Transporter 2 Quotes

What is it with you, sex, and modes of transportation?

We could try to go together, "I said. "I think we'd both fit, and that way, if we end up transported to another dimension or morphed into a wall, at least we'd have company.

I felt a pang -- a strange and inexplicable pang that I had never felt before. It was homesickness. Now, even more than I had earlier when I'd first glimpsed it, I longed to be transported into that quiet little landscape, to walk up the path, to take a key from my pocket and open the cottage door, to sit down by the fireplace, to wrap my arms around myself, and to stay there forever and ever.

You have a transportation fetish. I have a Gideon fetish. It's been weeks.

Yes, the giant transport bot is going to help the construct SecUnit pretend to be human. This will go well.

ART (aka Asshole Research Transport)

When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a lovely place to be-not here - Just Jane (Chapter Four Page 35)

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically one of them not being worth all the bother. On Earth — when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass — the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm's way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another — particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e. covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

I also told you when I made you my bride that I would not count the days if you would promise me the same. I don't intend to start now, love. You're my wife, yesterday, today, and forever. - Aiden MacRae

My poor clothes are going to wonder where they live. They have been transported back and forth to this place on numerous occasions.

I would read anything. Absolutely anything. I loved being transported somewhere else, even back in time.

Nick sat on the stairs, completely comatose. He stared straight ahead as if he'd been frozen in place. "Nick? You all right?" He didn't respond. Kyrian moved around him until he stood in front of him. He snapped his fingers in front of Nick's face. "Kid?" Nick blinked before he met Kyrian's gaze. "I'm not worthy," he said in a breathless tone. Baffled by his comment, Kyrian stared at him. "What?" Nick gestured towards his cars. "Dude that's a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bugatti, Alfa Romeo, Aston Martin, and a Bentley. And I'm not talking the cheap models. Those are the top of the top of the top of the line, fully loaded. I swear, that's real gold trim in the Bugatti. There's more money in metal in here than my brain can even tabulate. Oh my God! I shouldn't even be breathing the same air." Kyrian laughed at his awed tone. "It's all right, Nick. I need you to clean them." "Are you out of your ever-loving mind? What if I scratch them?" "You won't" "Nah I might. Those aren't cars, Kyrian. Those are works of art. I'm talking serious modes of transportation." "I know, and I drive them all the time." "No, no, no, no, no. I can't touch something so fine. I can't" Kyrian cuffed him on the shoulder. "Yes, you can. They don't bite, and they need to be washed.

When I read a novel I am not here. I am transported to far-off places, my eyes unseeing of the words on the page, busy with a scene being played out in my mind's eye, with my ears engaged, hearing the voices carry from the pen to the present. What a lovely place to be—not here.

He said that if I ever hurt you, he'd find me and kill me. I told him that if I ever hurt you, I'd want him to." - Aiden MacRae

Finn caught my gaze. "I know things seem rough with him right now, but he'll come around. He went nuts when you were missing." "He has a temper." Which wasn't surprising, considering his tragic background. "No, Evie. He was ... frantic, out of control. I'm talking Hulk-smash on ye olde cabin. When he realized our lack of transportation was the sole thing keeping him from you, he stormed back into that militia's camp, striding into a hail of bullets. Dude didn't duck, didn't sidestep, just rolled in, killed, took that jeep." My lips parted as I stared at Jackson in amazement. "He loves you," Finn insisted.

It is love that transports us, that fills us with joy! Love turns life into one long adventure, every encounter is a dazzling experience - well, not always, of course, but in actual fact, it is our less successful love affairs that enable us to appreciate the others. I think love protects us from one of the biggest problems facing the modern world: boredom.

I turned my face to him and he kissed me, an unspoken need on his lips.

…as I attempt to release her, she squeezes my hand and offers a shy smile. Something within me shifts. No, I don’t get nervous, but Brenna transports me to all sorts of new places. It’s not her physical proximity getting to me, it’s the fact that she makes me feel.

I love being single. It's my choice, not a sentence. It's not a state that I'm in until someone better comes along. Don't feel sorry for me. I love my life." "Don't you want someone to snuggle up to at night?" "No. this way, I never have to fight for the duvet, I can sleep diagonally across the bed and I can read until four in the morning." "A book can't take the place of a man!" "I disagree. A book can give you most things a relationship can. It can make you laugh, it can make you cry, it can transport you to different worlds and teach you things. You can even take it out to dinner. And if it bores you, you can move on. Which is pretty much what happens in real life.

Are all constructs so illogical? said the Asshole Research Transport with the immense processing capability whose metaphorical hand I had had to hold because it had become emotionally compromised by a fictional media serial.

The supply transport’s on autopilot most of the way down anyway. I’m just on board so that if it crashes, they can say someone died.

Also, on account of the odd relationship between time and space, the people who do manage to time-jump sometimes space-jump at the same time and end up in places where they simply don't belong. Over there, for example," he said as a raucous DeLorean sports car rared into view from nowhere, "is that crazy American professorwho can't seem to stay put in one time, and, I must say, there is an absolute plague of of killer robots from the future being sent to change the past. Sleeping there under that banyan tree is a certain Hank Morgan of Hartford, Connecticut, who was accidentally transported one day back to King Arthur's Court, and stayed there until Merlin put him to sleep for 1300 thirteen hundred years. He was suppsoed to wake up back in his own time, but look at this lazy fellow! He's still snoring away, and has missed his slot.

Matter and energy are equivalent, according to the equation E=mc2, where E stand for energy, m for mass and c for the speed of light,' 'Merapa explained. 'Matter can't be transported at the speed of light but energy can. Therefore, during a time shift transformation, matter is converted to energy then condenses back. In other words all the molecules in your body have been changed from matter to energy then back again.' 'Wow. It's a wonder it's not fatal,' Dirck said. 'Sometimes it is. If any transcription errors occur between the DNA and RNA in your vital organs you're all but dead.

Sleepy took a sip of his drink before responding. “Sounds like a plan. Although I don’t like the implications. If I get taken down, the Bob that gets restored won’t really be me.” “What, you’re positing a soul, now? For us?” Surly, I mean Hungry, rolled his eyes. “Every time the crew of Star Trek transported, they faced the same philosophical question.

It is a temporal universal that people never appreciate their own time, especially transportation. Twentieth-Century contemps complained about cancelled flights and gasoline prices, Eighteenth-Century contemps complained about muddy roads and highwaymen. No doubt Professor Peddick’s Greeks complained about recalcitrant horses and chariot wheels falling off.

I, for one, approve of Lock's new mom car. Obviously I wouldn't be caught dead owning one myself, but I like that we can transport a body and have enough cup holders for all of us.

Roads represented the transportation ability of a region. Thus, it represented its power of commerce.

How far they came to perish here, these soldiers and these machines! What bizarre train of events brought youngsters from the Rhineland and Prussia, from the Scottish Highlands and London, from Australia and New Zealand, to butt at each other to the death with flame-spitting machinery in faraway Africa, in a setting as dry and lonesome as the moon? But that is the hallmark of this war. No other war has ever been like it. This war rings the world.... Men fight as far from home as they can be transported, with courage and endurance that makes one proud of the human race, in horrible contrivances that make one ashamed of the human race.

Modern elevators are strange and complex entities. The ancient electric winch and “maximum-capacity-eight-persons" jobs bear as much relation to a Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Happy Vertical People Transporter as a packet of mixed nuts does to the entire west wing of the Sirian State Mental Hospital. This is because they operate on the curious principle of “defocused temporal perception.” In other words they have the capacity to see dimly into the immediate future, which enables the elevator to be on the right floor to pick you up even before you knew you wanted it, thus eliminating all the tedious chatting, relaxing and making friends that people were previously forced to do while waiting for elevators. Not unnaturally, many elevators imbued with intelligence and precognition became terribly frustrated with the mindless business of going up and down, up and down, experimented briefly with the notion of going sideways, as a sort of existential protest, demanded participation in the decision-making process and finally took to squatting in basements sulking. An impoverished hitchhiker visiting any planets in the Sirius star system these days can pick up easy money working as a counselor for neurotic elevators.

«A book can't take the place of a man!» «I disagree. A book can give you most things a relationship can. It can make you laugh, it can make you cry, it can transport you to different worlds and teach you things. You can even take it out to dinner. And if bores you, you can move on. Which is pretty much what happens in real life.»

Will you stay in Ravka?” asked Wylan. “Only long enough to arrange transport to Fjerda. There are Grisha who can help me preserve his body for the journey. But I can’t go home, I can’t rest until he does. I’ll take him north. To the ice. I’ll bury him near the shore.” She turned to them then, as if seeing them for the first time.

If someone had told her that she would be transported to what was for all purposes a magical land, where history could be rewritten at a whim, or people could suddenly be shrunk to the size of poppy seeds, but that at least for this moment, her most pressing concern would have been the absence of cigarettes, she would have thought them mad.

I loved books, even as I loved the similar way opium had of transporting a mind elsewhere

Now our world is at the present time firmly in the grip of a mechanical monster, whose head - if you want to call it that - is the World Engineer's Complex. That monster is opposed to us and can keep all too good a tab on us through every purchase we make with our credit numbers, every time we use the public transportation or eat a meal or rent a place to live.

If it weren’t for public transportation,” Sam said, “my brother wouldn’t be getting married today. He and Maggie fell in love along the ferry route from Bellingham to Anacortes … which brings to mind the old saying that life is a journey. Some people have a natural sense of direction. You could put them in the middle of a foreign country and they could find their way around. My brother is not one of those people.” Sam paused as some of the guests started laughing, and his older brother gave him a mock-warning glance. “So when Mark by some miracle manages to end up where he was supposed to be, it’s a nice surprise for everyone, including Mark.” More laughter from the crowd. “Somehow, even with all the roadblocks and detours and one-way streets, Mark managed to find his way to Maggie.” Sam raised his glass. “To Mark and Maggie’s journey together. And to Holly, who is loved more than any girl in the whole wide world.

I found it odd that the transport was less interested in Sanctuary Moon, which took place on a colony, than Worldhoppers, which was about the crew of a large exploration ship. You’d think it would be too much like work—I avoided serials about survey teams and mining installations—but maybe familiar things were easier for

Thou shalt not judge others by which thou do not possess thyself. If your only means of transportation are your Nikes, be ye not concerned with the model or make of a man’s vehicle. Be not shallow if you don’t have a pool.

The scent of the leather and the feel of the cold steel transported her back in time. “But Daddy, why can’t I have a sword and a scabbard? Dillon and Tynan have one and look, I can lift it above my head, too.” Kylah chuckled because she hadn’t lifted it above her head; she’d barely lifted the broadsword off the floor. But Cearnach was always supportive. He’d told her, “Someday, little one… someday you will be a great warrior just like your brothers.

The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.

Today a soldier can go out on patrol and kill someone or have one of his friends killed and call his girlfriend on his cell phone that night and probably talk about anything except what just happened. And if society itself tries to blur it as much as possible, by conscious well-intended efforts to provide “all the comforts of home” and modern transportation and communication, what chance does your average eighteen-year-old have of not becoming confused?2

… It was an astonishing situation, a tragedy unique in history. What terror had driven these peace-loving people to seek refuge in such a wilderness? Even grass had become scarce along the track. Scanty patches of grass had been eaten clean and transport animals, already showing signs of exhaustion were far from their journey’s end. … the constant flicker of lightning and the distant growl of thunder wasominous. In the small hours the storm burst upon us. Hastily rolling up bedding we took refuge wherever we could, in or under the lorries standing round. There together with many Indians we sat huddled and waited for the dawn. Dr Russell

There’s an old train system that used to operate in transporting girls near Grants Pass. It says it’s still active, even though this railroad line has been closed for decades.

Go on, you've claimed your thirty pieces of silver, go do something crazy like put gas in that penis replacement you call transportation.

Ms. Jain stated that the teachers were given free transportation for the first 2 weeks of the year, until they made other arrangements with American teachers.

He noticed, without surprise, that the two cats had come along, even though he had not specifically included them in the transportation spell. Cats were like that.

No one sought a job on an interstellar transport ship because their life was working out as planned.

Cabal looked at him. The expression “if looks could kill” does not begin to describe the pure corrosive abhorrence that he put into the glance. If, however, the steward had suddenly found himself transported far away and nailed, through his genitals, to the steeple of a church in the middle of a violent electrical storm, a more exact impression may be gained.

Space is one of the few places where time makes sense to him. He knows, on an intellectual level, that when he looks at any object, he’s looking back in time. In the case of his own hand, it takes the light a nanosecond—one billionth of a second—to transport the image to his eyes. When he looks at the research station from half a mile away, he’s seeing the structure as it existed 2,640 nanoseconds ago. It seems instantaneous, and for all intents and purposes, it is. But when Barry looks into the night sky, he’s seeing stars whose light took a year, or a hundred, or a million to reach him. The telescopes that peer into deep space are looking at ten-billion-year-old light from stars that coalesced just after the universe began.

He is transported to his childhood when, taken to a show by a neighbor, he watched in awe and thought (as he thought when he first saw the Rocky Mountains): Why did no one tell me life could be this? As if they had been hiding from him that, instead of Puritan hard work and failed get-rich schemes, promises broken and pointless battles waged, life could be sequins and song. He felt he had been lied to from the Pilgrims on down. The secret had been kept from him like a mad aunt locked in the basement, and now a neighbor had innocently set her loose—and she was wonderful! He understood everyone was wrong about life, and if they were wrong about that, then they could be wrong about him. It seemed possible—only for those two hours—that he as well, somewhere inside, could be sequins and song.

The loss of a loved one left behind heavy reminders, but when it found a space to curl up and claim as its own, it became a heavy, unmovable blanket until even the tiniest spark of hope sputtered out.

Objects are the markers of our humanity. Everything we hold onto has meaning for us. Those things are souvenirs that can transport us to that exact moment in time and make us feel that emotion all over again. Take

Glancing over my shoulder, toward the top seats, I see Xaden standing next to Bodhi with his arms folded across his chest, listening to whatever Garrick tells him. A painful ache erupts in my heart. How can we only have hours left? As if he senses the weight of my gaze, he looks at me, then winks like we’re not facing certain annihilation. Like we’ve transported ourselves back to last year and this is just another Battle Brief.

Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the subether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.

We just haven’t yet discovered the political will, economic might, and cultural flexibility to install and activate them, because doing so requires something a lot bigger, and more concrete, than imagination—it means nothing short of a complete overhaul of the world’s energy systems, transportation, infrastructure and industry and agriculture. Not to mention, say, our diets or our taste for Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

Another common recommendation is to turn lights off when you leave a room, but lighting accounts for only 3% of household energy use, so even if you used no lighting at all in your house you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon emissions. Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely you'd cut out 10kg CO2eq per year, which is only 0.4% of your total emissions. Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is overhyped: only 10% of the carbon footprint of food comes from transportation whereas 80% comes from production, so what type of food you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally produced food. In fact, exactly the same food can sometimes have higher carbon footprint if it's locally grown than if it's imported: one study found that the carbon footprint from locally grown tomatoes in northern Europe was five times as great as the carbon footprint from tomatoes grown in Spain because the emissions generated by heating and lighting greenhouses dwarfed the emissions generated by transportation.

There are whole villages in Extremadura in Spain that are built of rock that has very high grade wolfram ore and the stone fences of the peasant’s field are all made of this ore. Yet the peasants are very poor. At this time it was so valuable that we were using DC-2’s, transport planes such as fly from here to Miami, to fly it over from a field at Nam Yung in Free China to Kai Tak airport at Kowloon. From there it was shipped to the States. It was considered very scarce and of vital importance in our preparations for war

What about the dissolution transporter?” suggested Ms. Minnian. “Is it still checked out?” “Let’s see.” Doc went over to a card file and flipped through it. “No, it’s back downstairs in the Chresto. Excellent idea.” “What’s a dissolution transporter?” I asked. “Sort of like a fax machine for objects,” said Dr. Rust. “What’s a fax machine, then?” “Oh, you young people!” said Ms. Minnian. “Never mind about the fax,” said Doc. “A dissolution transporter deconstructs an object—in this case, you—taking note of its exact structure and composition. Then it transfers that information to another location, where the object is reassembled from material there.” “Kind of like the transporter on Star Trek except it only works one way,” said Jaya. That sounded alarming. “But if we’re deconstructed here and reassembled someplace else, won’t we turn into other people?” “Technically, yes. But you’ll be other people with the exact same memories. And exact duplicates of your bodies, down to the last quark,” said Ms. Minnian. “Yes, but I’ll be dead! Just because someone else has my memories, that doesn’t mean it’s me!” I objected. “It’s okay, Leo,” said Jaya. “I’ve used the diss tran a zillion times and I still feel like myself.” “Of course you do. You have all of the original Jaya’s memories, so of course you think you’re her. That doesn’t mean you are.” “What makes you so sure you’re the same Leo who went to bed last night?” said Ms. Minnian. “Dissolution transportation is no more discontinuous than falling asleep and waking up again. But you don’t have to go if you’re afraid.

All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?” “Yeah. The transporters.” “Do you know how they work?” “Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.” “No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.” “Sure.” “That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.” I shrugged. “I don’t get it.” “Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.” “Sure. “So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this. “Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.

Lord Antesh,” Uncle Sentes said. “I see no recognisable flag of truce, do you?” Antesh pursed his lips and shook his head. “Can’t say as I do, my lord.” “Well then.” “. . . swift transportation to any land of your choice,” the Volarian was saying, the scroll held in front of his eyes. “Plus one hundred pounds in gol—” He choked off as Antesh’s arrow punched through the scroll and the breastplate beyond. He tumbled from the saddle and lay still, the scroll pinned to his chest. “Right,” the Fief Lord said, turning away. “Let me know when the rest get here.

It was a good, sturdy chair of Dark Fae construction, with interlocking parts that could be disassembled for easier transportation. It bore his weight and size well. He approved. “I have a lap that requires a faerie’s presence,” he remarked to the room in general. Niniane’s tired face lightened.

To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth—when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish.

Not one of those worlds will be identical to Earth. A few will be hospitable; most will appear hostile. Many will be achingly beautiful. In some worlds there will be many suns in the daytime sky, many moons in the heavens at night, or great particle ring systems soaring from horizon to horizon. Some moons will be so close that their planet will loom high in the heavens, covering half the sky. And some worlds will look out onto a vast gaseous nebula, the remains of an ordinary star that once was and is no longer. In all those skies, rich in distant and exotic constellations, there will be a faint yellow star—perhaps barely seen by the naked eye, perhaps visible only through the telescope—the home star of the fleet of interstellar transports exploring this tiny region of the great Milky Way Galaxy. The themes of space and time are, as we have seen, intertwined. Worlds and stars, like people, are born, live and die. The lifetime of a human being is measured in decades; the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. In all those other worlds in space there are events in progress, occurrences that will determine their futures. And on our small planet, this moment in history is a historical branch point as profound as the confrontation of the Ionian scientists with the mystics 2,500 years ago. What we do with our world in this time will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully determine the destiny of our descendants and their fate, if any, among the stars.

Ship ID Renegade Transport, Captain Surukta requesting permission to land.” “Captain Surukta, permission granted to landing area thirty-two. Congratulations on your safe arrival,” a voice responded over the intercom. Teka snorted as she switched off the communicator. “I bet that’s standard practice, congratulating people on surviving.” “I’ve been here before,” Sifa said, wry. “It is indeed standard practice.

Consider the roots of a simple and mundane action, for instance, buying bread for your breakfast. A farmer has grown the grain in a field carved from wilderness by his ancestors; in the ancient city a miller has ground the flour and a baker prepared the loaf; the vendor has transported it to your house in a cart built by a cartwright and his apprentices. Even the donkey that draws the cart, what stories could she not tell if you could decipher her braying? And then you yourself hand over a coin of copper dug from the very heart of the earth, you who have risen from a bed of dreams and darkness to stand in the light of the vast and terrifying sun. Are there not a thousand strands woven together into this tapestry of a morning meal? How then can you expect that the omens of great events should be easy to unravel? The Pseudo-Iamblichus Scroll

Fitness means different things to different people. To exercise scientists, it means cardiorespiratory fitness, a parameter that can be measured in the laboratory by way of a test called maximal oxygen uptake or “VO2max” (the “V” stands for “volume”). It is also called aerobic fitness, and it refers to the capacity of your body to transport and utilize oxygen. Scientists have found that it’s one of the best predictors of overall health.

Charlie glanced quickly back at the Transport Capsule. The sheet-white faces of Shuckworth, Shanks and Showler were pressed against the glass of the little windows, terror-struck, stupefied, stunned, their mouths open, their expressions frozen like fish fingers. Once again, Charlie gave them the thumbs-up signal. Showler acknowledged it with a sickly grin, but that was all. ‘Oh, oh, oh!’ screamed Grandma Josephine. ‘Get that beastly squishy

And to expand on what you were saying about books, I think they are very much alive. They have the power to spark ideas, breathe life into the nonexistent, and transport us to another realm. The books in this library happen to be a bit more outwardly cunning than those found in mortals’ libraries, although even those volumes are full of power. These books just happen to know that they contain greatness and guard it from us, maybe waiting to decide if we’re ready and worthy for the wisdom they offer.” Liv let out a

Once the mobilization button was pushed, the whole vast machinery for calling up, equipping, and transporting two million men began turning automatically. Reservists went to their designated depots, were issued uniforms, equipment, and arms, formed into companies and companies into battalions, were joined by cavalry, cyclists, artillery, medical units, cook wagons, blacksmith wagons, even postal wagons, moved according to prepared railway timetables to concentration points near the frontier where they would be formed into divisions, divisions into corps, and corps into armies ready to advance and fight. One army corps alone—out of the total of 40 in the German forces—required 170 railway cars for officers, 965 for infantry, 2,960 for cavalry, 1,915 for artillery and supply wagons, 6,010 in all, grouped in 140 trains and an equal number again for their supplies. From the moment the order was given, everything was to move at fixed times according to a schedule precise down to the number of train axles that would pass over a given bridge within a given time.

All right, but you know Star Trek, and ‘Beam me up, Scotty’? How they can teleport people around?” “Yeah. The transporters.” “Do you know how they work?” “Just … special effects. CGI or whatever they used.” “No, I mean within the universe of the show. They work by breaking down your molecules, zapping you over a beam, and putting you back together on the other end.” “Sure.” “That is what scares me. I can’t watch it. I find it too disturbing.” I shrugged. “I don’t get it.” “Well, think about it. Your body is just made of a few different types of atoms. Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and so on. So this transporter machine, there is no reason in the world to break down all of those atoms and then send those specific atoms thousands of miles away. One oxygen atom is the same as another, so what it does is send the blueprint for your body across the beam. Then it reassembles you at the destination, out of whatever atoms it has nearby. So if there is carbon and hydrogen at the planet you’re beaming down to, it’ll just put you together out of what it has on hand, because you get the exact same result.” “Sure. “So it’s more like sending a fax than mailing a letter. Only the transporter is a fax machine that shreds the original. Your original body, along with your brain, gets vaporized. Which means what comes out the other end isn’t you. It’s an exact copy that the machine made, of a man who is now dead, his atoms floating freely around the interior of the ship. Only within the universe of the show, nobody knows this. “Meanwhile, you are dead. Dead for eternity. All of your memories and emotions and personality end, right there, on that platform, forever. Your wife and children and friends will never see you again. What they will see is this unnatural photocopy of you that emerged from the other end. And in fact, since transporter technology is used routinely, all of the people you see on that ship are copies of copies of copies of long-dead, vaporized crew members. And no one ever figures it out. They all continue to blithely step into this machine that kills one hundred percent of the people who use it, but nobody realizes it because each time, it spits out a perfect replacement for the victim at the other end.” I

So we watched Worldhoppers. It didn’t complain about the lack of realism. After three episodes, it got agitated whenever a minor character was killed. When a major character died in the twentieth episode I had to pause seven minutes while it sat there in the feed doing the bot equivalent of staring at a wall, pretending that it had to run diagnostics. Then four episodes later the character came back to life and it was so relieved we had to watch that episode three times before it would go on. At the climax of one of the main story lines, the plot suggested the ship might be catastrophically damaged and members of the crew killed or injured, and the transport was afraid to watch it. (That’s obviously not how it phrased it, but yeah, it was afraid to watch it.) I was feeling a lot more charitable toward it by that point so was willing to let it ease into the episode by watching one to two minutes at a time. After it was over, it just sat there, not even pretending to do diagnostics. It sat there for a full ten minutes, which is a lot of processing time for a bot that sophisticated. Then it said, Again, please. So I started the first episode again.

Oh, it doesn't work at all. That's the problem! It's an endless, halting parade of inspections, bribes, and nonsense—but if you're aboard a Texas vessel, you'll find less inconvenience along the way." "It's because of their guns!" declared Mr. Henderson, once more escaping his reverie, bobbing out of it as if to gasp for air. "Concise, my love." Mrs. Henderson gave him a smile. "And correct. Texans are heavily armed and often impatient. They don't need to be transporting arms and gunpowder to create a great nuisance for anyone who stops them, so they tend to be stopped…less often.

According to the UN, the livestock sector is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, around 40 percent more than the entire transport sector — cars, trucks, planes, trains, and ships — combined. Animal agriculture is responsible for 37 percent of anthropogenic methane, which offers twenty-three times the global warming potential (GWP) of CO2, as well as 65 percent of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, which provides a staggering 296 times the GWP of CO2. The most current data even quantifies the role of diet: omnivores contribute seven times the volume of greenhouse gases that vegans do.

The largest sources of CO2 from animal agriculture come not from the animals themselves (through respiration and waste), but from the inputs and land-use changes necessary to maintain and feed them, including: burning fossil fuels to produce fertilisers used in feed production; maintaining intensive animal production facilities; growing the associated animal feed; transporting the animal feed; and processing and transporting the animal products. Furthermore, clearing land to graze livestock and grow feed is the largest single cause of deforestation and among the major causes of land degradation and desertification.

In (largely) gloomy Germany the area needed by PV panels to supply all electricity generation (nearly 560 TWh in 2012) would be considerably larger. With an average PV output of 100 kWh/m2 (the recent annual mean for both roof - and ground-based installations), it would require about 5,600 km2 covered with modules. That would be the equivalent of nearly 1.6% of Germany's total area, 25% of the country's built-up area, or almost 15% of land claimed by settlements and transportation infrastructure; and roughly 2.7 times the total area of all German roofs, based on an estimate of roughly 25 m2 of roof area per person (Waffenschmidt 2008).

The ambulance arrived when the police cars did. They were accompanied by a man in a black suit who had the look of a federal agent. It didn’t surprise Cecily that he went right up to Tate and drew him to one side. While Cecily was being checked over by a paramedic, Gabrini, who’d already been loaded onto a gurney, was being watched by two police officers. Tate came back to Cecily while the federal agent paused by the police officers. “You can take him to the hospital to have his ribs strapped,” the man told the ambulance attendant. “But we’ll have transport for him to New Jersey with two federal marshals.” “Marshals!” Gabrini exclaimed, holding his side, because the outburst had hurt. “Marshals,” the federal agent replied. There was something menacing about the smile that accompanied the words. “It seems that you’re wanted in Jersey for much more serious crimes than breaking an entering and assault with a deadly weapon, Mr. Gabrini.” “Not in Jersey,” Gabrini began. “No, those other charges, they’re in D.C.” “You’ll get to D.C. eventually,” the federal agent murmured, then the dark man smiled. And Gabrini knew at once that he wasn’t connected in any way at all to the government. Gabrini was suddenly yelling his head off, begging for federal protection, but nobody paid him much attention. He was carried off in the ambulance with the sedan following close behind.

JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up organized crime. Nobody high-up in government has tangled the Mafia. J. E. Hoover, the hired hands of FBI and CIA, ran the assassination teams. They have been used since World War II. JFK was attempting to end the oil-tax depletion rip-offs, to get tax money from oil companies. JFK instituted the nuclear test ban treaty, often called “the kiss of death,” to oppose the Pentagon. JFK called off the Invasion of Cuba. He allowed Castro to live, antagonized narcotics and gambling, oil and sugar interests, formerly in Cuba. JFK asked his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to break up the CIA, the “hidden government behind my back.” Allen Dulles was fired. Dulles, the attorney for international multinationals, was angry. JFK planned to withdraw troops from Vietnam after the 1964 elections. Nov. 24, 1963, two days after JFK’s burial, the Pentagon escalated the Vietnam war … with no known provocations, after JFK was gone. There was no chance Kennedy could survive antagonizing the CIA, oil companies, Pentagon, organized crime. He was not their man. The assassination of JFK employed people from the Texas-Southwest. It was not a Southern plot. Upstarts could not have controlled the northern CIA, FBI, Kennedy family connections. This was a more detailed, sophisticated conspiracy that was to set the pattern for future murders to take place. The murder was funded by Permindex, with headquarters in Montreal and Switzerland. Their stated purpose was to encourage trade between nations in the Western world. Their actual purpose was fourfold: 1) To fund and direct assassinations of European, Mid-East and world leaders considered threats to the western world, and to Petroleum Interests of their backers. 2) Provide couriers, agents for transporting and depositing funds through Swiss Banks for Vegas, Miami and the international gambling syndicate. 3) Coordinate the espionage activities of White Russian Solidarists and Division V of the FBI, headed by William Sullivan. 4) Build, acquire and operate hotels and gambling casinos. See: Nomenclature of an Assassination Cabal, by William Torbitt.

This is not a healthy outlook for America. We are also facing the same combination of destabilizing events that took place in Imperial Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution, such as: 1. A crisis in government policies to improve deteriorating industry and transportation. (Yes ) 2. Difficulty in providing basic provisions to the citizenry. (Not yet) 3. A 36% decrease in gross industrial production. (Yes) 4. 50% of enterprises closing major industrial centers of manufacturing. (Almost there) 5. Sharp increase in the cost of living. (Yes) 6. Real wages fell 50% in the past 4 years. (Yes) 7. National debt rose 400%. (Yes) 8. Debt to foreign governments (like China and Saudi Arabia) exceeds 20%. (Yes) 9. Actual history becomes illegal. (Almost there)

Kate cradled his face between her hands, drinking him in with her mouth while her beauty and her sheer, sweet innocence enveloped him in an almost holy fire. As his hands began to wander over all the soft enticements of her body, she undulated under his palms in seductive invitation. Her breasts swelled beneath his roaming touch. He chafed her erect nipples with his thumbs, but soon could not resist their tautened allure. He dragged his lips away from hers and moved lower to pay homage. He sampled each with a deep, slow, savoring kiss. Her chest heaved as she lay back on her elbows, watching him, and enjoying his attentions. With her breast in his mouth, his hand was free to discover and to claim new territory. And he had a very clear idea of where he wanted to go. His hand inched down her stomach, teasing her as he neared her mound of Venus. His fingers drew playful circles at the bottom of her belly; he made sure she was dying for his touch before he deigned to give it to her. When she groaned with kittenish frustration, her hips rising impatiently to meet his cupped hand, he introduced himself to her mound with a deft caress. Ah, but when his fingertips pressed deeper, he nearly lost his mind. She was dripping for him, anointing his hand with her yearning nectar. She let out an urgent sigh of pleasure and dropped her head back as he began to finger her. His pulse slammed in his arteries, for she was as ready for love as any woman he had ever bedded, her breathless motions urging on his explorations. So wet. It was at about that moment that her unexpected wantonness enslaved him, heart and mind, body and soul. Her silken moans transported him to a throbbing frenzy. He had never wanted anyone with such a deep and elemental need.

First there was OralTrad, upgraded ten thousand years later by the rhyming (for easier recall) Oral TradPlus. For thousands of years this was the only Story Operating System and it is still in use today. The system branched in two about twenty thousand years ago; on one side with CaveDaubPro (forerunner of PaintPlus V2.3, GrecianUrn V1.2, Sculpt-Marble V1.4 and the latest, all-encompassing SuperArtisticExpression-5). The other strand, the Picto-Phonetic Storytelling Systems, started with Clay Tablet V2.1 and went through several competing systems (Wax-Tablet, Papyrus, VellumPlus) before merging into the award-winning SCROLL, which was upgraded eight times to V3.5 before being swept aside by the all new and clearly superior BOOK V1. Stable, easy to store and transport, compact and with a workable index, BOOK has led the way for nearly eighteen hundred years. WORDMASTER XAVIER LIBRIS, Story Operating Systems—the Early Years

The trouble with most forms of transport, he thought, is basically that not one of them is worth all the bother. On Earth—when there had been an Earth, before it was demolished to make way for a new hyperspace bypass—the problem had been with cars. The disadvantages involved in pulling lots of black sticky slime from out of the ground where it had been safely hidden out of harm’s way, turning it into tar to cover the land with, smoke to fill the air with and pouring the rest into the sea, all seemed to outweigh the advantages of being able to get more quickly from one place to another—particularly when the place you arrived at had probably become, as a result of this, very similar to the place you had left, i.e., covered with tar, full of smoke and short of fish. And what about matter transference beams? Any form of transport which involved tearing you apart atom by atom, flinging those atoms through the subether, and then jamming them back together again just when they were getting their first taste of freedom for years had to be bad news.

LIGHT AS AN EXCITATION OF SPACE Let's try and understand light in terms of an excitation of empty space-even if that makes no immediate sense. We might alternatively understand light in terms of a field, as we introduced that term in chapter 2. But light differs from the fields of temperature distributions, of sound, or of water in fluid motion described there: Whereas those phenomena are due to the composite action or motion of molecules at a more elementary level, light has its own reality at that level. It cannot be understood in terms of an oscillation of some matter that also exists in the dark-no, light is nothing but just that, light. It is an oscillation of an abstract nature, equivalent to a set of numbers that are assigned to each point in space. True, these abstract numbers have implications-most notably, they imply energy. But while a water wave transports energy by the movement of water molecules, the passing of a light wave does not mean that anything material oscillates. The energy of the liquid wave is the energy associated with gravitation and motion of its molecules; the energy of light is energy pure and simple, associated with every illuminated point in space.

W odpowiedzi de Gaulle poparł drugą stronę. W kwietniu 1956 roku zaczął przekazywać duże ilości nowoczesnej broni do Izraela. Malutkie państwo w końcu zyskało rzetelnego i pierwszorzędnego dostawcę broni. Po upaństwowieniu przez Egipt Kanału Sueskiego w 1956 roku kontakty się pogłębiły. Transport morski z tego regionu do Europy był w przypadku Francji uzależniony od Suezu. IDF pomógł zagwarantować Francji dostęp do Suezu, a w zamian za to Francja wysyłała do Izraela jeszcze więcej broni. Im bliżej i częściej Francuzi i Izraelczycy współpracowali, tym bardziej te dostawy się zwiększały. Agencja szpiegowska de Gaulle’a pozyskała pomoc Izraela przy osłabianiu antyfrancuskiego oporu w Algierii, jednego z bastionów kolonialnych Francji. W 1960 roku Francja obiecała dostarczyć Izraelowi w ciągu następnych dziesięciu lat dwieście czołgów AMX-13 i siedemdziesiąt dwa myśliwce odrzutowe Mystère.3 Ale 2 czerwca 1967 roku, na trzy dni przed zaplanowanym przez Izrael wyprzedzającym atakiem na Egipt i Syrię, de Gaulle całkowicie odciął się od Izraela. – Francja nie wyrazi zgody – a co dopiero mówić o udzieleniu wsparcia – krajowi, który pierwszy użyje broni – powiedział swojemu gabinetowi.4 Jednak w decyzji de Gaulle’a chodziło o coś więcej niż próbę zażegnania wojny na Bliskim Wschodzie. Nowe okoliczności wymagały nowych francuskich sojuszy. Do 1967 roku Francja wycofała się z Algierii. Mając za sobą długą i zaciekłą wojnę w północnej Afryce, de Gaulle za priorytet uznał zbliżenie ze światem arabskim. W interesie Francji nie leżało już stawanie po stronie Izraela. – Gaullistowska Francja nie ma przyjaciół, tylko interesy – zauważył wtedy francuski tygodnik Le Nouvel Observateur.5

Here is an important twist you need to understand. God doesn’t create heaven and hell. We do. Whatever plane of consciousness we find ourselves in after the body drops away is a world of our own making, according to the Hindu seers. If our thoughts have been predominantly cheerful and benevolent, our after-death experience is similar. If our thoughts have been filled with violence and anger, our afterlife will be, too. The climate in the life after death is the atmosphere of our own minds. Our karma—the mental vectors we’ve created by our thoughts and actions—carries us to a high state, a low state, or an okay in-between state. We’re in control—if we’re living life consciously. If we’re not directing our lives with awareness, then the unconscious tendencies stored in our subtle body take control when we die. For many Hindus, a long stay in heaven is just what the doctor ordered, and some Hindus devote considerable effort to building up enough karmic velocity to transport them into a higher world after they jettison their bodies. Eventually, the karmic forces that propelled you into a disembodied realm peters out. Your stay in that world is up—it’s time to return to a physical body. You remember how much you enjoyed sex. You remember how much you enjoyed whipped cream puffs. You remember how much you wanted to go to Mars. You remember that your brother-in-law owes you $3,000. Your unfulfilled desires draw you back to an appropriate physical body and—poof!—here you are again. The obstetrician is cutting your umbilical cord and slapping your bottom while you wail helplessly at the indignity. You traded the old model in for a new vehicle. Hopefully, thanks to good karma, you’ve traded up.

Variations on a tired, old theme Here’s another example of addict manipulation that plagues parents. The phone rings. It’s the addict. He says he has a job. You’re thrilled. But you’re also apprehensive. Because you know he hasn’t simply called to tell you good news. That kind of thing just doesn’t happen. Then comes the zinger you knew would be coming. The request. He says everybody at this company wears business suits and ties, none of which he has. He says if you can’t wire him $1800 right away, he won’t be able to take the job. The implications are clear. Suddenly, you’ve become the deciding factor as to whether or not the addict will be able to take the job. Have a future. Have a life. You’ve got that old, familiar sick feeling in the pit of your stomach. This is not the child you gladly would have financed in any way possible to get him started in life. This is the child who has been strung out on drugs for years and has shown absolutely no interest in such things as having a conventional job. He has also, if you remember correctly, come to you quite a few times with variations on this same tired, old story. One variation called for a car so he could get to work. (Why is it that addicts are always being offered jobs in the middle of nowhere that can’t be reached by public transportation?) Another variation called for the money to purchase a round-trip airline ticket to interview for a job three thousand miles away. Being presented with what amounts to a no-choice request, the question is: Are you going to contribute in what you know is probably another scam, or are you going to say sorry and hang up? To step out of the role of banker/victim/rescuer, you have to quit the job of banker/victim/rescuer. You have to change the coda. You have to forget all the stipulations there are to being a parent. You have to harden your heart and tell yourself parenthood no longer applies to you—not while your child is addicted. Not an easy thing to do. P.S. You know in your heart there is no job starting on Monday. But even if there is, it’s hardly your responsibility if the addict goes well dressed, badly dressed, or undressed. Facing the unfaceable: The situation may never change In summary, you had a child and that child became an addict. Your love for the child didn’t vanish. But you’ve had to wean yourself away from the person your child has become through his or her drugs and/ or alcohol abuse. Your journey with the addicted child has led you through various stages of pain, grief, and despair and into new phases of strength, acceptance, and healing. There’s a good chance that you might not be as healthy-minded as you are today had it not been for the tribulations with the addict. But you’ll never know. The one thing you do know is that you wouldn’t volunteer to go through it again, even with all the awareness you’ve gained. You would never have sacrificed your child just so that you could become a better, stronger person. But this is the way it has turned out. You’re doing okay with it, almost twenty-four hours a day. It’s just the odd few minutes that are hard to get through, like the ones in the middle of the night when you awaken to find that the grief hasn’t really gone away—it’s just under smart, new management. Or when you’re walking along a street or in a mall and you see someone who reminds you of your addicted child, but isn’t a substance abuser, and you feel that void in your heart. You ache for what might have been with your child, the happy life, the fulfilled career. And you ache for the events that never took place—the high school graduation, the engagement party, the wedding, the grandkids. These are the celebrations of life that you’ll probably never get to enjoy. Although you never know. DON’T LET    YOUR KIDS  KILL  YOU  A Guide for Parents of Drug and Alcohol Addicted Children PART 2

We may have to mask your scent.” He looked at her soberly. “Did Olivia tell you anything about scent marking?” “Scent marking?” Sophie wracked her brain, trying to remember. It seemed vaguely familiar though she couldn’t remember exactly what it involved. Still, how bad could it be? “Oh, uh, sure. Scent marking.” She nodded. “Good. Because in the last extremity, if I hear the sniffers around this cabin, I may have to scent mark you—to mask your scent with my own.” “Can you do that? I mean, is your scent that much stronger than mine, especially when they’re focused on me?” Sylvan looked down at his hands. “Normally it isn’t but right now…ever since the trip we took in the transport tube…” Sophie thought of the warm, spicy scent that seemed to go to her head, the way it made her react to him… “It’s your mating scent, isn’t it?” she asked in a low voice, not daring to look at him. “Yes.” He sounded ashamed. “But why…” She risked a sidelong glance at him. “Why is it coming out now? I, uh, thought it only happened during the claiming period. But you’re not, um, claiming me or anything. I mean, we’re not… you know.” “I know.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand what’s going on either. We haven’t even been dream sharing. Well, that is, I mean…” He cleared his throat. “I’ve had a few dreams of you. But nothing out of the ordinary.” He glanced at her. “Have you…had any strange dreams?” “No.” Sophie shook her head and a look of mingled disappointment and relief passed over his stern features. “I have been, uh, having problems with my art, though,” she admitted in a low voice. “Problems with your art?” He frowned. “What do you mean?” “I paint,” Sophie explained. “You know—with a paintbrush and easel?” She made a painting motion in the air and his eyes widened. “That was what I dreamed. That you were painting a picture of…of me.” Sophie nearly choked. “But I have been! You’re all I’ve been able to paint lately. Even when I try not to, you always sneak in there. It’s so annoying.” Then she realized what she’d said. “Uh, I mean—” “It doesn’t matter.” Sylvan cut her off, shaking his head. “So we have been dream sharing, in a way.” Sophie

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent. To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative. It also follows that a very trifling thing can cause the greatest of joys. Take as an example something that happened on our journey from Auschwitz to the camp affiliated with Dachau. We had all been afraid that our transport was heading for the Mauthausen camp. We became more and more tense as we approached a certain bridge over the Danube which the train would have to cross to reach Mauthausen, according to the statement of experienced traveling companions. Those who have never seen anything similar cannot possibly imagine the dance of joy performed in the carriage by the prisoners when they saw that our transport was not crossing the bridge and was instead heading “only” for Dachau. And again, what happened on our arrival in that camp, after a journey lasting two days and three nights? There had not been enough room for everybody to crouch on the floor of the carriage at the same time. The majority of us had to stand all the way, while a few took turns at squatting on the scanty straw which was soaked with human urine. When we arrived the first important news that we heard from older prisoners was that this comparatively small camp (its population was 2,500) had no “oven,” no crematorium, no gas! That meant that a person who had become a “Moslem” could not be taken straight to the gas chamber, but would have to wait until a so-called “sick convoy” had been arranged to return to Auschwitz. This joyful surprise put us all in a good mood. The wish of the senior warden of our hut in Auschwitz had come true: we had come, as quickly as possible, to a camp which did not have a “chimney”—unlike Auschwitz. We laughed and cracked jokes in spite of, and during, all we had to go through in the next few hours.

To give you a sense of the sheer volume of unprocessed information that comes up the spinal cord into the thalamus, let’s consider just one aspect: vision, since many of our memories are encoded this way. There are roughly 130 million cells in the eye’s retina, called cones and rods; they process and record 100 million bits of information from the landscape at any time. This vast amount of data is then collected and sent down the optic nerve, which transports 9 million bits of information per second, and on to the thalamus. From there, the information reaches the occipital lobe, at the very back of the brain. This visual cortex, in turn, begins the arduous process of analyzing this mountain of data. The visual cortex consists of several patches at the back of the brain, each of which is designed for a specific task. They are labeled V1 to V8. Remarkably, the area called V1 is like a screen; it actually creates a pattern on the back of your brain very similar in shape and form to the original image. This image bears a striking resemblance to the original, except that the very center of your eye, the fovea, occupies a much larger area in V1 (since the fovea has the highest concentration of neurons). The image cast on V1 is therefore not a perfect replica of the landscape but is distorted, with the central region of the image taking up most of the space. Besides V1, other areas of the occipital lobe process different aspects of the image, including: •  Stereo vision. These neurons compare the images coming in from each eye. This is done in area V2. •  Distance. These neurons calculate the distance to an object, using shadows and other information from both eyes. This is done in area V3. •  Colors are processed in area V4. •  Motion. Different circuits can pick out different classes of motion, including straight-line, spiral, and expanding motion. This is done in area V5. More than thirty different neural circuits involved with vision have been identified, but there are probably many more. From the occipital lobe, the information is sent to the prefrontal cortex, where you finally “see” the image and form your short-term memory. The information is then sent to the hippocampus, which processes it and stores it for up to twenty-four hours. The memory is then chopped up and scattered among the various cortices. The point here is that vision, which we think happens effortlessly, requires billions of neurons firing in sequence, transmitting millions of bits of information per second. And remember that we have signals from five sense organs, plus emotions associated with each image. All this information is processed by the hippocampus to create a simple memory of an image. At present, no machine can match the sophistication of this process, so replicating it presents an enormous challenge for scientists who want to create an artificial hippocampus for the human brain.

We may have to mask your scent.” He looked at her soberly. “Did Olivia tell you anything about scent marking?” “Scent marking?” Sophie wracked her brain, trying to remember. It seemed vaguely familiar though she couldn’t remember exactly what it involved. Still, how bad could it be? “Oh, uh, sure. Scent marking.” She nodded. “Good. Because in the last extremity, if I hear the sniffers around this cabin, I may have to scent mark you—to mask your scent with my own.” “Can you do that? I mean, is your scent that much stronger than mine, especially when they’re focused on me?” Sylvan looked down at his hands. “Normally it isn’t but right now…ever since the trip we took in the transport tube…” Sophie thought of the warm, spicy scent that seemed to go to her head, the way it made her react to him… “It’s your mating scent, isn’t it?” she asked in a low voice, not daring to look at him. “Yes.” He sounded ashamed. “But why…” She risked a sidelong glance at him. “Why is it coming out now? I, uh, thought it only happened during the claiming period. But you’re not, um, claiming me or anything. I mean, we’re not… you know.” “I know.” He shook his head. “I don’t understand what’s going on either. We haven’t even been dream sharing. Well, that is, I mean…” He cleared his throat. “I’ve had a few dreams of you. But nothing out of the ordinary.” He glanced at her. “Have you…had any strange dreams?” “No.” Sophie shook her head and a look of mingled disappointment and relief passed over his stern features. “I have been, uh, having problems with my art, though,” she admitted in a low voice. “Problems with your art?” He frowned. “What do you mean?” “I paint,” Sophie explained. “You know—with a paintbrush and easel?” She made a painting motion in the air and his eyes widened. “That was what I dreamed. That you were painting a picture of…of me.” Sophie nearly choked. “But I have been! You’re all I’ve been able to paint lately. Even when I try not to, you always sneak in there. It’s so annoying.” Then she realized what she’d said. “Uh, I mean—” “It doesn’t matter.” Sylvan cut her off, shaking his head. “So we have been dream sharing, in a way.” Sophie felt herself go cold all over. “Does…does that mean you’re going to try to…to claim me? The way Baird claimed Liv?” Oh my God, if he does, if he claims me, then he’ll want to bite me! That’s the way his people do it. She had horror-movie visions of being held down under his muscular bulk, held down and pierced multiple times and in multiple ways. God, his teeth in my throat at the same time he’s inside me, filling me, holding me down and biting and thrusting. He’s so big, so strong—I’d never be able to get away. The horror she felt must have showed on her face, because Sylvan’s voice was rough when he spoke. “Don’t worry, Sophia. Even if I wanted to claim you, I couldn’t.” “Oh right.” She felt a small measure of relief. “Your vow.” “My vow,” he agreed. “Sylvan,

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive. Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers. The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books. Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive. Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We've quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

Dieselgate fed into a 180-degree turn in thinking that was in process about diesel fuel and urban transportation in Europe, where diesel cars have been popular. But anti-diesel sentiment was a big threat to Germany’s auto industry, which looms large in the country’s economy. German chancellor Angela Merkel decried the “demonizing” of diesel cars. Diesel, she said, was essential for combating climate change, owing to its lower CO2 emissions and greater fuel efficiency. She convened “diesel summits” to try to head off urban bans on diesel cars. But it was all to little avail. European cities, concerned about the higher levels of nitrogen oxide emissions from diesel, began to introduce limits for diesels. The aim for many is an eventual ban.

Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol, which is transport layer protocol agnostic.

The Internet Protocol (IP) functions at the Internet layer. Its responsibility is to provide a hardware-independent addressing scheme to the messages pass-through. Finally, it becomes the responsibility of the network access layer to transport the messages via the physical network.

Bitcoin is not a smart network. Bitcoin is a dumb network. It really is a dumb network. It is a dumb transaction-processing network. It’s a dumb network for verifying a very simple scripting language. It doesn’t offer a complete range of financial services and products. It doesn’t have automation and incredible features built in. Bitcoin is simply a dumb network, and that is one of its strongest and most important features. When you design networks, when you architect network systems, one of the most fundamental choices is this: do you make a dumb network that supports smart devices, or do you make a smart network that supports dumb devices? 5.1.1. The Smart Network - Phones The phone network was a very smart network. The telephone at the end of that network was a very dumb device. If you had a pulse-dialing phone, that thing had maybe four electronic components inside it. It was basically a switch on a wire with a speaker attached to it. You could dial by flicking the hook up and down fast enough. 
The phone was a dumb device; it had no intelligence whatsoever. Everything the phone network did was in the network. Caller ID was a network feature. Call waiting was a network feature. And if you wanted to make the experience better, you had to upgrade the network but you didn’t need to upgrade the device. That was a critical design decision because, at that time, the belief was that smart networks were better because you could deliver these incredible services just by upgrading the network for everyone. There is one small disadvantage with smart networks. They have to be upgraded from the center out. And that means innovation occurs at the center, by one player, and requires permission. As a result of smart network design, innovation only happens when a feature is needed by all of the subscribers of the network, when it is compelling enough to disrupt the function of the entire network to upgrade it. 5.1.2. The Dumb Network - Internet The internet is a dumb network. It’s dumb as rocks. All it can do is move data from point A to point B. It doesn’t know what that data is. It can’t tell the difference between a Skype call and a web page. It doesn’t know if the device on the end is a desktop computer or a mobile phone, a vacuum cleaner, a refrigerator, or a car. It doesn’t know if that device is powerful or not. If it can do multimedia or not. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care. In order to run a new application or innovate on a dumb network, all you have to do is add innovation at the edge. Because a dumb network can support smart devices, you don’t need to change anything in the network. If you push intelligence to the edge of the network, an application that only has five users can be implemented so long as those five users upgrade their devices to implement that application. The dumb network will transport their data because it doesn’t know the difference and it doesn’t care. 5.1.3. Bitcoin’s Dumb Network Bitcoin is a dumb network supporting really smart devices, and that is an incredibly powerful concept because bitcoin pushes all of the intelligence to the edge. It doesn’t care if the bitcoin address is the address of a multimillionaire, the address of a central bank, the address of a smart contract, the address of a device, or the address of a human. It doesn’t know. It doesn’t care if the transaction is carrying lots of money or not much money at all. It doesn’t care if the address is in Kuala Lumpur or downtown New York. It doesn’t know, it doesn’t care. It moves money from one address to another based on a simple locking script. And that means that if you want to build a new application on top of bitcoin, you can upgrade the

The Gray Man set the pistol back in its drawer and pushed it closed. He checked his watch. He had twenty minutes to pick up his rental car. He might upgrade to a midsize. He hated compact cars nearly as much as he hated public transportation.

The HTTP, which operates at the application layer, takes care of building the HTTP message with all relevant headers and passes it to the TCP at the transport layer. Whatever the data it receives from the application layer, the TCP encapsulates with its own headers and passes it through the rest of the layers in the TCP/IP stack.

For the next few minutes, time stood still and Cassie was transported into a real-life version of hell. Even as she watched it, she knew she’d never be able to scrub the images from her mind for the rest of her life. She had to remind herself to breathe.

When night fell, the bears stirred. They ran through the streets in the cover of dark. Wouldn’t it be better to use a transport gate, you say? Cards on the table, I just really wanted to run through town on a bear.

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.

Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl The story of Viktor Frankl (1905–1997), an Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist imprisoned in concentration camps during the Nazi Holocaust of WWII, inspired the world after the war. By 1997, when Frankl died of heart failure, his book Man’s Search for Meaning, which related his experiences in the death camps and the conclusions he drew from them, had sold more than 10 million copies in 24 languages. The book’s original title (translated from the German) reveals Frankl’s amazing outlook on life: Saying Yes to Life in Spite of Everything: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp. In 1942, Frankl and his wife and parents were sent to the Nazi Theresienstadt ghetto in Czechoslovakia, which was one of the show camps used to deceive Red Cross inspectors as to the true purpose and conditions of the concentration camps. In October 1944, Frankl and his wife were moved to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million people would meet their deaths. Later that month, he was transported to one of the Kaufering labor camps (subcamps of Dachau), and then, after contracting typhoid, to the Türkheim camp where he remained until American troops liberated the camp on April 27, 1945. Frankl and his sister, Stella, were the only ones in his immediate family to survive the Holocaust. In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl observed that a sense of meaning is what makes the difference in being able to survive painful and even horrific experiences. He wrote, “We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s own attitude in any given set of circumstances—to choose one’s own way.” Frankl maintained that while we cannot avoid suffering in life, we can choose the way we deal with it. We can find meaning in our suffering and proceed with our lives with our purpose renewed. As he states it, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” In this beautiful elaboration, Frankl wrote, “Between a stimulus and a response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom. The last of human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.” 7.2. In recent years, record numbers have visited Auschwitz. The ironic sign above the front gate means “Work sets you free.” TRAUMA IS EVERYWHERE It’s not just veterans, crime victims, abused children, and accident survivors who come face-to-face with trauma. About 75% of Americans will experience a traumatic event at some point in their lives. Women are more likely to be victims of domestic violence than they are to get breast cancer.