Suspect Zero Quotes

There was nothing like staring down the barrel of a suspected cyberweapon to clear the fog in your mind.

Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with relative ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy. SALES

These three man," Mimi said, "are suspects in a recent theft. Last night, Polly Partial received a shipment of twenty blueberry pies. This morning she counted them and came up short." "How many are missing?" I asked. "Last night she had twenty," Harvey said, shutting the station door, "and today she found zero. So at least eighteen are missing." "At least." I agreed.

As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him. For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion.

Most of them, I suspect, come to the mall not because there is something specific that they need to buy. Rather, they come in the hope that doing so will trigger a desire for something that, before going to the mall, they didn't want. It might be a desire for a cashmere sweater, a set of socket wrenches, or the latest cell phone. Why go out of their way to trigger desire? Because if they trigger one, they can enjoy the rush that comes when they extinguish that desire by buying its object. It is a rush, of course, that has little to do with their long-term happiness as taking a hit of heroin has to do with the long-term happiness of a heroin addict. My ability to form desires for consumer goods seems to have atrophied. What brought about this state of affairs? The profound realization, thanks to the practice of Stoicism, that requiring the things that those in my social circle typically crave and work hard to afford will, in the long run, make zero difference in how happy I am and will in no way contribute to my having a good life.

Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).

Zero Hour grew out of Naperville District 203’s unique approach to physical education, which has gained national attention and become the model for a type of gym class that I suspect would be unrecognizable to any adult reading this. No getting nailed in dodgeball, no flunking for not showering, no living in fear of being the last kid picked. The essence of physical education in Naperville 203 is teaching fitness instead of sports. The underlying philosophy is that if physical education class can be used to instruct kids how to monitor and maintain their own health and fitness, then the lessons they learn will serve them for life. And probably a longer and happier life at that. What’s being taught, really, is a lifestyle.

Suppose someone says, “Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world’s favorite pastime, is starting to decline.” You suspect he is wrong. How do you question the claim? Don’t even think of taking a personal shot like “You’re silly.” That only adds heat, not light. “I don’t think so” only expresses disagreement without delving into why you disagree. “What do you mean?” lowers the emotional temperature with a question but it’s much too vague. Zero in. You might say, “What do you mean by ‘pastime’?” or “What evidence is there that soccer’s popularity is declining? Over what time frame?” The answers to these precise questions won’t settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested. Since Socrates, good teachers have practiced precision questioning, but still it’s often not used when it’s needed most. Imagine how events might have gone if the Kennedy team had engaged in precision questioning when planning the Bay of Pigs invasion: “So what happens if they’re attacked and the plan falls apart?” “They retreat into the Escambray Mountains, where they can meet up with other anti-Castro forces and plan guerrilla operations.” “How far is it from the proposed landing site in the Bay of Pigs to the Escambray Mountains?” “Eighty miles.” “And what’s the terrain?” “Mostly swamp and jungle.” “So the guerrillas have been attacked. The plan has fallen apart. They don’t have helicopters or tanks. But they have to cross eighty miles of swamp and jungle before they can begin to look for shelter in the mountains? Is that correct?” I suspect that this conversation would not have concluded “sounds good!” Questioning like that didn’t happen, so Kennedy’s first major decision as president was a fiasco. The lesson was learned, resulting in the robust but respectful debates of the Cuban missile crisis—which exemplified the spirit we encouraged among our forecasters.

I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever. Muslims and Sikhs became the target of hate crimes. ICE was the creation of 9/11 paranoia. The Secure Communities program would require local police to share information with Homeland Security. Immigration detention centers began to be managed by private prison groups. And New York State, as well as most other states, axed driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants.

Either way, I suspect that it’s less effective to aim at the Gini index as a deeply buried root cause of many social ills than to zero in on solutions to each problem: investment in research and infrastructure to escape economic stagnation, regulation of the finance sector to reduce instability, broader access to education and job training to facilitate economic mobility, electoral transparency and finance reform to eliminate illicit influence, and so on.

What if I told you,” he said, striking a match and lighting it idly, a reflex, a habit. “That I had zero ambition. That I just wanted to plant and trim and weed all day. What then?” “What do you mean, ‘what then’?” “Would that be it? Would you be over this?” He drew a line in the air between us. “Are you looking for someone who’s always trying to transform themselves into the next thing? Because that can get exhausting.” I still struggled to get a bead on when Leo was kidding and when he was being serious; I suspected it was often a combination of the two.

1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

Computers speak machine language," Hiro says. "It's written in ones and zeroes -- binary code. At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It's the tongue of Eden. But it's very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while, working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH. You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn't always come out the way you want. Like a dusty pane or warped mirror. A really advanced hacker comes to understand the true inner workings of the machine -- he sees through the language he's working in and glimpses the secret functioning of the binary code -- becomes a Ba'al Shem of sorts." "Lagos believed that the legends about the tongue of Eden were exaggerated versions of true events," the Librarian says. "These legends reflected nostalgia for a time when people spoke Sumerian, a tongue that was superior to anything that came afterward." "Is Sumerian really that good?" "Not as far as modern-day linguists can tell," the Librarian says. "As I mentioned, it is largely impossible for us to grasp. Lagos suspected that words worked differently in those days. If one's native tongue influences the physical structure of the developing brain, then it is fair to say that the Sumerians -- who spoke a language radically different from anything in existence today -- had fundamentally different brains from yours. Lagos believed that for this reason, Sumerian was a language ideally suited to the creation and propagation of viruses. That a virus, once released into Sumer, would spread rapidly and virulently, until it had infected everyone." "Maybe Enki knew that also," Hiro says. "Maybe the nam-shub of Enki wasn't such a bad thing. Maybe Babel was the best thing that ever happened to us.

Patient Zero in the Ebola outbreak, researchers suspect, was a 2-year-old boy who died on Dec. 6, just a few days after falling ill in a village in Guéckédou, in southeastern Guinea. Bordering Sierra Leone and Liberia, Guéckédou is at the intersection of three nations, where the disease found an easy entry point to the region. A week later, it killed the boy’s mother, then his 3-year-old sister, then his grandmother. All had fever, vomiting and diarrhea, but no one knew what had sickened them.

All philosophies are either monist or dualist. Monists believe that the material world is the only world -- hence, materialists. Dualists believe in a binary universe, that there is a spiritual world in addition to the material world." "Well, as a computer geek, I have to believe in the binary universe." The Librarian raises his eyebrows. "How does that follow?" "Sorry. It's a joke. A bad pun. See, computers use binary code to represent information. So I was joking that I have to believe in the binary universe, that I have to be a dualist." "How droll," the Librarian says, not sounding very amused. "Your joke may not be without genuine merit, however." "How's that? I was just kidding, really." "Computers rely on the one and the zero to represent all things. This distinction between something and nothing -- this pivotal separation between being and nonbeing -- is quite fundamental and underlies many Creation myths." Hiro feels his face getting slightly warm, feels himself getting annoyed. He suspects that the Librarian may be pulling his leg, playing him for a fool. But he knows that the Librarian, however convincingly rendered he may be, is just a piece of software and cannot actually do such things. "Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation." "How about 'sword'?" "From a root with several meanings. One of those meanings is 'to cut or pierce.' One of them is 'post' or 'rod.' And the other is, simply, 'to speak.'" "Let's stay on track," Hiro says. "Fine. I can return to this potential conversation fork at a later time, if you desire." "I don't want to get all forked up at this point.

Not long after my video deposition, I was talking to a Secret Service colleague who worked the West Wing Lobby. He had just resumed his shift after returning from his own testimony. The president had just visited him. That was extremely suspicious—my associate was spooked. “He just came out and came straight up to me like—like he was looking for me. Yeah, and he asked how I was by name. We chatted—like small talk—like normal. And then he asked how my wife and kids were.… We’ve never actually talked before.” Nothing about that was normal. It was obviously a subtle form of intimidation. The president was sending a message that he knew of the officer’s recent testimony—and perhaps was sending an even more sinister message. I certainly was glad to be at JJRTC, away from them. It was all so wild, so bizarre. Prior to that, the president didn’t seem to know my fellow officer by name. Someone—most likely the president’s attorneys—advised him to make small talk immediately after the officer testified. The president’s little “hint” spooked both of us. It confirmed to me what I suspected: That was indeed how they operated. It was reminiscent of the stories we had heard of some of the women who alleged that the president, while governor, had either raped or sexually assaulted them. In one of the stories Mrs. Clinton had homed in on the alleged victim, despite having never met her beforehand, just as the president zeroed in on the West Wing Lobby officer. I was glad to be at JJRTC, but I feared that I was not far enough away.

People still think the Lewinsky affair was one political party making a big deal over a little extra pie on the side; it wasn’t. What Starr proved was that the president had engaged in inappropriate sexually related workplace conduct with an intern/employee, as he had with other women. Some women, such as Juanita Broaddrick, even alleged he had assaulted them. He had zero integrity in this area, and that made everything he did suspect and untrustworthy. It revealed his real character. The president of the United States believed that he was above the law. He perjured himself and convinced others to perjure themselves to try to save his carefully crafted image. He created a spirit of corruption that infected the White House, the Secret Service, the whole government. Bill Clinton endangered us all by serving himself. He dragged me through the mud for it. He raked a lot of people over the coals for it.

Tripp somehow manipulated Monica into giving her the infamous blue dress. Nel and I hadn’t cleaned up everything. The president had “deposited” somewhere besides White House towels. The biggest security leak in history was the one that Monica wore into the White House and then strutted out with—right past us. There was no way to spin it. Either the president had mysteriously gone around the White House ejaculating on people’s clothing, or he and Monica had a taxpayer-funded affair for which he committed perjury. It also proved what I damn well knew, that Monica was easily manipulated, either by the likes of a higher-up like President Clinton or a lower-down like Linda Tripp. She had no business playing in a high-stakes environment within arm’s reach of intelligence of the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, and the Department of Defense. I mean, the spook shit that moved and was approved through the White House was the most sensitive intel in existence. Actionable intel is power. How could anyone in the Secret Service be expected to do his or her job if the Americans allowed people like the Clintons to assume national leadership? People still think the Lewinsky affair was one political party making a big deal over a little extra pie on the side; it wasn’t. What Starr proved was that the president had engaged in inappropriate sexually related workplace conduct with an intern/employee, as he had with other women. Some women, such as Juanita Broaddrick, even alleged he had assaulted them. He had zero integrity in this area, and that made everything he did suspect and untrustworthy. It revealed his real character. The president of the United States believed that he was above the law. He perjured himself and convinced others to perjure themselves to try to save his carefully crafted image. He created a spirit of corruption that infected the White House, the Secret Service, the whole government. Bill Clinton endangered us all by serving himself.

She suspected that a big factor in her choice was the fact that they were both men. They had exactly zero interest in attacking a woman. But it was more than that. It was the love she read on their faces when they looked at each other, their commitment to openly and fiercely love each other even though society might disapprove. Given its conception during a violent rape, this child might also need that strength of commitment and acceptance.

Nerds are used to transparency. They add value by becoming expert at a technical skill like computer programming. In engineering disciplines, a solution either works or it fails. You can evaluate someone else’s work with relative ease, as surface appearances don’t matter much. Sales is the opposite: an orchestrated campaign to change surface appearances without changing the underlying reality. This strikes engineers as trivial if not fundamentally dishonest. They know their own jobs are hard, so when they look at salespeople laughing on the phone with a customer or going to two-hour lunches, they suspect that no real work is being done. If anything, people overestimate the relative difficulty of science and engineering, because the challenges of those fields are obvious. What nerds miss is that it takes hard work to make sales look easy.

The first of our losses happened on September 11, 2001. Years later, during my freshman year at college, a popular topic of conversation in the dining hall was where you were on 9/11. I learned that no matter how far away you were from New York that day, no matter how distant your connection to that day was, no matter how much lower than zero the count of the people you lost on that day was, if you were white, 9/11 happened to you personally, with blunt and scalding force. Because the antithesis of an American is an immigrant and because we could not be victims in the public eye, we became suspects. And so September 11 changed the immigration landscape forever.

we showed them how to tactfully dissect the vague claims people often make. Suppose someone says, “Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world’s favorite pastime, is starting to decline.” You suspect he is wrong. How do you question the claim? Don’t even think of taking a personal shot like “You’re silly.” That only adds heat, not light. “I don’t think so” only expresses disagreement without delving into why you disagree. “What do you mean?” lowers the emotional temperature with a question but it’s much too vague. Zero in. You might say, “What do you mean by ‘pastime’?” or “What evidence is there that soccer’s popularity is declining? Over what time frame?” The answers to these precise questions won’t settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested.

Kilimanjaro offered a diverse and riveting selection of ways to die: malaria, typhoid fever, yellow fever, hepatitis, meningitis, polio, tetanus, and cholera. Those, of course, could be vaccinated against. There was no injection to protect you from the fog, which could roll in fast and as dense as clouds. According to one hiker’s online testimonial, “At lunch . . . the fog was so thick, I did not know what I was eating until it was in my mouth. Even then, it was a guess.” With zero visibility, people wandered off the trail and died of exposure. Even on a clear day, one could step on a loose rock and slide to an exhilarating demise. Or sometimes the mountain just came to you. In June 2006, three American climbers had been killed by a rockslide traveling 125 miles per second. Some of the boulders had been the size of cars, and scientists suspected the ice that held them in place had melted due to global warming. On the other end, hypothermia was also a concern. Temperatures could drop below zero at night. Then there was this heartening tidbit I came across in my research: “At 20,000 feet, Mount Kilimanjaro is Africa’s highest peak and also the world’s tallest volcano. And although classified as dormant, Kilimanjaro has begun to stir, and evidence suggests that a massive landslide could rip open the side of the mountain causing a cataclysmic flow of hot gases and rock, similar to Mount St. Helens.” A volcano?! They’re still making volcanoes? But the biggest threat on Kilimanjaro was altitude sickness. It happened when you ascended too quickly. Symptoms could be as mild as nausea, shortness of breath, and a headache. At its worst it resulted in pulmonary edema, where your lungs filled up with fluid (essentially, drowning on land), or cerebral edema, where your brain swelled. Eighty percent of Kilimanjaro hikers got altitude sickness. Ten percent of those cases became life threatening or caused brain damage. Ten percent of 80 percent? I didn’t like those odds. Maybe this trip was too dangerous. My

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth. These lessons have become dogma in the startup world; those who would ignore them are presumed to invite the justified doom visited upon technology in the great crash of 2000. And yet the opposite principles are probably more correct: 1. It is better to risk boldness than triviality. 2. A bad plan is better than no plan. 3. Competitive markets destroy profits. 4. Sales matters just as much as product.

Let me guess. Reagan’s pregnant and you’re scared shitless,” he deadpans. All the blood drains from Pete’s face. “What? Reagan’s pregnant?” He looks at each of us in turn. “Oh, fuck,” Paul says. “You didn’t know.” “How the fuck did you know and I didn’t?” Pete says, his voice rising. “We didn’t know,” Matt says. “He was just guessing, because all of us, aside from Sam, came to him when we had one on the way.” Matt glares at Paul. “Why did you have to go and ruin it?” “Hell, I thought everyone knew. She’s been sick for the past week.” “Bad shrimp,” Pete says. “Bad shrimp wouldn’t make her throw up every morning,” Logan chimes in. He can speak when he wants to. “She’s knocked up.” Pete sinks down in a chair like his legs have turned to noodles. Logan raises his hand. “When I suspected Em was pregnant and I came to spill my guts to Paul, it was because Em’s boobs were getting bigger.” “Sky’s did too,” Matt chimes in. Paul nods. “Same here.” Pete looks around the room. “Reagan’s boobs are bigger, and she’s sick every morning. And afternoon. Hell, even in the evening.” He smiles, and I imagine I can see stars floating in the air around his head. “I’m going to be a dad?” “Sorry we ruined the surprise. We’ve had bets going for a whole week to find out if you’d realize it before Reagan does.” Matt shrugs. “One of you could have told me!” Pete cries. But he’s grinning like a damn fool. He points around the room at each of us. “So, which of you bet Reagan would know first?” I raise my hand. I figured she’s the one with the uterus, so she’d realize it before Pete did. “You lost, little brother,” Paul says. He walks by me and squeezes my shoulder. “Doesn’t count if you tell him,” I complain. Paul wraps his beefy arm around Pete’s head and gives him a noogie. Pete’s still in la-la land though, so he doesn’t even struggle. “Stop and get a test on the way home,” Matt tells him. “Okay.” Pete’s still star-struck. “Wait,” I say. “If you didn’t want to tell us Reagan’s pregnant, what did you call me here for?” Pete throws up his hands. “Hell, I can’t remember.

If you don’t know where you’re going, it’s unlikely you’ll ever get there. Seems obvious, doesn’t it, when you see it written down. But many of us drift through life having no real idea where we’re going to end up. It’s no wonder so many of us are unhappy. Did you have burning ambitions when you were younger? Most of us did. What was it that made those yearnings so pronounced? Several things I would suspect: Your dreams were big You thought about them constantly You made plans for them You attached major significance to them They were of life or death importance to you How do your old dreams compare to your current goals?

HEROPANTI MOVIE REVIEW & RATING Movie Name: Heropanti Director: Sabbir Khan Producer: Sajid Nadiadwala Music Director: Sajid-Wajid, Manj Musik Cast: Tiger Shroff, Kirti Sanon, Sandeepa Dhar ‘Heropanti’, a love story is directed by Sabbir Khan and produced by Sajid Nadiadwala. It is the debut movie of Tiger Shroff (son of superstar Jackie Shroff) and Kirti Sanon, both starring in lead roles alongside Sandeepa Dhar featuring in a pivotal role. Overall it is a remake of Telugu movie ‘Parugu’ starring Allu Arjun. ‘Heropanti’ is all about another new gem in Bollywood industry. Big launch with hit songs. New faces- heroine as well as hero. Does it work? Let’s go through to know it… ‘Heropanti’ borrows half of its title from Sr. Shroff’s breakout film and is also having the signature tune from ‘Hero’ (1983) which is being played in the background repeatedly. The action movie is not as terrible as Salman and Akshay films. The newcomer Tiger Shroff has done amazing stunts in the film. The story is set in the land of Jattland in Harayana where Chaudhary (Prakash Raj), the Haryanvi goon is completely against love marriages. He has two daughters- Renu (Sandeepa Dhar) and Dimpi (Kirti Sanon). Chaudharyji’s elder daughter Renu’s marriage is held, but on the wedding night she elopes with her boyfriend Rakesh. Her step results in a frantic search for her across the village. Chaudharyji launches a manhunt to track them down and eliminate them. Now Haryanvi goon’s men suspects Rakesh’s friends and thinks that they may know where Renu is. So the goon decides to kidnap the buddies of his daughter’s lover. Bablu (Tiger Shroff) turns to be one of the buddies with ultra muscular head and shoulders model who falls in love with Chaudharyji’s younger daughter Dimpy (Kirti Sanon). The goons manage to trace Bablu who has actually helped Rakesh and Renu in escaping. Bablu, meanwhile in captivity, shares with his pals about his love interest. Bablu falls in love at first sight with the pretty younger daughter of Chaudharyji’s, Dimpy. He comes to know quite early that it is none other than the Harynavi goon Chaudharyji’s daughter. The movie tries to end up in a ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’ style where Bablu uses his superpowers and figures out to be with his love but without offending her father. launch pad for Shroff to show his acting and dancing skills. Plan to watch it, if nothing left to do. Tiger Shoff is a great action hero. When it comes to action, he is a star but comparatively his acting skills are zero. Kirti Sanon requires a little brushing up on her acting skills she reminds us somewhere of young Deepika Padukone who is surely going to have a good run in the industry someday. Verdict: It’s the most masala-less movie of this year with more action and less drama. But the movie is a perfect

He took the pilot chair and headed the Comet across the zone toward the computed position of the invisible asteroid. “They’ll surely see us approaching!” Ezra warned. “The Magician of Mars will be taking no chances, Cap’n Future!” “We’re going to use a stratagem to get onto that asteroid without him suspecting,” Curt informed. “Watch.” —Hamilton; The Magician of Mars (1941)

Each night my father counts backward from 100 like a shepherd climbing down meadow by meadow the Alps. Since his stroke he does this, he says, so his mind holds still, so it freezes, a suspect, hands on the wallpaper. That way it is there with his cane the next morning. When your mind runs away, well, it stashes parts of your real life forever, the names of lakes, the pretty faces of girls. When that happens, you count on nothing, a patch of sun on a green carpet, new snow on a roof framed by curtains. You call the woman “Nurse” and wonder why she cries. It is still a life, that chair between the cashews and windows. Then one day Bang! Doesn’t your mind come waltzing home, made up clown-style, sloshing memories like confetti in a pail? And don’t you take your life in your hands, counting out good times, counting out bad, marking time backward so it’s understood? Whatever you’re missing, he says, it’s what you don’t miss. Listen, he says, that sound in the old high ceilings of the house, not ice in the eaves, no man’s voice, no echo either... Only the wind, counting toward zero.

She’d yet to see a book in any Bigendian environment. He was a creature of screens, of bare expanses of desk or table, empty shelves. He owned, as far as she knew, no art. In some way, she suspected, he regarded it as competition, noise to his signal.

We also gave teams a primer on teamwork based on insights gleaned from research in group dynamics. On the one hand, we warned, groupthink is a danger. Be cooperative but not deferential. Consensus is not always good; disagreement is not always bad. If you do happen to agree, don't take the agreement—in itself—as proof that you are right. Never stop doubting. Pointed questions are as essential to a team as vitamins are to a human body. On the other hand, the opposite of groupthink—rancor and dysfunction—is also a danger. Team members must disagree without being disagreeable, we advised. Practice 'constructive confrontation' to use the phrase of Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel. Precision questioning is one way to do that. Drawing on the work of Dennis Matthies and Monica Worline, we showed them how to tactfully dissect the vague claims people often make. Suppose someone says, 'Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world's favorite pastime, is starting to decline.' You suspect [they] are wrong. ... Zero in. You might say, 'What do you mean by 'pastime?' or 'What evidence is there that soccer's popularity is declining? Over what time frame.' The answers to these precise questions won't settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested.

When will and reason strive to correct by force or even to strike out a bad channel of personal evolution- bad probably because it is necessarily so -- "truth" then makes its appearance like an ambassador that is as necessary and incontestable as an object, and unsuspected because there is no "egoistic" intention behind it. Does this mean that nothing devised by the individual has any credibility? His will is suspect, because it is intentional; geometry and algebra are suspect, because they are the grocer's scales; the reasoning instinct, and utility, are objects of scorn on account of their profound uselessness; and even the unconscious is not to be trusted because it serves as a storage cellar for the conscious mind. What is not confirmed by chance has no validity. One would like to think a projection screen exists that extends between the ego and the outside world, upon which the subconscious projects the image of its predominant excitation, but which is only visible to the conscious mind (and objectively communicable) in the case where "the other side," the outside world, projects the same image on the screen at the same time, and if these two congruent images are superimposed. It is in varying percentages of efficacy that intuition on the one hand, and chance from the outside world on the other, share in such examples of convergence. There remains a degree of question of varying magnitude, which can became surprisingly large-as in the case above-if, in this particular instance, the individual's contribution-his part of the interpretation-is reduced to zero. This is when a vertiginous interpretation of the universe seems to be felt as if the universe was a double of the super ego, a superior, thinking entity.

The entrepreneurs who stuck with Silicon Valley learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

Foley, he began to suspect, studying the mouth under the black rectangle, might be the kind of scary that was about meanness, rather than strength. Though he’d also seen the two coexist, more or less, in the same individual, and that hadn’t been good at all.

learned four big lessons from the dot-com crash that still guide business thinking today: 1. Make incremental advances Grand visions inflated the bubble, so they should not be indulged. Anyone who claims to be able to do something great is suspect, and anyone who wants to change the world should be more humble. Small, incremental steps are the only safe path forward. 2. Stay lean and flexible All companies must be “lean,” which is code for “unplanned.” You should not know what your business will do; planning is arrogant and inflexible. Instead you should try things out, “iterate,” and treat entrepreneurship as agnostic experimentation. 3. Improve on the competition Don’t try to create a new market prematurely. The only way to know you have a real business is to start with an already existing customer, so you should build your company by improving on recognizable products already offered by successful competitors. 4. Focus on product, not sales If your product requires advertising or salespeople to sell it, it’s not good enough: technology is primarily about product development, not distribution. Bubble-era advertising was obviously wasteful, so the only sustainable growth is viral growth.

I wasn’t expecting to read a paragraph that encouraging when I started that book. I suspect a businessman would read that paragraph and wonder what all the fuss is about. It might sound an awful lot like complaining. But it isn’t. I sighed a weary, happy sigh because Dahl assured me I’m not as crazy or as wimpy as I’m afraid I am. The same can be said for songwriting too. God has arranged the process (for me, at least) in such a way that after every song is complete, I get amnesia. I think, in the fast-fading thrill of having written a song, that I’ve finally unlocked the secret formula, discovered the missing number, solved the timeless mystery of how to write a song. I have at last answered for myself the question of whether the music or the lyrics come first! And the answer is—wait, I had it a second ago. What was it again? And it’s gone. Even as the last note fades to silence, amnesia sets in. I can’t remember how it works. So the next time I pick up the guitar or open the notebook, I do so with fear and trembling, unsure how to proceed. I’m starting from zero.

The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating U.S. Population Stabilization (1970–1998): A First Draft of History by Roy Beck and Leon Kolankiewicz The overwhelmingly non-Hispanic, white leadership of the environmental movement may have felt it was defensible to address population growth as long as the great bulk of this growth came from non-Hispanic whites, which it did during the Baby Boom. But the situation changed dramatically after1972. From that year forward, the fertility of non-Hispanic whites was below the replacement rate, while that of black Americans and Latinos remained well above the replacement rate. To talk of fertility reductions after 1972 was to draw disproportionate attention to nonwhites. Certain minorities and their spokespersons—with long memories of disgraceful treatment by the white majority and acutely aware of their comparative powerlessness in American society—were deeply suspicious of possible hidden agendas in the population stabilization movement. As the Reverend Jesse Jackson told the Rockefeller Commission, “our community is suspect of any programs that would have the effect of either reducing or levelling off our population growth. Virtually all the security we have is in the number of children we produce.” And Manuel Aragon, speaking in Spanish, declared to the Commission: “what we must do is to encourage large Mexican American families so that we will eventually be so numerous that the system will either respond or it will be overwhelmed.” During the twenty-six years after 1972, the non-Hispanic white share of population growth declined significantly from the 1970 era. Thus, by the 1990s, a majority of the nation’s growth stemmed from sources other than non-Hispanic whites (especially Latin American and Asian immigrants and their offspring). Environmentalist leaders—proud and protective of their claim to the moral high ground—may have been reluctant to jeopardize this by venturing into the political minefield of the nation’s volatile racial/ethnic relations through appearing to point fingers at “outsiders,” “others,” or “people of color” as responsible for America’s ongoing problem with population growth.

Drawing on the work of Dennis Matthies and Monica Worline, we showed them how to tactfully dissect the vague claims people often make. Suppose someone says, “Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world’s favorite pastime, is starting to decline.” You suspect he is wrong. How do you question the claim? Don’t even think of taking a personal shot like “You’re silly.” That only adds heat, not light. “I don’t think so” only expresses disagreement without delving into why you disagree. “What do you mean?” lowers the emotional temperature with a question but it’s much too vague. Zero in. You might say, “What do you mean by ‘pastime’?” or “What evidence is there that soccer’s popularity is declining? Over what time frame?” The answers to these precise questions won’t settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested.

Entanglement means some aspect of our description of behavior can't be separated by space, time or dimensions. Clocks entanglement and dimensionality in spacetime: A clock runs at the same rate for an object falling into a black hole (but slows to zero at the event horizon for an outside observer) as it does in empty space and at the exact center of a black hole, if it is not spinning because gravity cancels itself out. Since the object's clock rate remains the same the whole time the difference is scale and dimensions. I would suspect that the scale of the other three forces is reduced proportionately. We might describe this as a fractal nesting of scale.

Nor would Marina, hewing to purely Party principles, let her stepfather find out about the death of his drunkard of a nephew, who looked like a dead man long before his live-in lover, an alcoholic with a face like stomach contents, killed the poor guy with a classic Russian ax. … Nonetheless, she refused to confirm this disgraceful death as a fact. For her anxious mother, who wasn’t allowed to see the real news, either, but who somehow could tell something bad had happened, the crime story became a vodka poisoning—which was also partly the truth since, according to the autopsy report, at the moment her nephew, unsteady on his feet, was leveled by the ax, his organism was as sloshed as soup and he had barely a few weeks to live. Nonetheless, Marina had to take care to maintain this person’s pseudo-life. … She just couldn’t zero him out—and evidently her mother, taking from the mailbox the latest transfer sent by Marina, still asked herself why her now grown-up relative didn’t show his face or come visit even for the holidays that had always been sacred for him, dates for reestablishing his rights and for being with his people. Doubtless, her mother secretly suspected that brusque Marina had insulted her relative—which was also true because the deads’ resentment for the living always seeps through the night and comes out on the wallpaper, and also because Marina had stashed the body.

Pardon me for finding it a little suspect that she literally had zero interest in me, yet turns around and fucks you.