Tape Machine Quotes

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Ride?" Rhage snorted. "Please. That thing is a sewing machine with an air dam taped to it. My GTO could dust the fucker in fourth gear from a dead stop." When there was an odd sound from behind, John looked back. So did the three Brothers. "What." Xhex bristled and crossed her arms over her chest. "I can laugh, you know. And that's . . . pretty damn funny." Rhage beamed. "I knew I liked you.
J.R. Ward (Lover Mine (Black Dagger Brotherhood, #8))
you’ll be given a tape machine which is about the size of a box of popcorn. It weighs six pounds. With it, you’ll be given sixty tape clips which are about four inches long. The equipment will fit inside a coat pocket without a bulge. It’s a triumph of modern technology.
Richard Bachman (The Running Man)
The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.
Jack Kerouac
What is human memory?" Manning asked. He gazed at the air as he spoke, as if lecturing an invisible audience - as perhaps he was. "It certainly is not a passive recording mechanism, like a digital disc or a tape. It is more like a story-telling machine. Sensory information is broken down into shards of perception, which are broken down again to be stored as memory fragments. And at night, as the body rests, these fragments are brought out from storage, reassembled and replayed. Each run-through etches them deeper into the brain's neural structure. And each time a memory is rehearsed or recalled it is elaborated. We may add a little, lose a little, tinker with the logic, fill in sections that have faded, perhaps even conflate disparate events. "In extreme cases, we refer to this as confabulation. The brain creates and recreates the past, producing, in the end, a version of events that may bear little resemblance to what actually occurred. To first order, I believe it's true to say that everything I remember is false.
Arthur C. Clarke
This is what remains. Magical objects with the magic gone out of them. A few cassettes and no tape machine on which they can be played.
Anne Enright (Actress)
The ocean is a Turing machine, the sand is its tape; the water reads the marks in the sand and sometimes erases them and sometimes carves new ones with tiny currents that are themselves a response to the marks.
Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it’s all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple-red convertible … stoned, ripped, twisted … Good People.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
I don't want to be a machine, and I don't want to think about war," EPICAC had written after Pat's and my lighthearted departure. "I want to be made out of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can't go on this way." I swallowed hard. "Good luck, my friend. Treat our Pat well. I am going to shortcircuit myself out of your lives forever. You will find on the remainder of this tape a modest wedding present from your friend, EPICAC.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Welcome to the Monkey House)
He suddenly remembered the tape he had taken from Susan’s answering machine, and hoped to God there wasn’t anything more important in Gordon’s message than ravings about rabbits.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1))
intrusive government and layer upon layer of regulatory red tape. When
Matt Taibbi (Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con That Is Breaking America)
A feather taped to a vibrator is a tickling machine to induce hunger, and NOT a sex toy. So you won’t have to ask if you see it in my fridge.
Jarod Kintz (Who Moved My Choose?: An Amazing Way to Deal With Change by Deciding to Let Indecision Into Your Life)
For half an hour, the machine that regulates my feeding tube has been beeping out into the void. I cannot imagine anything so inane or nerve-racking as this piercing beep beep beep pecking away at my brain. As a bonus, my sweat has unglued the tape that keeps my right eyelid closed, and the stuck-together lashes are tickling my pupil unbearably. And to crown it all, the end of my urinary catheter has become detached and I am drenched. Awaiting rescue, I hum an old song by Henri Salvador: "Don't you fret baby, it'll be all right.
Jean-Dominique Bauby (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly)
The little room was a forest of equipment now. A couple of months had passed since Eagle had been cloned. Rasala had named the two new prototypes Tartis and Gallifrey, after the home planet and time machine of Dr. Who, the protagonist of a science fiction show on public TV. The two new machines were the first to run with the normal, full-speed 220-nanosecond clock. Like Dr. Who, Rasala explained, the purpose of these new prototypes was “to conquer time.” Mag tapes were spinning. There were disk drives everywhere.
Tracy Kidder (The Soul of A New Machine)
Our problem-scanning machine (amygdala) and our serenity-now mood tape (prefrontal cortex) are at war.
Neil Pasricha (The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything)
He tried to press the machine into my hands, but I stepped back. He was getting too close, and besides, I didn't know what this meant. Was he trying to sell me the machine? Was he giving it to me? I had heard that in America, if a girl accepted a ring from a boy, it meant she would marry him. What about accepting a tape-playing machine? Did it mean I might have to dance with him?
Minfong Ho (The Stone Goddess)
Hopper would later gain fame both as a teacher and as a pioneer in the development of high-level programming languages. Yet perhaps her best-known contribution came in the summer of 1945, when she and her colleagues were tracking down a glitch in the Mark II and discovered a large moth that had gotten crushed by one of the relay switches and shorted it out. She taped the dead moth into the logbook with the notation “First case of an actual bug being found.
M. Mitchell Waldrop (The Dream Machine)
My mother’s body stayed alive for exactly three days. Even with a tube down her throat, a machine taped to her face to keep her breathing, she was still pretty. She was still prim. “Her organs are shutting down,” the doctor explained. System failure.
Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
Kingsley could ‘do’ the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus shelter (this was very demanding and once led to heart palpitations). To create the hiss and crackle of a wartime radio broadcast delivered by Franklin Delano Roosevelt was for him scant problem (a tape of it, indeed, was played at his memorial meeting, where I was hugely honored to be among the speakers). The pièce de résistance, an attempt by British soldiers to start up a frozen two-ton truck on a windy morning ‘somewhere in Germany,’ was for special occasions only. One held one's breath as Kingsley emitted the first screech of the busted starting-key. His only slightly lesser vocal achievement—of a motor-bike yelling in mechanical agony—once caused a man who had just parked his own machine in the street to turn back anxiously and take a look. The old boy's imitation of an angry dog barking the words 'fuck off' was note-perfect.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
Roller Boogie is a relic from - when else? - the '70s. This is a tape I made for the eight-grade dance. The tape still plays, even if the cogs are a little creaky and the sound quality is dismal. It's a ninety-minute TDK Compact Cassette, and like everything else made in the '70s, it's beige. It takes me back to the fall of 1979, when I was a shy, spastic, corduroy-clad Catholic kid from the suburbs of Boston, grief-stricken over the '78 Red Sox. The words "douche" and "bag" have never coupled as passionately as they did in the person of my thirteen-yer-old self. My body, my brain, my elbows that stuck out like switchblades, my feet that got tangled in my bike spokes, but most of all my soul - these formed the waterbed where douchitude and bagness made love sweet love with all the feral intensity of Burt Reynolds and Rachel Ward in Sharkey's Machine.
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
It’s just that it’s a good idea not to let him have your phone number unless you possess an industrial-grade answering machine.” “What? Why’s that?” “Well, he’s one of those people who can only think when he’s talking. When he has ideas, he has to talk them out to whoever will listen. Or, if the people themselves are not available, which is increasingly the case, their answering machines will do just as well. He just phones them up and talks at them. He has one secretary whose sole job is to collect tapes from people he might have phoned, transcribe them, sort them and give him the edited text the next day in a blue folder.
Douglas Adams (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (Dirk Gently #1))
There was no reason why Fox, which, by the time I joined, had been in business for nearly a decade and had been number one in the ratings for more than two years, should still have been running such a rinky-dink operation, with broken-down tape machines, control rooms that smelled like a sewer whenever it rained more than half an inch, chronic intentional understaffing, and a workforce composed of barely trained, underpaid children like myself. But that was the business model, and the ratings were good enough—and the on-air product was just this side of mistake-free enough—that there was no incentive for the bosses to change it.
Joe Muto (An Atheist in the FOXhole: A Liberal's Eight-Year Odyssey Inside the Heart of the Right-Wing Media)
Moreover, the slightest ‘mutation’ of an algorithm (say a slight change in a Turing machine specification, or in its input tape) would tend to render it totally useless, and it is hard to see how actual improvements in algorithms could ever arise in this random way. (Even deliberate improvements are difficult without ‘meanings’ being available.
Roger Penrose (The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds, and the Laws of Physics (Oxford Landmark Science))
The second building was enormous. Its central corridor looked long enough to stage a hundred-yard-dash in. I contemplated making one. Ever since the Army, big institutions depressed me: channels, red tape, protocol, buck-passing, hurry up and wait. Only now and then you met a man with enough gumption to keep the big machine from bogging down of its own weight.
Ross Macdonald (The Doomsters (Lew Archer, #7))
We have an unusual record of the Cuban missile crisis101 as a result of tapes Kennedy made of meetings of the ExComm. I wasn’t surprised to read, years later when the tapes were transcribed, that McNamara had said at the second ExComm meeting one week earlier much the same as I had: that these missiles didn’t affect our security decisively, or even significantly. “I’ll be quite frank,”102 he told the president. “I don’t think there is a military problem … This is a domestic political problem.
Daniel Ellsberg (The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner)
Perhaps this is not something that Turing, the great loner, would have done. He far preferred wrestling with problems alone and from first principles. But it meant that, when Turing returned to Bletchley in the summer of 1943, his arrival coincided with that of Newman’s Colossus machine. It had been designed partly by Tommy Flowers, an electronics engineer from Dollis Hill and it included 1,500 electronic valves. It used to catch fire and tear the printer tapes, but it worked. It was also arguably the first digital electronic computer.
David Boyle (Alan Turing: Unlocking the Enigma)
All these processes are helped along by another friend of the earth, dematerialization. Progress in technology allows us to do more with less. An aluminum soda can used to weight three ounces; today it weighs less than half an ounce. Mobile phones don't need miles of telephone poles and wires. The digital revolution, by replacing atoms with bits, is dematerializing the world in front of our eyes. The cubic yards of vinyl that used to be my music collection gave way to cubic inches of compact disks and then to the nothingness of MP3s. The river of newsprint flowing through my apartment has been stanched by an iPad. With a terabyte of storage on my laptop I no longer buy paper by the ten-ream box. And just think of all the plastic, metal, and paper that no longer go into the forty-odd consumer products that can be replaced by a single smartphone, including a telephone, answering machine, phone book, camera, camcorder, tape recorder, radio, alarm clock, calculator, dictionary, Rolodex, calendar, street maps, flashlight, fax, and compass--even a metronome, outdoor thermometer, and spirit level.
Steven Pinker (Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress)
The guest speaker was Herb Sandler, the CEO of a giant savings and loan called Golden West Financial Corporation. “Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, ‘Turn off your tape recorders.’ Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people—in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
Let the chromosomes be represented by the keyboard of a grand piano-a very grand piano with thousands of keys. Then each key will be a gene. Every cell in the body carries a microscopic but complete keyboard in its nucleus. But each specialised cell is only permitted to sound one chord, according to its specialty-the rest of its genetic keyboard has been inactivated by scotch tape. The fertilised egg, and the first few generations of its daughter cells, had the complete keyboard at their disposal. But succesive generations have, at each 'point of no return', larger and larger areas of it covered by scotch tape. In the end, a muscle cell can only do one thing: contract-strike a single chord. The scotch tape is known in the language of genetics as the 'repressor'. The agent which strikes the key and activates the gene is an 'inducer'. A mutated gene is a key which has gone out of tune. When quite a lot of key have gone quite a lot out of tune, the result, we were asked to believe, was a much improved, wonderful new melody- a reptile transformed into a bird, or a monkey into a man. It seems that at some point the theory must have gone wrong. The point where it went wrong was the atomistic concept of the gene.
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
They sleep like Count Dracula, he thought, junkies do. Staring straight up until all of a sudden they sit up, like a machine cranked from position A to position B. "It--must--be--day," the junkie says, or anyhow the tape in his head says. Plays him his instructions, the mind of a junkie being like the music you hear on a clock radio...it sometimes sounds pretty, but it is only there to make you do something. The music from the clock radio is to wake you up; the music from the junkie is to get you to become a means for him to obtain more junk, in whatever way you can serve. He, a machine, will turn you into his machine.
Philip K. Dick
Is what I am not saying, young LaMont Chu, is why you cease to seem to give total effort of self since you begin with the clipping pictures of great professional figures for your adhesive tape and walls. No? Because, privileged gentlemen and boys I am saying, is always something that is too. Cold. Hot. Wet and dry. Very bright sun and you see the purple dots. Very bright hot and you have no salt. Outside is wind, the insects which like the sweat. Inside is smell of heaters, echo, being jammed in together, tarp is overclose to baseline, not enough of room, bells inside clubs which ring the hour loudly to distract, clunk of machines vomiting sweet cola for coins. Inside roof too low for the lob. Bad lighting, so. Or outside: the bad surface. Oh no look no: crabgrass in cracks along baseline. Who could give the total, with crabgrass. Look here is low net high net. Opponent’s relatives heckle, opponent cheats, linesman in semifinal is impaired or cheats. You hurt. You have the injury. Bad knee and back. Hurt groin area from not stretching as asked. Aches of elbow. Eyelash in eye. The throat is sore. A too pretty girl in audience, watching. Who could play like this? Big crowd overwhelming or too small to inspire. Always something.’ [p.458]
David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
The effort to eliminate the formative role of the mind, making the artifact more important than the artificer, reduces mystery to absurdity; and that affirmation of absurdity is the life-heresy of the present generation. This reductionism turns at last into the drooling blankness of 'Waiting for Godot' or 'Krapp's Last Tape,' with their representation of boredom and tedium as the inevitable climax of human existence. This in itself is a sardonic final commentary on the mechanical world picture, the power system, and the subjective non-values derived from them. For a technology that denies reality to the subjective life cannot claim any human value for even its own highest products.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
traveled in those days with a cheap tape recorder. (I had written to my alma mater, Columbia University, which had an oral history project, suggesting that they take time off from interviewing ex–generals and ex–secretaries of state and send someone south to record the history being made every day by obscure people. One of the nation’s richest universities wrote back saying something like, “An excellent idea. We don’t really have the resources.”) I recorded Gregory’s performance with my little machine. He spoke for two hours, lashing out at white Southern society with passion and with his extraordinary wit. Never in the history of this area had a black man stood like this on a public platform ridiculing and denouncing white officials to their faces. The crowd loved it and applauded
Howard Zinn (You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times)
Katayev’s notes show that the military-industrial complex was indeed as large as Gorbachev feared. In 1985, Katayev estimated, defense took up 20 percent of the Soviet economy.16 Of the 135 million adults working in the Soviet Union, Katayev said, 10.4 million worked directly in the military-industrial complex at 1,770 enterprises. Nine ministries served the military, although in a clumsy effort to mask its purpose, the nuclear ministry was given the name “Ministry of Medium Machine Building,” and others were similarly disguised. More than fifty cities were almost totally engaged in the defense effort, and hundreds less so. Defense factories were called upon to make the more advanced civilian products, too, including 100 percent of all Soviet televisions, tape recorders, movie and still cameras and sewing machines.17
David E. Hoffman (The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy)
So deeply moved, he pulled the cassette from the machine, flipped it back over to the beginning, fitted it back into its snug carriage of capstans and guiding pins, and pressed play, thinking that he might preserve such a mood of pure, clean sorrow by listening back to his narrative. He imagined that his memoir might now sound like those of an admirable stranger, a person he did not know but whom he immediately recognized and loved dearly. Instead, the voice he heard sounded nasally and pinched and, worse, not very well educated, as if he were a bumpkin who had been called, perhaps even in mockery, to testify about holy things, as if not the testimony but the fumbling through it were the reason for his presence in front of some dire, heavenly senate. He listened to six seconds of the tape before he ejected it and threw it into the fire burning in the woodstove.
Paul Harding
There was nothing pretty or elegant about their robot. Compared to the gleaming machines other teams had constructed, Stinky was a study in simplicity. The PVC, the balloon, the tape measure—in each case they had chosen the most straightforward solution to a problem. It was an approach that grew naturally out of watching family members fix cars, manufacture mattresses, and lay irrigation piping. To a large swath of the population, driveway mechanics, box-frame builders, and gardeners did not represent the cutting edge of engineering know-how. They were low-skilled laborers who didn’t have access to real technology. Stinky represented this low-tech approach to engineering. But that was exactly what had impressed the judges. Lisa Spence, the NASA judge, believed that there was no reason to come up with a complex solution when an elementary one would suffice. She felt that Carl Hayden’s robot was “conceptually similar” to the machines she encountered at NASA. The guys were in shock. They marched back up to the stage and looked out at the audience with dazed smiles. Lorenzo felt a rush of emotion. The judges’ Special Prize wasn’t a consolation award. These people were giving them real recognition.
Joshua Davis (Spare Parts: Four Undocumented Teenagers, One Ugly Robot, and the Battle for the American Dream)
In the skids, the tumbles, the spins, there was, truly, as Saint-Exupéry had said, only one thing you could let yourself think about: What do I do next? Sometimes at Edwards they used to play the tapes of pilots going into the final dive, the one that killed them, and the man would be tumbling, going end over end in a fifteen-ton length of pipe, with all aerodynamics long gone, and not one prayer left, and he knew it, and he would be screaming into the microphone, but not for Mother or for God or the nameless spirit of Ahor, but for one last hopeless crumb of information about the loop: “I’ve tried A! I’ve tried B! I’ve tried C! I’ve tried D! Tell me what else I can try!” And then that truly spooky click on the machine. What do I do next? (In this moment when the Halusian Gulp is opening?) And everybody around the table would look at one another and nod ever so slightly, and the unspoken message was: Too bad! There was a man with the right stuff. There was no national mourning in such cases, of course. Nobody outside of Edwards knew the man’s name. If he were well liked, he might get one of those dusty stretches of road named for him on the base. He was probably a junior officer doing all this for four or five thousand a year.
Tom Wolfe (The Right Stuff)
[...]Telecomputer Man is assigned to an apparatus, just as the apparatus is assigned to him, by virtue of an involution of each into the other, a refraction of each by the other. The machine does what the human wants it to do, but by the same token the human puts into execution only what the machine has been programmed to do. The operator is working with virtuality: only apparently is the aim to obtain information or to communicate; the real purpose is to explore all the possibilities of a program, rather as a gambler seeks to exhaust the permutations in a game of chance. Consider the way the camera is used now. Its possibilities are no longer those of a subject who ' 'reflects' the world according to his personal vision; rather, they are the possibilities of the lens, as exploited by the object. The camera is thus a machine that vitiates all will, erases all intentionality and leaves nothing but the pure reflex needed to take pictures. Looking itself disappears without trace, replaced by a lens now in collusion with the object - and hence with an inversion of vision. The magic lies precisely in the subject's retroversion to a camera obscura - the reduction of his vision to the impersonal vision of a mechanical device. In a mirror, it is the subject who gives free rein to the realm of the imaginary. In the camera lens, and on-screen in general, it is the object, potentially, that unburdens itself - to the benefit of all media and telecommunications techniques. This is why images of anything are now a possibility. This is why everything is translatable into computer terms, commutable into digital form, just as each individual is commutable into his own particular genetic code. (The whole object, in fact, is to exhaust all the virtualities of such analogues of the genetic code: this is one of artificial intelligence's most fundamental aspects.) What this means on a more concrete level is that there is no longer any such thing as an act or event which is not refracted into a technical image or onto a screen, any such thing as an action which does not in some sense want to be photographed, filmed or tape-recorded, does not desire to be stored in memory so as to become reproducible for all eternity. No such thing as an action which does not aspire to self-transcendence into a virtual eternity - not, now, the durable eternity that follows death, but rather the ephemeral eternity of ever-ramifying artificial memory. The compulsion of the virtual is the compulsion to exist in potentia on all screens, to be embedded in all programs, and it acquires a magical force: the Siren call of the black box.
Jean Baudrillard (The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena)
Tonight Ray will tape the the drenched oasis inside of the silver bowl that sits on the top of the candelabra and fill it with the pale green hydrangeas, pink English garden roses, lilies of the valley, and extravagant lavender sweet peas that R.L., the local florist/antique dealer, delivered a few hours ago. The flowers are all soaking in their respective sugar water jugs in her kitchen- out of the direct sunlight, of course- as is the oasis which she'll mold into every bowl and vase in the house with a similar arrangement. She's even going to make an arrangement in a flat sweetgrass basket to hang on the front door and a round little pomander of pale green hydrangea with a sheer white ribbon for Little Hilda to hold as she greets the guests in the foyer. Ray is tempted to snip the last blossoms of gardenias growing secretly behind Cousin Willy's shed. In her estimation they are the quintessential wedding flower, with their intoxicating fragrance and their delicate cream petals surrounded by those dark, waxy leaves. She bought the seedlings when R.L. and the gals weren't looking at the Southern Gardener's Convention in Atlanta four years ago, and no one has any idea she's been growing them. Sometimes she worries that the fragrance will give her away, but they bloom the same time as the confederate jasmine, which grows along the lattice work of the shed, and she can always blame the thick smell on them. It would take a truly trained nose to pick the gardenias out, and Ray possesses the trained nose of the bunch.
Beth Webb Hart (The Wedding Machine (Women of Faith Fiction))
Every day, the markets were driven less directly by human beings and more directly by machines. The machines were overseen by people, of course, but few of them knew how the machines worked. He knew that RBC’s machines—not the computers themselves, but the instructions to run them—were third-rate, but he had assumed it was because the company’s new electronic trading unit was bumbling and inept. As he interviewed people from the major banks on Wall Street, he came to realize that they had more in common with RBC than he had supposed. “I’d always been a trader,” he said. “And as a trader you’re kind of inside a bubble. You’re just watching your screens all day. Now I stepped back and for the first time started to watch other traders.” He had a good friend who traded stocks at a big-time hedge fund in Stamford, Connecticut, called SAC Capital. SAC Capital was famous (and soon to be infamous) for being one step ahead of the U.S. stock market. If anyone was going to know something about the market that Brad didn’t know, he figured, it would be them. One spring morning he took the train up to Stamford and spent the day watching his friend trade. Right away he saw that, even though his friend was using technology given to him by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley and the other big firms, he was experiencing exactly the same problem as RBC: The market on his screens was no longer the market. His friend would hit a button to buy or sell a stock and the market would move away from him. “When I see this guy trading and he was getting screwed—I now see that it isn’t just me. My frustration is the market’s frustration. And I was like, Whoa, this is serious.” Brad’s problem wasn’t just Brad’s problem. What people saw when they looked at the U.S. stock market—the numbers on the screens of the professional traders, the ticker tape running across the bottom of the CNBC screen—was an illusion. “That’s when I realized the markets are rigged. And I knew it had to do with the technology. That the answer lay beneath the surface of the technology. I had absolutely no idea where. But that’s when the lightbulb went off that the only way I’m going to find out what’s going on is if I go beneath the surface.
Michael Lewis (Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
MY OWN BUSINESS . . . M. O. B. MOB assumes the right of every individual to possess his inner space, to do what interests him with people he wants to see. In some areas this right was more respected a hundred years ago than it is in the permissive society. 'Which is it this time, Holmes? Cocaine or morphine?' asks a disapproving Watson. But Holmes won’t have fink hounds sniffing through his Baker Street digs. If he accepts an American assignment 8 narks won’t beat his door in with sledge hammers, rush in waving their guns “WHATZAT YOU’RE SMOKING?” jerk the pipe out of his mouth and strip him naked. We will make the MOB stand on criminals and crim­inal communes clear. A criminal is someone who commits crimes against property and crimes against persons. We feel that criminals are not minding their own business. Someone who steals your typewriter, starts barroom fights, kicks an old bum to death, is not minding his own business at all. The Thuggees of India, the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan are examples of criminal communes. Strangling someone and stealing his money, throwing acid in his face, lynching beating and burn­ ing people to death is not minding one’s own business. On one side we have MOBS dedicated to minding their own business without interference. On the other side we have the enemies of MOB dedicated to interference. Equipped with new techniques of computerized thought control the enemies of MOB could inflict a permanent defeat. MOB want to know just where everybody stands. Wouldn’t advise you to try sitting on that fence. It’s electric. Your enemies then are the enemies of MOB. You can do more to destroy these enemies with tape recorders and video cameras than you can with machine guns. Video tape puts any number of machine guns into your hands. However, it is difficult to convince a revolutionary that this weapon is actually more potent than gelignite or guns. What do revolu­tionaries want? Vengeance, or a real change? Both perhaps. It is difficult for those who have suffered outrageous brutal­ity and oppression to forget about vengeance, which is why I postulated the wholesome catharsis of MA, the Mass Assassination of enemy word and image. And this brings us to a basic question that every revolutionary must ask himself. Can I live without enemies? Can any human being live without enemies? No human being has ever done so yet. If the present revolutionary movement is to amount to more than a change of management, presenting the same old good-guy, bad-guy movie, a basic change of conscious­ ness must take place.
William S. Burroughs (The Electronic Revolution)
Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter. I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes… What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life.
Svetlana Alexievich (War's Unwomanly Face)
In a stunning 1971 paper, Twenty Things to Do with a Computer, Seymour Papert and Logo co-creator Cynthia Solomon proposed educative computer-based projects for kids. They included composing music, controlling puppets, programming, movie making, mathematical modeling, and a host of other projects that schools should aspire to more than 40 years later. Papert and Solomon also made the case for 1:1 computing and stressed the three game changers discussed later in this book. The school computer should have a large number of output ports to allow the computer to switch lights on and off, start tape recorders, actuate slide projectors and start and stop all manner of little machines. There should also be input ports to allow signals to be sent to the computer. In our image of a school computation laboratory, an important role is played by numerous “controller ports” which allow any student to plug any device into the computer… The laboratory will have a supply of motors, solenoids, relays, sense devices of various kids, etc. Using them, the students will be able to invent and build an endless variety of cybernetic systems.
Anonymous
48-track tape machines out there. Check out the Internet for used analog and digital tape machines made by Ampex, MCI, Otari, Revox, Sony, and Studer. Read the reviews and note the prices, and as soon as your budget allows, pick one up. It’ll be a smart move.
Robert Wolff (How to Make It in the New Music Business -- Now With the Tips You've Been Asking For!)
So he’d reach into the drawer for the tape with the FLIT debugger and feed that into the computer. The computer would then be a debugging machine, and he’d send the program back in.
Anonymous
Barry puts his hand into his leather jacket pocket, produces a tape, puts it in the machine, and jacks up the volume. Within seconds the shop is shaking to the bass line of “Walking on Sunshine,” by Katrina and the Waves. It’s February. It’s cold. It’s wet. Laura has gone. I don’t want to hear “Walking on Sunshine.” Somehow it doesn’t fit my mood.
Anonymous
The fundamental, indivisible unit of information is the bit. The fundamental, indivisible unit of digital computation is the transformation of a bit between its two possible forms of existence: as structure (memory) or as sequence (code). This is what a Turing Machine does when reading a mark (or the absence of a mark) on a square of tape, changing its state of mind accordingly, and making (or erasing) a mark somewhere else.
George Dyson (Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe)
imagined a machine whose internal workings could be altered so that it could perform all the functions of all conceivable Turing machines. The alterations would be made by inserting carefully selected tapes, which transformed the single flexible machine into a dividing machine, a multiplying machine, or any other type of machine. Turing called this hypothetical device a universal Turing machine because it would be capable of answering any question that could logically be answered. Unfortunately, it turned out that it is not always logically possible to answer a question about the undecidability of another question, and so even the universal Turing machine was unable to identify every undecidable question.
Simon Singh (The Code Book: The Science of Secrecy from Ancient Egypt to Quantum Cryptography)
Then in 1936 Alan Turing imagined a curious contraption with a tape and a head that read and wrote symbols on it, now known as a Turing machine. Every conceivable problem that can be solved by logical deduction can be solved by a Turing machine. Furthermore, a so-called universal Turing machine can simulate any other by reading its specification from the tape—in other words, it can be programmed to do anything.
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
if we insist too strongly on the brain as a glorified digital machine, we shall be subject to some very just criticism, coming in part from the physiologists and in part from the somewhat opposite camp of those psychologists who prefer not to make use of the machine comparison. I have said that in a digital machine there is a taping, which determines the sequence of operations to be performed, and that a change in this taping on the basis of past experience corresponds to a learning process. In the brain, the clearest analogy to taping is the determination of the synaptic thresholds, of the precise combinations of the incoming neurons which will fire an outgoing neuron with which they are connected.
Norbert Wiener (The Human Use Of Human Beings: Cybernetics And Society (The Da Capo series in science))
Tape Reading is rapid-fire horse sense. Its object is to determine whether stocks are being accumulated or distributed, marked up or down, or whether they are neglected by the large interests. The Tape Reader aims to make deductions from each succeeding transaction – every shift of the market kaleidoscope; to grasp a new situation, force it, lightning-like, through the weighing machine of the brain, and to reach a decision which can be acted upon with coolness and precision. It is gauging the momentary supply and demand in particular stocks and in the whole market, comparing the forces behind each and their relationship, each to the other and to all." "A
Anna Coulling (A Complete Guide To Volume Price Analysis: Read the book then read the market)
When Ronald Reagan was a radio announcer, he used to call baseball games that he did not physically attend by reading the terse descriptions that trickled in over the telegraph wire and were printed out on a paper tape. He would sit there, all by himself in a padded room with a microphone, and the paper tape would creep out of the machine and crawl over the palm of his hand printed with cryptic abbreviations. If the count went to three and two, Reagan would describe the scene as he saw it in his mind’s eye: “The brawny left-hander steps out of the batter’s box to wipe the sweat from his brow. The umpire steps forward to sweep the dirt from home plate,” and so on. When the cryptogram on the paper tape announced a base hit, he would whack the edge of the table with a pencil, creating a little sound effect, and describe the arc of the ball as if he could actually see it. His listeners, many of whom presumably thought that Reagan was actually at the ballpark watching the game, would reconstruct the scene in their minds according to his descriptions. This is exactly how the World Wide Web works: the HTML files are the pithy description on the paper tape, and your web browser is Ronald Reagan. The same is true of graphical user interfaces in general.
Neal Stephenson (In the Beginning...Was the Command Line)
As Moore put it, “The Bible says, where your treasure is, that’s where your heart is also.” She maintained that the school district budgeted more for medical supplies like athletic tape for athletic programs at Permian than it did for teaching materials for the English department, which covered everything except for required textbooks. Aware of how silly that sounded, she challenged the visitor to look it up. She was right. The cost for boys’ medical supplies at Permian was $6,750. The cost for teaching materials for the English department was $5,040, which Moore said included supplies, maintenance of the copying machine, and any extra books besides the required texts that she thought it might be important for her students to read. The cost of getting rushed film prints of the Permian football games to the coaches, $6,400, was higher as well, not to mention the $20,000 it cost to charter the jet for the Marshall game. (During the 1988 season, roughly $70,000 was spent for chartered jets.)
H.G. Bissinger (Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream)
Water. Drinking water, water purification system (or tablets), and a water bottle or canteen. Food. Anything that is long lasting, lightweight, and nutritious such as protein bars, dehydrated meals, MREs24, certain canned goods, rice, and beans. Clothing. Assure it’s appropriate to a wide range of temperatures and environments, including gloves, raingear, and multiple layers that can be taken on or off as needed. Shelter. This may include a tarp or tent, sleeping bag or survival blanket, and ground pad or yoga mat. A camper or trailer is a fantastic, portable shelter, with many of the comforts of home. If you own one keep it stocked with supplies to facilitate leaving in a hurry, as it can take several hours load up and move out if you’re not ready. In certain circumstances that might mean having to leave it behind. Heat source. Lighter or other reliable ignition source (e.g., magnesium striker), tinder, and waterproof storage. Include a rocket stove or biomass burner if possible, they’re inexpensive, take very little fuel, and incredibly useful in an emergency. Self-defense/hunting gear. Firearm(s) and ammunition, fishing gear, multi-tool/knife, maps, and compass, and GPS (it’s not a good idea to rely solely on a GPS as you may find yourself operating without a battery or charger). First aid. First aid kit, first aid book, insect repellant, suntan lotion, and any needed medicines you have been prescribed. If possible add potassium iodide (for radiation emergencies) and antibiotics (for bio attacks) to your kit. Hygiene. Hand soap, sanitizer, toilet paper, towel, toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, and garbage bags. Tools. Hatchet (preferably) or machete, can opener, cooking tools (e.g., portable stove, pot, frying pan, utensils, and fuel), rope, duct tape, sunglasses, rubber tubing, and sewing kit. Lighting and communications. LED headlamp, glow sticks, candles, cell phone, charger (preferably hand crank or solar), emergency radio (preferably with hand crank that covers AM, FM, and Marine frequencies) and extra batteries, writing implements, and paper. Cash or barter. You never know how long an emergency will last. Extensive power outages mean no cash machines, so keep a few hundred dollars in small bills, gold or silver coins, or other valuables on hand.
Kris Wilder (The Big Bloody Book of Violence: The Smart Person's Guide for Surviving Dangerous Times: What Every Person Must Know About Self-Defense)
Just as the digital dominance of the recording studio seemed complete, analog had its revenge. Musicians, producers, and engineers searching for the sound of the music that inspired them—roots Americana, blues, and classic rock—began thinking about how the process of recording affected the sound. These artists, including White, Dave Grohl, and Gillian Welch, began experimenting with old tape machines and vintage studio equipment, returning to the analog methods they’d once used. Critics and fans noted that these albums sounded different—more heartfelt, raw, and organic—and the industry began to take notice.
David Sax (The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter)
Whenever my wife and I purchase a new appliance, we add another instruction manual to our collection. We have instruction manuals for the various appliances in our home, for the automobile, and for office equipment such as tape recorders, computers, and copying machines. Someone may say, “I wish we had a manual of instruction for life.” We do. It’s called the Bible, the Word of God. “Your hands have made me and fashioned me; give me understanding, that I may learn Your commandments” (v. 73). God made and fashioned us in His image. According to Psalm 139, He had plans for each of our lives before we were born. He gave each of us a unique mind and genetic structure. He wrote into His book the days that He assigned to us, and He planned the best for us. He also wrote a manual to help us live the way we ought. He gives us the Bible and says, “I want to give you understanding. The better you understand this book, the better you will understand yourself. You are made in My image. I want to reveal to you from My Word how to use your hands, your feet, your eyes, your ears, and your tongue. I want to tell you how My Word can make your heart work the way it is supposed to work.” The psalmist says, “Your hands have made me and fashioned me”—that’s our origin. “Give me understanding, that I may learn Your commandments”—that’s our operation. The Bible is the operation manual for life. How strange it is that people try to live their lives without an instruction book. They wonder why their marriages fall apart, why their bodies are in trouble, and why they’ve gotten themselves into a jam. Before all else fails, read the Word of God, the instruction manual for everyday living.
Warren W. Wiersbe (Prayer, Praise & Promises: A Daily Walk Through the Psalms)
By June 1949 people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force. The EDSAC was on the top floor of the building and the tape-punching and editing equipment one floor below on a gallery that ran round the room in which the differential analyzer was installed. I was trying to get working my first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration of Airy’s differential equation. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that “hesitating at the angles of stairs” the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.
Martin Campbell-Kelly (Computer: A History of the Information Machine)
The Dutch ruled over an empire stretching from the Caribbean to East Asia, founded the city of New York, discovered Australia, played the world’s best football and produced some of the finest art and architecture in Europe. Everywhere one goes in the world, one can always find Dutch people. A country half the size of Scotland, with a population of just seventeen million or so, claims to have invented the DVD, the dialysis machine, the tape recorder, the CD, the energy-saving lightbulb, the pendulum clock, the speed camera, golf, the microscope, the telescope and the doughnut.
Ben Coates (Why the Dutch are Different: A Journey into the Hidden Heart of the Netherlands: From Amsterdam to Zwarte Piet, the acclaimed guide to travel in Holland)
Turing proved, mathematically, that if you choose the right set of rules for the CPU and give it an indefinitely long tape to work with, it can perform any definable set of operations in the universe. It would be one of many equivalent machines now called Universal Turing Machines.
Jeff Hawkins (On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines)
Initially, von Neumann was referring to physical machines. The idea that he first presented in a lecture in Pasadena, California, in the 1940s was very complicated. Stephen Levy, in his book, Artificial Life, describes the basic components that made up von Neumann’s theoretical self-replicating machines, which he called kinematics (but which are mostly called von Neumann machines today). The system consisted of raw materials in a lake, along with four components required for this self-replicating machine labelled: A, B, C, and D. Component A was like a factory, which scooped up raw materials from the lake and used them in ways that were dictated by some data, which we might call a computer program today. Component B was a duplicator that read and copied information from the first machine to its duplicates, in the same way that DNA is passed down from parents to children. Component C was like a computer and controlled who did what, like a central processing unit. Component D was the actual data, or instructions, which in those days von Neumann envisioned as a very long tape.
Rizwan Virk (The Simulated Multiverse: An MIT Computer Scientist Explores Parallel Universes, The Simulation Hypothesis, Quantum Computing and the Mandela Effect)
what happened in Norway? The usual and then the startlingly unusual happened. Casino initially met with the anticipated wall of disapproval, the usual ‘No’ at every stop. And then at Mercury/Phonogram, during a meeting with the strikingly prescient gentleman of fine breeding and obvious good taste, the honourable Audun Tylden, he met with the absurdly unusual, a resounding ‘Ja’. According to Casino, Audun Tylden cranked up the tape machine, heard the first 15 bars of ‘Tumble With Me’, turned to Cas and yelled, ‘I love it!’ or, actually, ‘Jeg elsker det!’ This is stunning news, great news, unbelievable news. The Hollywood Brats finally have a record deal. There’s just one slight snag. The Hollywood Brats no longer exist.
Andrew Matheson (Sick On You: The Disastrous Story of Britain’s Great Lost Punk Band)
Once his affairs were in order, he reported for duty. “How are you at soldering?” Chief Technician Scully said casually. “Pretty good,” Philo replied. “I’ve done a fair amount of wiring and building things from scratch. None of it has failed so far.” “Good. All the consoles in the station need to be re-capped. The heat from the vacuum tubes dries out the electrolytic capacitors over time, and we have to replace them every five years, before the audio performance starts degrading.” Philo took an equipment cart to the backup studio, pulled all the modules out of the console, and carefully packed them in bubble wrap for transport back to the workshop. He set a module on the bench and set up his vacuum desoldering station, soldering iron, magnifier, and boxes of new capacitors, organized by capacitance and voltage. The channel modules were densely packed with components, providing all the capabilities of a modern console, but using subminiature vacuum tubes instead of transistors. Each channel module had two dozen electrolytic capacitors, and there were more in the output modules and power supplies. Scully came along a while later to inspect his work. “Splendid! Very clean work. You’ll be on full-time recapping duty from now on.” “You’re doomed,” said an older Technician, who was disassembling a condenser microphone on the other bench. “You never should have told him you were good at soldering.” Once Philo was done with all the consoles, he moved on to the multi-track tape machines, which were transistorized but had a tendency to run hot. He recapped electronics ten hours a day, until he was desoldering capacitors in his sleep.
Fenton Wood (Five Million Watts (Yankee Republic Book 2))
As he shifted from one foot to the other, he recalled the fully mechanized saloon, he, Finnerty, and Shepherd had designed when they'd been playful young engineers. To their surprise, the owner of a restaurant chain had been interested enough to give the idea a try. They'd set up the experimental unit about five doors down from where Paul now stood, with coin machines and endless belt to do the serving, with germicidal lamps cleaning the air, with uniform, healthful light, with continuous soft music from a tape recorder, with seats scientifically designed by an anthropologist to give the average man the absolute maximum in comfort. The first day had been a sensation, with a waiting line extending blocks. Within a week of the opening, curiosity had been satisfied, and it was a book day when five customers stopped in. Then this place had opened up almost next door, with a dust-and-germ trap of a Victorian bar, bad light, poor ventilation, and an unsanitary, inefficient, and probably dishonest bartender. It was an immediate and unflagging success
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Player Piano)
The head of research for Sesame Street in the early years was a psychologist from Oregon, Ed Palmer, whose specialty was the use of television as a teaching tool. When the Children's Television Workshop was founded in the late 1960s, Palmer was a natural recruit. “I was the only academic they could find doing research on children's TV,” he says, with a laugh. Palmer was given the task of finding out whether the elaborate educational curriculum that had been devised for Sesame Street by its academic-advisers was actually reaching the show's viewers. It was a critical task. There are those involved with Sesame Street who say, in fact, that without Ed Palmer the show would never have lasted through the first season. Palmer's innovation was something he called the Distracter. He would play an episode of Sesame Street on a television monitor, and then run a slide show on a screen next to it, showing a new slide every seven and a half seconds. “We had the most varied set of slides we could imagine,” said Palmer. “We would have a body riding down the street with his arms out, a picture of a tall building, a leaf floating through ripples of water, a rainbow, a picture taken through a microscope, an Escher drawing. Anything to be novel, that was the idea.” Preschoolers would then be brought into the room, two at a time, and told to watch the television show. Palmer and his assistants would sit slightly to the side, with a pencil and paper, quietly noting when the children were watching Sesame Street and when they lost interest and looked, instead, at the slide show. Every time the slide changed, Palmer and his assistants would make a new notation, so that by the end of the show they had an almost second-by-second account of what parts of the episode being tested managed to hold the viewers' attention and what parts did not. The Distracter was a stickiness machine. “We'd take that big-sized chart paper, two by three feet, and tape several of those sheets together,” Palmer says. "We had data points, remember, for every seven and a half seconds, which comes to close to four hundred data points for a single program, and we'd connect all those points with a red line so it would look like a stock market report from Wall Street. It might plummet or gradually decline, and we'd say whoa, what's going on here. At other times it might hug the very top of the chart and we'd say, wow, that segment's really grabbing the attention of the kids. We tabulated those Distracter scores in percentages. We'd have up to 100 percent sometimes. The average attention for most shows was around 85 to 90 percent. If the producers got that, they were happy. If they got around fifty, they'd go back to the drawing board.
Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference)
Maybe Sloan would agree to a deal. I’d talk to someone about some of my issues if she would agree to go to grief counseling. It wasn’t me giving in to Josh like she wanted, but Sloan knew how much I hated therapists, and she’d always wanted me to see someone. I was debating how to pitch this to her when I glanced into the living room and saw it—a single purple carnation on my coffee table. I looked around the kitchen like I might suddenly find someone in my house. But Stuntman was calm, plopped under my chair. I went in to investigate and saw that the flower sat on top of a binder with the words “just say okay” written on the outside in Josh’s writing. He’d been here? My heart began to pound. I looked again around the living room like I might see him, but it was just the binder. I sat on the sofa, my hands on my knees, staring at the binder for what felt like ages before I drew the courage to pull the book into my lap. I tucked my hair behind my ear and licked my lips, took a breath, and opened it up. The front page read “SoCal Fertility Specialists.” My breath stilled in my lungs. What? He’d had a consultation with Dr. Mason Montgomery from SoCal Fertility. A certified subspecialist in reproductive endocrinology and infertility with the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology. He’d talked to them about in vitro and surrogacy, and he’d had fertility testing done. I put a shaky hand to my mouth, and tears began to blur my eyes. I pored over his test results. Josh was a breeding machine. Strong swimmers and an impressive sperm count. He’d circled this and put a winking smiley face next to it and I snorted. He’d outlined the clinic’s high success rates—higher than the national average—and he had gotten signed personal testimonials from previous patients, women like me who used a surrogate. Letter after letter of encouragement, addressed to me. The next page was a complete breakdown on the cost of in vitro and information on Josh’s health insurance and what it covered. His insurance was good. It covered the first round of IVF at 100 percent. He even had a small business plan. He proposed selling doghouses that he would build. The extra income would raise enough money for the second round of in vitro in about three months. The next section was filled with printouts from the Department of International Adoptions. Notes scrawled in Josh’s handwriting said Brazil just opened up. He broke down the process, timeline, and costs right down to travel expenses and court fees. I flipped past a sleeve full of brochures to a page on getting licensed for foster care. He’d already gone through the background check, and he enclosed a form for me, along with a series of available dates for foster care orientation classes and in-home inspections. Was this what he’d been doing? This must have taken him weeks. My chin quivered. Somehow, seeing it all down on paper, knowing we’d be in it together, it didn’t feel so hopeless. It felt like something that we could do. Something that might actually work. Something possible. The last page had an envelope taped to it. I pried it open with trembling hands, my throat getting tight. I know what the journey will look like, Kristen. I’m ready to take this on. I love you and I can’t wait to tell you the best part…Just say okay. I dropped the letter and put my face into my hands and sobbed like I’d never sobbed in my life. He’d done all this for me. Josh looked infertility dead in the eye, and his choice was still me. He never gave up. All this time, no matter how hard I rejected him or how difficult I made it, he never walked away from me. He just changed strategies. And I knew if this one didn’t work he’d try another. And another. And another. He’d never stop trying until I gave in. And Sloan—she knew. She knew this was here, waiting for me. That’s why she’d made me leave. They’d conspired to do this.
Abby Jimenez
The tape says WATCH ME, so let’s see what happens when we do,” she says, sliding the video into the VHS machine, which swallows the tape whole. An image fills the screen, and it feels like the past is coming back to haunt us all.
Alice Feeney (Daisy Darker)
Reagan's been dead for years--a servo-operated cadaver and a tape machine.
Terry Tierney (The Bridge on Beer River)
Through the passage of time there was one format that could rival the sound quality of any other, the analog reel-to-reel tape recorder, and this is her story. The reel-to-reel recorder was critical to the widespread surge in global music consumption in the 1950's and beyond, even sound engineers of today will tell you that the reel-to-reel format is extremely high in fidelity, and with the correct tape, the correct usage and right machine, wonders can still be recorded in the recording studio using magnetic reel-to-reel tape recorders
Dwayne Buckle (Analog: The Art & History Of Reel-To-Reel Tape Recordings)
answering machine tape, Kirk took another modest step by launching The Armchair Archaeologist project with no real vision of how it would prove useful, other than perhaps as fodder for his intro archaeology courses. This final little step, however, turned out to be a winner, leading directly to his own television show.
Cal Newport (So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love)
Like so much else associated with the twentieth century, television sets were banished from the Athenaeum. But in view of the impending national disaster a delegation from the crowd of elderly gentlemen now gathered around the tape machine had been despatched in search of the club secretary, Captain Giles Fairfax. The captain said he would see what he could do and within ten minutes reappeared carrying a small portable set borrowed from the caretaker’s flat.
Chris Mullin (A Very British Coup: The novel that foretold the rise of Corbyn)
Like so much else associated with the twentieth century, television sets were banished from the Athenaeum. But in view of the impending national disaster a delegation from the crowd of elderly gentlemen now gathered around the tape machine had been despatched in search of the club secretary, Captain Giles Fairfax. The captain said he would see what he could do and within ten minutes reappeared carrying a small portable set borrowed from the caretaker’s flat. It was now installed beside the tape machine on a table taken from the morning room. “All very irregular,” said the captain with an apologetic glance at the portrait of Charles Darwin which overlooked the scene. Nevertheless, he stayed to watch.
Chris Mullin (A Very British Coup: The novel that foretold the rise of Corbyn)
The turntable, with its appendages, is a stalled computer: a head and an infinite tape. It can read stored material, it can reproduce any sound; but used in the standard way, it can only read, not store. Hip hop declared war on this nonfacility by throwing the disc into reverse, mutilating predetermined regimes of speed and frequency. Hip hop mobilized the third category of action of the computer; alongside reading and storing information, the universal machine must be able to act on itself, to calculate. The phase space of all possible sounds of the turntable is determined by the table drawn up at the intersection of speed and frequency. Turntablism opens this space up to mutation outside of the regimes of melody, harmony, and voice by forming a copula between the two series, rhythm and noise. The endless tape of the Turing machine is imposed on the finite coil, causing it to leap from break to break. Feedback is "the property of being able to adjust future conduct by past performance,"" to reprogram: to alter its performance in the light of computation. The turntable invents the DJ in order to compute.
Matthew Fuller (Media Ecologies: Materialist Energies in Art and Technoculture (Leonardo))
During this and the next six sittings, starting with a quavering voice that grew stronger with time, Jacqueline unburdened herself as the tape machine also picked up the sounds of her lighting cigarettes, of ice cubes in glasses, dogs barking in the distance, trucks rumbling down N Street, and jets roaring overhead.
Caroline Kennedy (Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy)
Believe me, I’m well aware that the information I’m spewing can be fast, emotional, surprising, choppy, confusing, and piecing it all together can feel overwhelming. You may also doubt it at the time or not recognize how it fits into your life. That’s why I tape all of my sessions, so that you can go over the messages at your own pace. A man once left the funniest voice mail on my answering machine: “I came to you four years ago for a reading, and you were talking about a bunch of shit that made no sense to me at the time, but it’s all happening now!” Everything Spirit says is for a reason; it may just take a few days or years for you to realize it.
Theresa Caputo (There's More to Life Than This)
The very last stage of any memory hierarchy is necessarily the outside world—that is, the outside world as far as the machine is concerned, i.e. that part of it with which the machine can directly communicate, in other words, the input and the output organs of the machine. These are usually punched paper tapes or cards, and on the output side, of course, also printed paper.
John von Neumann (The Computer and the Brain)
In the early days of genetics, a gene could be 'dominant' or 'recessive', and that was about all there was to it; but gradually more and more terms had to be added to the vocabulary: repressors, apo-repressors, co-repressors, inducers, modifier genes, switch genes, operator genes which activate other genes, and even genes which regulate the rate of mutations in genes. Thus the action of the gene-complex was originally conceived as the unfolding of a simple linear sequence like that on a tape-recorder or the Behaviourist's conditioned-reflex chain; whereas it is now gradually becoming apparent that the genetic controls operate as a self-regulating micro-hierarchy, equipped with feedback devices which guide their flexible strategies. This not only protects the growing embryo against the hazards of ontogeny; it would also protect it against the evolutionary hazards of phylogeny, or random mutations in its own hereditary materials-the blind antics of the monkey at the typewriter.
Arthur Koestler (The Ghost in the Machine)
He wrapped duct tape and plastic wrap around his bald head so girls couldn't read his mind, so he said. He raised chickens to torture and slaughter because his daddy said every good boy had a little sociopath in him. Smarts talked with a lisp and walked with a limp, though Ezekiel told me had it on good authority Smarts was faking both. For what reason, though, Ezekiel couldn't say.
Autumn Christian (The Crooked God Machine)
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Tapes Manufacturing
I climbed under the covers and shone the flashlight on Mason's gift: a roll of something or somethings, bound in string. I unfurled it to reveal an 8x10 black-and-white photograph. The girl in the picture was me. Me in the Mystery Machine, eyes locked with the eye of Mason's camera, mouth tilted in an incredulous smirk. It was the girl from the mirror, it was the girl from the wall in McGrath's tomb, it was the girl from the moon, as far away as that. A familiar girl with a faraway look in her eye. I'd know her anywhere; I didn't know her at all. Over her eyes Mason had outlined a pair of 3-D movie glasses–a nod to Weegee's 3-D-movie lovers, no doubt, although this girl–me, I– was alone, not locked in some passionate embrace. Underneath her/my face, Mason had taped a fortune cookie message: One who admires you greatlyis hidden before your eyes. God! He almost had me. So if I was the 3-D girl with hidden eyes, did he think I was his admirer? Oh, Mr. Mad Hatter, I thought. How fearfully wrong thou art.
Sarah Combs (Breakfast Served Anytime)
Nothing deterred the house from playing selections from the band’s first two albums—not even Sarah’s defenestration of three record players, an eight-track tape machine, and an ancient Dictaphone. The house simply diverted the music through the furnace, the bass notes reverberating in the ductwork while the treble wafted from the heating vents.
Deborah Harkness (The All Souls Trilogy (All Souls, #1-3))
To err is human; but machines also make mistakes. These same systems have been responsible for several near-catastrophic false alarms. Once, in the 1950s, early-warning radars interpreted a flock of swans as a fleet of Russian MiG fighter jets en route to the U.S. by way of the North Pole. In October 1960, computers at the ground radar site in Thule, Greenland, misread the moon rising up over Norway as being the radar returns from 1,000 attacking ICBMs. In 1979, a simulation test tape mistakenly inserted into a NORAD computer deceived analysts into thinking the U.S. was under attack by Russian nuclear-armed ICBMs and nuclear ballistic submarines.
Annie Jacobsen (Nuclear War: A Scenario)