked at a safe distance from other cars, exited the BMW, and set the alarm. You want me to stay with the car in case someone's riding around with a bomb in his backseat looking for a place to put it?" Lula asked. Not necessary. Ranger says the car has sensors." Ranger give you a car with bomb sensors? The head of the CIA don't even have a car with bomb sensors. I hear they give him a stick with a mirror on the end of it.

It's like I have a sensor in my head, but she works on a seven-second delay... well-meaning, but perpetually about seven seconds too late to actually do anything to stop the horrific avalanche of shit-you-shouldn't- say-out-loud-but-I-just-did.

In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success. In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.

We’re in luck. This place looks like it’s terraformed. There must be sensors for checking the air quality outside.” “There are,” she agrees. “But the electrical surge fried them. We don’t need them, though. It’s safe.” “Glad you’re so sure, Miss LaRoux,” I retort before I can stop myself. “I think I’d rather an instrument told me so. Not that I don’t trust your extensive training.” Her eyes narrow, and if looks could kill, then toxic atmospheres would be the least of my problems.

Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

LUKE —But O, what now? What light through yonder flashing sensor breaks? HAN It marks the loss of yon deflector shield.

When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in muscular changes so fleeting that they can only be captured with electronic sensors. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they’ll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy. We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.

I don’t know,” I said, exasperated. “What else do you have in your wacked-out world? Heat sensors? Mine fields? Dirigibles? Booby traps? Machine guns? Shrink rays? What?” “Aside from dirigibles, which are rather expensive and rare outside of trade routes, most of what you just said made no sense whatsoever,” he said, as delighted as a child hearing a foreign language for the first time. “But it all sounds very dangerous. And fun. Especially the part about the boobies.

Behind them, there was a massive bang, and they all turned as a young man welled and dropped something to the ground, which smoked and hissed. "My Sensor exploded", he growled. "I think we can assume some very serious demonic activity," Edgar said.

The Pentagon has been looking into the possibility of developing “smart dust,” dust-sized particles that have tiny sensors inside that can be sprayed over a battlefield to give commanders real-time information. In the future it is conceivable that “smart dust” might be sent to the nearby stars.

We all have blind spots in our knowledge and opinions. The bad news is that they can leave us blind to our blindness, which gives us false confidence in our judgment and prevents us from rethinking. The good news is that with the right kind of confidence, we can learn to see ourselves more clearly and update our views. In driver’s training we were taught to identify our visual blind spots and eliminate them with the help of mirrors and sensors. In life, since our minds don’t come equipped with those tools, we need to learn to recognize our cognitive blind spots and revise our thinking accordingly.

But I'm... How can I... No hand, no visual sensor, humongous landing gear... Are those supposed to be my feet?" " Well, no. It's supposed to be landing gear." "Oh, what's become of me? I'm hideous!" "Now hold on just a minute there, Miss disembodied voice." Throne strode into the engine room and crossed his arms. "What do you mean 'hideous'?" "Who's that? Who's speaking?" "I am Captain Carswell Thorne, the owner of this fine ship and I will not stand to have her insulted in my presence!" Cinder rolled her eyes. "Captain Carswell Thorne?" "That's right." A brief silence, "My net search is finding only Cadet Carswell Thorne." "That's him." Said Cinder Another silence as the heat in the engine room rose. "You're rather handsome, Captain" "And you my fine lady, are the most gorgeous ship in these skies, and don't let anyone tell you other wise." "Iko, are you intentionally blushing?" "But am I really pretty? Even as a ship?" "The prettiest.

We are all glorified motion sensors. Some things only become visible to us when they undergo change. We take for granted all the constant, fixed things, and eventually stop paying any attention to them. At the same time we observe and obsess over small, fast-moving, ephemeral things of little value. The trick to rediscovering constants is to stop and focus on the greater panorama around us. While everything else flits abut, the important things remain in place. Their stillness appears as reverse motion to our perspective, as relativity resets our motion sensors. It reboots us, allowing us once again to perceive. And now that we do see, suddenly we realize that those still things are not so motionless after all. They are simply gliding with slow individualistic grace against the backdrop of the immense universe. And it takes a more sensitive motion instrument to track this.

One of the most difficult things to remember is to remember to remember. We forget that we live in a body with senses and feelings and thoughts and emotions and ideas. We get caught up in rumination and fantasy, isolating us from the world of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, tastes, and sensations constantly bombarding our input sensors. To stop and pay attention to the moment is one way of snapping out of these mindscapes, and is a definition of meditation. This awareness is a process of deepening self-acceptance. Whatever it observes, it embraces. There is nothing unworthy of acceptance.

He leaned back, appalled at himself. She was a ***damn dose of truth serum. Things were falling out of his mouth as though his ability to sensor had short-circuited.

We have only thermal sensors to guide us, which is why when you sit down on a wet spot, you can’t generally tell whether it really is wet or just cold.

I tuned down my pain sensors and the impact sites faded from explosions down to embers. (I know that’s actually not a permanent solution and pretending bad things aren’t happening is not a great survival strategy in the long run, but there was nothing I could do about it now.)

Computation has finally demystified mentalistic terms. Beliefs are inscriptions in memory, desires are goal inscriptions, thinking is computation, perceptions are inscriptions triggered by sensors, trying is executing operations triggered by a goal.

On the stern quarterdeck, Leo rushed around like a madman, checking his gauges and wrestling levers. Most helmsmen would've been satisfied with a pilot's wheel of a tiller. Leo had also installed a keyboard, monitor, aviation controls from a Learjet, a dubstep soundboard, and motion-control sensors from a Nintendo Wii. He could turn the ship by pulling the throttle, fire weapons by sampling an album, or raise sails by shaking his Wii controllers really fast. Even by demigod standards, Leo was seriously ADHD.

I had a stab wound so large you could see the metal of my interior structure, but Senior Indah was too polite to mention it. The medical bot extended a delicate sensor limb toward me. On the feed I told it anything that touched me would get torn off and thrown across the room. It pulled the limb back and used it to check Hostile Two instead.

I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.

how all animals see—using light-sensitive proteins that are actually modified chemical sensors. In a way, we see by smelling light.

I’ve got good psychopath sensors now. It’s like an allergy: you get exposed once, from then on you’re supersensitized.” She

What about guns with sensors in the handles that could detect if you were angry, and if you were, they wouldn't fire, even if you were a police officer? What about skyscrapers made with moving parts, so they could rearrange themselves when they had to, and even open holes in their middles for planes to fly through?

What do you get when you combine Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, IoT Sensors and Machine Learning? An intelligence professional assistant that will likely correct us when we are wrong!

সেনসর বোর্ড ফোর্ড ও তখন শিশু, এখনকার মত জ্যাঠা হয়ে উঠেনি, কাজেই হরেক রুচির ফিল্ম তখন এদেশে অক্লেশে আসত এবং আমরা সেগুলো গোগ্রাসে গিলতুম, তার ফলে আমাদের চরিত্র সর্বোনাশ হয়েছে সে কথা কেউ কখনো বলেনি এবং আজ যে সেন্সর বোর্ডের এত কড়াকড়ি, তার ফলে এ যুগের চ্যাংড়া চিংড়িরা যীশুখেস্ট কিংবা রামকেষ্ট হয়ে গিয়েছে এ মস্করাও কেউ করেনি

How peculiar. Perhaps it’s a programming glitch.” She stared down into Iko’s single sensor. “A programming glitch.” “Sure. You have programming, don’t you?” Iko lifted a spindly arm and gestured toward Cinder’s steel prosthetic. “I have a glitch, too. Sometimes I forget that I’m not human. I don’t think that happens to most androids.” Cinder

Son of a nutcracker.

Tahukah kau, tubuhmu memiliki sensor penerima sinyal gemosi dari luar? Sensor yang sama yang menghubungkan emosi sepasang anak kembar yang terpisah ratusan kilometer! Hei, benar-benar sensor yang hebat, bukan?! Ketika pertama kali sepasang insan terpikat satu sama lain, masing-masing sensornya menangkap sinyal gemosi cinta. Kontak mata, sentuhan punggung tangan, ucapan-ucapan cinta dan rayuan-rayuan yang membuat hatimu cenat-cenut akan mempercepat penyamanan frekuensi cinta dengan dentingan seindah harpa yang paling merdu sejagat raya. Selanjutnya, semakin selaras frekuensi itu, perasaan nyaman akan tumbuh beriringan. Kemudian rasa rindu hebat akan menyertainya saat dua gemosi berinterferensi saling menguatkan.

Will interrupted. "Henry," he said, "your on fire. You do know that, don't you?" "Oh, yes," Henry said eagerly. The flames were now nearly to his shoulder. "I've been working like a man possessed all day. Charlotte, did you hear what i said about the sensor?" Charlotte dropped her hand from her mouth. "Henry!" She shrieked. "Your arm!" Henry glanced down at his arm, and his mouth dropped open. Bloody hell!” - Clockwork Angel

Of course! he thought. He had touched the screen. It was a touch screen! The red lights around the edges must be infrared sensors. Tim had never seen such a screen, but he’d read about them in magazines. He touched RESET/REVERT.

He turned to face her, his body tingling. She gave a little shudder. "Did you feel that too?" she asked. "Yes," he said softly, "but don't talk." She pushed him away. "It was our sensor webs, you fool. Something's triggered them.

The Spanish Influenza did not originate in Spain. In fact the first recorded case was in the United States, in Kansas, on March 9th, 1918. Beware the Ides of March. But because Spain was neutral in World War I, it did not sensor reports of the disease to the public. To tell the truth then, is to risk being remembered by its fiction. Countless countries laid blame to one another. What the US called the Spanish Influenza, Spain called the French Flu, or the Naples Soldier. What Germans dubbed the Russian Pest, the Russians called Chinese Flu.

There's an emergency link to the defence grid, but that's only for use in the direst emergencies." "And of course a mile-long unknown intruder approaching your main source of power isn't an emergency?" Karan hesitated, his chins wobbling slightly with their own momentum. "It'll take time, but I could access the defence grid's sensor logs for that sector..." "I won't tell if you don't.

Haven't you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that's everywhere and nowhere?

For Adamatzky, the point of fungal computers is not to replace silicon chips. Fungal reactions are too slow for that. Rather, he thinks humans could use mycelium growing in an ecosystem as a “large-scale environmental sensor.” Fungal networks, he reasons, are monitoring a large number of data streams as part of their everyday existence. If we could plug into mycelial networks and interpret the signals they use to process information, we could learn more about what was happening in an ecosystem.

Be controlled from the inside of you. Be controlled by your standards. Be motivated by your decisions. Have high standards of behaviour that ride over the negative noise of others. Laugh with those who laugh, mourn with those who mourn, but don’t mourn when you don’t want to, and laugh at those who laugh at you if you want to. Determine not to be a photo-sensor that brightens the lights only when people are nice to you.

Property is no longer about power, personality and command. It's not about vulgar display or tasteful display. Because it no longer has weight or shape. The only thing that matters is the price you pay. Yourself, Eric, think. What did you buy for your one hundred and four million dollars? Not dozens of rooms, incomparable views, private elevators. Not the rotating bedroom and computerized bed. Not the swimming pool or the shark. Was it air rights? The regulating sensors and software? Not the mirrors that tell you how you feel when you look at yourself in the morning. You paid the money for the number itself. One hundred and four million. This is what you bought. And it's worth it. The number justifies itself.

Motherhood had primed me to anticipate unlikely worst-case scenarios, and I tried to reassure myself that my internal disaster sensor was on overdrive, as per usual.

I recorded the ding-dong sound that shoplifting sensors at the doors of Wal-Mart make. Now I just stand at the exit and press play as people try to leave.

Still nothing," Raven answered "This is shitty. We are going to have to invest in heat sensors. These motion detectors blow Satan's left nut.

My ears and eyes are important sensors to catch their every move and desire.

A Singapore Airlines cargo flight had to make an emergency landing in Bali due to a smoke sensor being triggered from the dung and farts of the 2,186 sheep aboard the plane.

For them, the last option was to have brain surgery, which involved removing parts of the skull and exposing the brain. (Since the brain has no pain sensors, a person can be conscious during this entire procedure, so Dr. Penfield used only a local anesthetic during the operation.)

If there was a light at the end of the tunnel, the flickering bulb above my head wasn’t it. The faces of my tormentors were no angels—they were hell’s minions and I’d stepped into their purgatory.

The olfactory sensors of dogs, he said, had evolved over millions of years to be able to detect a handful of molecules, and that kind of sensitivity is extremely difficult to match, even with our most finely tuned sensors. It’s likely that we will continue to rely on dogs at airports for the foreseeable future.

something.” Of course! he thought. He had touched the screen. It was a touch screen! The red lights around the edges must be infrared sensors. Tim had never seen such a screen, but he’d read about them in magazines.

Imagine you have a hammer. That’s machine learning. It helped you climb a grueling mountain to reach the summit. That’s machine learning’s dominance of online data. On the mountaintop you find a vast pile of nails, cheaper than anything previously imaginable. That’s the new smart sensor tech. An unbroken vista of virgin board stretches before you as far as you can see. That’s the whole dumb world. Then you learn that any time you plant a nail in a board with your machine learning hammer, you can extract value from that formerly dumb plank. That’s data monetization. What do you do? You start hammering like crazy and you never stop, unless somebody makes you stop. But there is nobody up here to make us stop. This is why the “internet of everything” is inevitable.

Well, over here, this is a Sensor. It senses when demons are near.” He moved toward Magnus, and the Sensor made a loud wailing noise. “Impressive!” Magnus exclaimed, pleased. He lifted a construction of fabric with a large dead bird perched atop it. “And what is this?” “The Lethal Bonnet,” Henry declared. “Ah,” said Magnus. “In times of need a lady can produce weapons from it with which to slay her enemies.” “Well, no,” Henry admitted. “That does sound like a rather better idea. I do wish you had been on the spot when I had the notion. Unfortunately this bonnet wraps about the head of one’s enemy and suffocates them, provided that they are wearing it at the time.” “I imagine that it will not be easy to persuade Mortmain into a bonnet,” Magnus observed. “Though the color would be fetching on him

The gut has not only a remarkable system of nerves to gather all this information, but also a huge surface area. That makes it the body’s largest sensory organ. Eyes, ears, nose, or the skin pale by comparison. The information they gather is received by the conscious mind and used to formulate a response to our environment. They can be seen as life’s parking sensors. The gut, by contrast, is a huge matrix, sensing our inner life and working on the subconscious mind.

What you intend when you approach something in the world determines, to varying extents, the degree of sensory gating that occurs as you perceive that phenomenon. Intent, task demands, cognitive template, and gating defaults all affect what you sensorally perceive when a part of the exterior world and you meet. More colloquially, all of us see what we expect to see.

Imagine a system with clearly defined goals, sensors and effectors for reading and interacting with the world, the ability to recognize pleasure and pain as attractors and things to avoid, the resources to carry out its will, the legal and social standing to see that its needs are catered for, even respected. That's a description on an AI - it's also a description of a modern corporation.

I’d loved women who were old and who were young; those extra kilos and large rumps, and others so thin there was barely even skin to pinch, and every time I held them, I worried I would snap them in two. But for all of these: where they had merited my love was in their delicious smell. Scent is such a powerful tool of attraction, that if a woman has this tool perfectly tuned, she needs no other. I will forgive her a large nose, a cleft lip, even crossed-eyes; and I’ll bathe in the jouissance of her intoxicating odour.

The garage door slid open as we pulled into the driveway, registering the sensors Shaun and I wear around our neck. In case of viral amplification, the garage becomes the zombie equivalent of a roach motel: Our sensors get us in, but only a clean blood test and a successful voice check gets us out. If we ever fail those tests, we’ll be incinerated by the house defense system before we can do any further damage.

If we think of the relationship between software and hardware, Artificial Intelligence mainly flows from software to hardware, just as the human mind controls the body. The recognition processed by Machine Learning directs hardware and other software. On the contrary, in the Internet of Things, processing from hardware to software is the main process, and the huge amount of big data collected by sensors is analysed by software.

I said ‘not so much,’” Dr. Russell said. “Not so much as what? Having your head stepped on by an elephant?” “Not so much as when the sensors connect to each other,” Dr. Russell said. “The good news is that as soon as they’re connected, the pain stops. Now hold still, this will only take a minute.” He tapped the PDA again. Eighty thousand needles shot out in every direction in my skull. I have never wanted to punch a doctor so much in my life.

She went again and bought this car, too, from an antique dealer. He almost gave it away, saying it will never run again. It has the old days’ engine, the kind you don’t find in this era. A change of engines and batteries, a new set of all-terrain-tires, some safety trackers, sensors, and, well, a whole list of other things with 300% luck to make it run again through the Junk Land—the land outside the cities where it’s only ruins and rubble. Needs hard work, yes. But Kusha instantly liked the color of its body, the moment she saw it—a sort of green with greyish tint, and a good load of rust.

Because if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need, it’s one more INFP trying to act like a type that they’re not. The world has enough extroverts. It has enough sensors. It has enough thinkers and judgers, and each of them is out there fulfilling their uniquely important role within our social ecosystem.

Nothing has changed, or will ever change. Melena, you belong to me. I would walk through the fires of hell for you. I would face anyone or do anything if it could keep you alive even one extra day. There is no price too high that I wouldn’t pay.

DNA passes the blueprints of life between generations. Ever more complex life forms input information from sensors such as eyes and ears and process the information in brains or other systems to figure out how to act and then act on the world, by outputting information to muscles, for example. As some point during our 13.8 billion years of cosmic history, something beautiful happened. This information processing got so intelligent that life forms became conscious. Our universe has now awoken, becoming aware of itself. I regard it a triumph that we, who are ourselves mere stardust, have come to such a detailed understanding of the universe in which we live.

brain is not an information-absorbing, perpetual coding device, as it is often portrayed, but a venture-seeking explorer, an action-obsessed agent constantly controlling the body’s actuators and sensors to test its hypotheses. The brain ceaselessly interacts with, rather than just detects, the external world in order to remain itself. It is through such exploration that correlations and interactions acquire meaning and become information (Chapter 5). Brains do not process information: they create it.

I can't - is sacrificing your potential...

It wasn’t the dead who suffered, but the living.

If you try to separate from her in any way . . .” “She will bark?” Konstantin asked. “Yes. If she barks for longer than one minute, the electronic sensor in her collar will send an alert. Cutting the collar or removing it will also trigger an alert.” Matilda stared at him. “If anything happens to Rooster or her collar, I will know. I will come. I will bring friends. I hope we understand each other.

It is one thing to continue smoking despite general statistics that connect smoking with lung cancer. It is a very different thing to continue smoking despite a concrete warning from a biometric sensor that has just detected seventeen cancerous cells in your upper left lung. And if you are willing to defy the sensor, what will you do when the sensor forwards the warning to your insurance agency, your manager, and your mother?

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree,” he writes. But if we look at the whole tree of life, Darwin says, we can find innumerable gradations from extremely simple eyes consisting of hardly more than a nerveless cluster of pigment cells, which are rudimentary light sensors, to the marvels of the human eye, which are more impressive pieces of work than the human telescope.

Like a vast, random experiment targeting the environment with health doomed to be collateral damage, chemicals have been released into the air, soil, and water since nineteenth-century industrialism. While some may shrug that the aerial release of chemical nanoparticles and nano-sensors, microprocessors, and biologicals under the classified Project Cloverleaf is just more of the same, nanoparticles able to breach the blood-brain barrier make it uniquely diabolical, as does the global conspiracy of power to turn the entire planet into an electromagnetic grid and plug everyone into it. War has gone corporate and all of life reframed as a battlespace of disposable noncombatants (civilians) redefined as potential “terrorists.” The military is no longer a protector but partnered with giant transnational corporations and wealthy dynastic cartels like that of Big Pharma and Big Oil.

In space flight, “attitude” refers to orientation: which direction your vehicle is pointing relative to the Sun, Earth and other spacecraft. If you lose control of your attitude, two things happen: the vehicle starts to tumble and spin, disorienting everyone on board, and it also strays from its course, which, if you’re short on time or fuel, could mean the difference between life and death. In the Soyuz, for example, we use every cue from every available source—periscope, multiple sensors, the horizon—to monitor our attitude constantly and adjust if necessary. We never want to lose attitude, since maintaining attitude is fundamental to success. In my experience, something similar is true on Earth. Ultimately, I don’t determine whether I arrive at the desired professional destination. Too many variables are out of my control. There’s really just one thing I can control: my attitude during the journey, which is what keeps me feeling steady and stable, and what keeps me headed in the right direction. So I consciously monitor and correct, if necessary, because losing attitude would be far worse than not achieving my goal.

She was certain that it was wise to prevent Wilson and Brown from working closely together during sorties inside Rama. Nicole chastised herself for not having raised the issue with Borzov on her own. She realized that her mission portfolio included mental health as well, but somehow she had difficulty thinking of herself as the crew psychiatrist. I avoid it because it’s not an objective process, she thought. We have no sensors yet to measure good or bad mental health.

Konstance is old enough to understand that Father’s farm is unlike the other three: those spaces are tidy and systematic, while Farm 4 is a tangle of wires and sensors, grow-racks skewed at every angle, individual trays crowded with different species, creeping thyme beside radishes beside carrots. Long white hairs sprout from Father’s ears; he’s at least two decades older than the other children’s fathers; he’s always growing inedible flowers just to see what they look like and muttering in his funny accent about compost tea. He claims he can taste whether a lettuce has lived a happy life; he says one sniff of a properly grown chickpea can whisk him three zillion kilometers back to the fields who grew up in Scheria.

when couples are tested by the greatest obstacles, don’t give up, and make it past them, they become stronger for it. Strength isn’t something that you’re born with, it’s something you build through a series of difficult experiences in your life that break you down and build you back up a little sturdier each time (if you let them). What’s the saying…forged by fire?

They don’t know what it’s about, or…you know, at least they don’t know what’s going to happen. This isn’t even built like a torture chamber. It’s all being watched, right? Water and air sensors. It’s a Petri dish. They don’t know what that s*** that killed Julie does, and this is how they’re finding out.” Holden frowned. “Don’t they have laboratories? Places where you could maybe put that crap on some animals or something? Because as experimental design goes, this seems a little messed up.

If Kindle is upgraded with face recognition and biometric sensors, it will know how each sentence you read influenced your heart rate and blood pressure. It will know what made you laugh, what made you sad and what made you angry. Soon, books will read you while you are reading them. And whereas you quickly forget most of what you read, Amazon will never forget a thing. Such data will enable Amazon to choose books for you with uncanny precision. It will also enable Amazon to know exactly who you are, and how to turn you on and off.35

I bit into the chocolate chip. Slowed myself down. By then, almost a week in, I could sort through the assault of layers a little more quickly. The chocolate chips were from a factory, so they had that same slight metallic, absent taste to them, and the butter had been pulled from cows in pens, so the richness was not as full. The eggs were tinged with a hint of far away and plastic. All of those parts hummed in the distance, and then the baker, who'd mixed the batter and formed the dough, was angry. A tight anger, in the cookie itself.

Every computing device today has five basic components: (1) the integrated circuits that do the computing; (2) the memory units that store and retrieve information; (3) the networking systems that enable communications within and across computers; (4) the software applications that enable different computers to perform myriad tasks individually and collectively; and (5) the sensors—cameras and other miniature devices that can detect movement, language, light, heat, moisture, and sound and transform any of them into digitized data that can be mined for insights.

To combat the sin of self-sufficiency, we need a special kind of faith. It's what I call Starbucks Rest Room Faith. Almost every Starbucks store has a sensor that controls the light in the rest room. You can't just flip a switch, and you can't make it go on by just waving your arm inside the door. You have to put your whole body into that dark room and trust that the light will come on as you enter. Faith in God is a lot like that. He doesn't offer a safety net, He doesn't let us hedge our bets, and He doesn't give any guaranteed results ahead of time. We have to be all in before the light comes on.

The nuclear arms race is over, but the ethical problems raised by nonmilitary technology remain. The ethical problems arise from three "new ages" flooding over human society like tsunamis. First is the Information Age, already arrived and here to stay, driven by computers and digital memory. Second is the Biotechnology Age, due to arrive in full force early in the next century, driven by DNA sequencing and genetic engineering. Third is the Neurotechnology Age, likely to arrive later in the next century, driven by neural sensors and exposing the inner workings of human emotion and personality to manipulation.

Pathfinder LOG: SOL 0 BOOT SEQUENCE INITIATED TIME 00:00:00 LOSS OF POWER DETECTED, TIME/DATE UNRELIABLE LOADING OS… VXWARE OPERATING SYSTEM (C) WIND RIVER SYSTEMS PERFORMING HARDWARE CHECK: INT. TEMPERATURE: −34°C EXT. TEMPERATURE: NONFUNCTIONAL BATTERY: FULL HIGAIN: OK LOGAIN: OK WIND SENSOR: NONFUNCTIONAL METEOROLOGY: NONFUNCTIONAL ASI: NONFUNCTIONAL IMAGER: OK ROVER RAMP: NONFUNCTIONAL SOLAR A: NONFUNCTIONAL SOLAR B: NONFUNCTIONAL SOLAR C: NONFUNCTIONAL HARDWARE CHECK COMPLETE BROADCASTING STATUS LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL… LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL… LISTENING FOR TELEMETRY SIGNAL SIGNAL ACQUIRED…

All right gentlemen, we have a job to do. At approximately 01:30 tonight, three children made an escape. Our job is to find them and bring them back. Every minute the factory is down, I lose two thousand, seven hundred and thirty-eight dollars and forty-seven cents. Therefore, we must find them and find them fast. They were last seen heading south by southwest in three makeshift kites. We'll head in that direction, fanning out and using our heat sensors to track them. Any questions?" Tubaface raised his hand. "Yes?" "Where do babies come from?" "That question is wholly innapropriate to our present situation. Someone slap him.

The result will not be an Orwellian police state. We always prepare ourselves for the previous enemy, even when we face an altogether new menace. Defenders of human individuality stand guard against the tyranny of the collective, without realising that human individuality is now threatened from the opposite direction. The individual will not be crushed by Big Brother; it will disintegrate from within. Today corporations and governments pay homage to my individuality, and promise to provide medicine, education and entertainment customised to my unique needs and wishes. But in order to so, corporations and governments first need to break me up into biochemical subsystems, monitor these subsystems with ubiquitous sensors and decipher their working with powerful algorithms. In the process, the individual will transpire to be nothing but a religious fantasy. Reality will be a mesh of biochemical and electronic algorithms, without clear borders, and without individual hubs.

As more and more data flows from your body and brain to the smart machines via the biometric sensors, it will become easy for corporations and government agencies to know you, manipulate you, and make decisions on your behalf. Even more importantly, they could decipher the deep mechanisms of all bodies and brains, and thereby gain the power to engineer life. If we want to prevent a small elite from monopolising such godlike powers, and if we want to prevent humankind from splitting into biological castes, the key question is: who owns the data? Does the data about my DNA, my brain and my life belong to me, to the government, to a corporation, or to the human collective?

There are moments in one’s life that can put a shadow on the soul. A dark stain that changes a person—for better or worse—and they’re forced to move forward with the certain knowledge that they can no longer trust what they once perceived as truth. When that reality is changed, the only thing one can do is learn from it and do their best to not let it harm them again.

He never approves of anything I do,” Kusha says from the garage, hiding her frown. She gets all her old cars and tools from places you don’t want your daughters to visit. And Rashad Gaumont certainly doesn’t want her to visit Magic Mama, the not-enough-evolved, middle-aged man from the Old City. “He’s not a citizen! He lives in a bus! So what if he made it himself? So what if he teaches you about machines? Don’t meet him.” “Why?” Kusha used to ask Rashad, and she’d always get the same answer: “The unevolved kind brings chaos and wars.” Kusha didn’t listen. She went again and bought this car, too, from an antique dealer. He almost gave it away, saying it will never run again. It has the old days’ engine, the kind you don’t find in this era. A change of engines and batteries, a new set of all-terrain-tires, some safety trackers, sensors, and, well, a whole list of other things with 300% luck to make it run again through the Junk Land—the land outside the cities where it’s only ruins and rubble. Needs hard work, yes. But Kusha instantly liked the color of its body, the moment she saw it—a sort of green with greyish tint, and a good load of rust.

Imagine a cat, a vial of poison, and a radioactive source in a sealed box. If an internal sensor registers radioactivity, like an atom decaying, the vial is broken, releasing a poison that kills the cat. The atom has an equal chance of decaying or not decaying. It’s an ingenious way of linking an outcome in the classical world, our world, to a quantum-level event. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests a crazy thing: before the box is opened, before observation occurs, the atom exists in superposition—an undetermined state of both decaying and not decaying. Which means, in turn, that the cat is both alive and dead. And only when the box is opened, and an observation made, does the wave function collapse into one of two states. In other words, we only see one of the possible outcomes. For instance, a dead cat. And that becomes our reality. But then things get really weird. Is there another world, just as real as the one we know, where we opened the box and found a purring, living cat instead? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics says yes. That when we open the box, there’s a branch. One universe where we discover a dead cat. One where we discover a live one. And it’s the act of our observing the cat that kills it—or lets it live. And then it gets mind-fuckingly weird. Because those kinds of observations happen all the time. So if the world really splits whenever something is observed, that means there’s an unimaginably massive, infinite number of universes—a multiverse—where everything that can happen will happen.

Brown believed that technological superiority was imperative to military dominance, and he also believed that advancing science was the key to economic prosperity. “Harold Brown turned technology leadership into a national strategy,” remarks DARPA historian Richard Van Atta. Despite rising inflation and unemployment, DARPA’s budget was doubled. Microprocessing technologies were making stunning advances. High-speed communication networks and Global Positioning System technologies were accelerating at whirlwind speeds. DARPA’s highly classified, high-risk, high-payoff programs, including stealth, advanced sensors, laser-guided munitions, and drones, were being pursued, in the black. Soon, Assault Breaker technology would be battle ready. From all of this work, entire new industries were forming.

A year after that, the great red star, its waist now nearly to Jupiter, all at once collapsed in on itself and exploded into a supernova that vaporized every remaining planet, asteroid, and comet of the eighteenth planetary system of the third spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy. A beautiful magenta-and-yellow wash spread through space, like spilled watercolors. Sensors aboard the hundreds of starliners recorded the event, but even just a short time later, when the Second Fleet would awaken near Delphi, those brilliant clouds would already be gone, and only a small, cold neutron star would remain, a celestial gravestone to humanity’s birthplace. But here, in this final moment . . . As arcs of plasma glowed . . . As stardust glittered . . . As rare elements formed in the atomic foam . . . A fleet of silent black ships, flickering like droplets, moved swiftly into the storm they had secretly created, and got to work.

Jobs spent part of every day for six months helping to refine the display. “It was the most complex fun I’ve ever had,” he recalled. “It was like being the one evolving the variations on ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ ” A lot of features that seem simple now were the result of creative brainstorms. For example, the team worried about how to prevent the device from playing music or making a call accidentally when it was jangling in your pocket. Jobs was congenitally averse to having on-off switches, which he deemed “inelegant.” The solution was “Swipe to Open,” the simple and fun on-screen slider that activated the device when it had gone dormant. Another breakthrough was the sensor that figured out when you put the phone to your ear, so that your lobes didn’t accidentally activate some function. And of course the icons came in his favorite shape, the primitive he made Bill Atkinson design into the software of the first Macintosh: rounded rectangles. In session after session, with Jobs immersed in every detail, the team members figured out ways to simplify what other phones made complicated. They added a big bar to guide you in putting calls on hold or making conference calls, found easy ways to navigate through email, and created icons you could scroll through horizontally to get to different apps—all of which were easier because they could be used visually on the screen rather than by using a keyboard built into the hardware.

The fact that the information platform requires an extension of sensors means that it is countering the tendency towards a lean platform. These are not asset-less companies – far from it; they spend billions of dollars to purchase fixed capital and take other companies over. Importantly, ‘once we understand this [tendency], it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand’.15 Calls for privacy miss how the suppression of privacy is at the heart of this business model. This tendency involves constantly pressing against the limits of what is socially and legally acceptable in terms of data collection. For the most part, the strategy has been to collect data, then apologise and roll back programs if there is an uproar, rather than consulting with users beforehand.16 This is why we will continue to see frequent uproars over the collection of data by these companies.

Bumblebees detect the polarization of sunlight, invisible to uninstrumented humans; put vipers sense infrared radiation and detect temperature differences of 0.01C at a distance of half a meter; many insects can see ultraviolet light; some African freshwater fish generate a static electric field around themselves and sense intruders by slight perturbations induced in the field; dogs, sharks, and cicadas detect sounds wholly inaudible to humans; ordinary scorpions have micro--seismometers on their legs so they can detect in darkness the footsteps of a small insect a meter away; water scorpions sense their depth by measuring the hydrostatic pressure; a nubile female silkworm moth releases ten billionths of a gram of sex attractant per second, and draws to her every male for miles around; dolphins, whales, and bats use a kind of sonar for precision echo-location. The direction, range, and amplitude of sounds reflected by to echo-locating bats are systematically mapped onto adjacent areas of the bat brain. How does the bat perceive its echo-world? Carp and catfish have taste buds distributed over most of their bodies, as well as in their mouths; the nerves from all these sensors converge on massive sensory processing lobes in the brain, lobes unknown in other animals. how does a catfish view the world? What does it feel like to be inside its brain? There are reported cases in which a dog wags its tail and greets with joy a man it has never met before; he turns out to be the long-lost identical twin of the dog's "master", recognizable by his odor. What is the smell-world of a dog like? Magnetotactic bacteria contain within them tiny crystals of magnetite - an iron mineral known to early sailing ship navigators as lodenstone. The bacteria literally have internal compasses that align them along the Earth's magnetic field. The great churning dynamo of molten iron in the Earth's core - as far as we know, entirely unknown to uninstrumented humans - is a guiding reality for these microscopic beings. How does the Earth's magnetism feel to them? All these creatures may be automatons, or nearly so, but what astounding special powers they have, never granted to humans, or even to comic book superheroes. How different their view of the world must be, perceiving so much that we miss.

Our modern microscopes, scanners, and sensors have disabused us of most of the old fanciful notions about the brain’s function. But the brain’s strangely remote quality—the way it seems both part of us and apart from us—still influences our perceptions in subtle ways. We have a sense that our brain exists in a state of splendid isolation, that its fundamental nature is impervious to the vagaries of our day-to-day lives. While we know that our brain is an exquisitely sensitive monitor of experience, we want to believe that it lies beyond the influence of experience. We want to believe that the impressions our brain records as sensations and stores as memories leave no physical imprint on its own structure. To believe otherwise would, we feel, call into question the integrity of the self.

My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French cafe, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen door, but I didn't care about any of it. There, I ordered chicken Dijon, or beef Bourguignon, or a simple green salad, or a pate sandwich, and when it came to the table, I melted into whatever arrived. I lavished in a forkful of spinach gratin on the side, at how delighted the chef had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese, like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love. Sure, there were small distractions and preoccupations in it all, but I could find the food in there, the food was the center, and the person making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it.

My honors thesis project was my first interactive exhibit, in which two facing chairs were activated by a motion sensor when the viewer walked by. One was a cofortable armchair of plush red velvet, with a dildo sticking out of a hole in the seat. When activated, the dildo moved up and down and a strobe light pulsed. The facing chair was hard and uncomfortable, with spikes protruding from the seat, and when the viewer walked by it a dog would bark. The juxtaposition of the two chairs was meant to represent how forces of repression censor the desire for liberation. In that same exhibition, I showed a handmade box in the shape of a cross, decorated with a beautiful painting of the Holy Trinity. The viewer was encouraged to open the box, where they would find a dildo wrapped in the American flag and nailed to a cross-- this was meant to symbolize the hypocrisy and repression that is hidden under the attractive facade of organized religion. The dildo was surrounded by pages from the Bible, which were themselves surrounded by images of the sickness and starvation caused by the embargo in Iraq, a comment on the effects of imposing one culture and religion on another.

Sirine puts a forkful of sweet potatoes into her mouth. The potatoes are soft as velvet, the gravy satiny. It is as if she can taste the life inside all those ingredients: the stem that the cranberries grew on, the earth inside the bread, even the warm blood inside the turkey. It comes back to her, the small secret that was always hers, for years, the only truth she seemed to possess- that food was better than love: surer, truer, more satisfying and enriching. As long as she could lose herself in the rhythms of peeling an onion, she was complete and whole. And as long as she could cook, she would be loved.