What Percentage Of A Paper Can Be Quotes

In one of my periodicals, there’s a paper by someone who’s worked out that what we know of the universe is only a tiny percentage of what actually exists. He says what’s left can’t be seen or detected, but it’s there; he calls it ‘dark matter’. Of course, no one believes him; but I find the idea unsettling. Or rather, not the idea itself, that’s merely an odd notion about outer space. What I don’t like is the feeling I sometimes get that other things might exist around us, of which we know nothing.

This wasn’t the first time Maureen encountered fellow white people who assumed she shared their racial fears. She recalls with overwhelming fondness her years teaching at Sacramento High, the public charter school whose students were all from working-class backgrounds and mostly African American, with a small percentage of Hmong and Latinx kids. “These were the best students of my career,” she said. “If I gave the students something to read, they read it in three days. I would sometimes plan a lesson [unit] to go on for four or five weeks, and they were done in two weeks and wanted to write the paper because they were excited.” Yet the most frequent question Maureen received from her white friends about the school and its students was “Are you scared?” Her response: “Scared of what? Don’t be scared of Black kids. Be scared for them.

In other words, the subjective perception of a copy of you in a typical parallel universe is a seemingly random sequence of wins and losses, behaving as if generated through a random process with probabilities of 50% for each outcome. This experiment can be made more rigorous if you take notes on a piece of pater, writing "1" every time you win and "0" every time you lose, and place a decimal point in front of it all. For example, if you lose, lose, win, lose, win,win,win, lose,lose and win, you'd write ".0010111001." But this is just what real numbers between zero and one look like when written out in binary, the way computers usually write them on the hard drive! If you imagine repeating the Quantum Cards experiment infinitely many times, your piece of paper would have infinitely many digits written on it, so you can match each parallel universe with a number between zero and one. Now what Borel's theorem proves is that almost all of these numbers have 50% of their decimals equal to 0 and 50% equal to 1, so this means that almost all of the parallel universes have you winning 50% of the time and losing 50% of the time. It's not just that the percentages come out right. The number ".010101010101..." has 50% of its digits equal to 0 but clearly isn't random, since it has a simple pattern. Borel's theorem can be generalized to show that almost all numbers have random-looking digits with no patterns whatsoever. This means that in almost all Level III parallel universes, your sequence of wins and losses will also be totally random, without any pattern, so that all that can be predicted is that you'll win 50% of the time.

Before third grade, when scores and percentages did not matter, I wrote freely and honestly about what made me happy. But then foreign numbers began appearing on my papers, numbers representing other people’s approval or disdain. At first those numbers were inconvenient little shapes that hindered my ability to write without care. But soon I began to rely on those numbers. I became addicted to A’s, craving more when I got snatches of praise. And I started to drift away from what I had been writing as a younger child. Before I realized it, I was writing for those little, crawling black shapes and red marks. Students

Why are we down here?” “To stock up on weapons.” Uncle Mort crossed to the far wall. “We need lots of ’em. Driggs, pick that up, it’s not going to kill you—” Driggs gave him a look. “Okay, it won’t further kill you. Take a couple of these, too.” He handed Lex and Driggs a few thin vials of Amnesia each. “What are these for?” “Weapons. Aren’t you paying attention?” He walked to yet another wall and began to load up on items that were, at long last, recognizable as instruments of death. “Guns?” she asked, surprised for some reason. “Not, like, Amnesia blow darts?” “Oh, which reminds me.” He took something else off the shelf. “What’s that?” “Amnesia blow darts.” Lex shook her head. “But why guns, if we have all of this other cool stuff?” “Because despite our best efforts to use Amnesia as much as we can instead of lethal force, we’ll probably need to kill some people, and guns kill people.” He moved on to the next wall and began rifling through more gadgets. “Or people kill people. I forget how the hippies say it. Now, this one’s for you, Lex. I’m going to need you to guard this with every meager iota of attention span you have left. Okay? I’m trusting you with this. Don’t lose it.” Lex got all her hopes up—even though she’d gotten to know Uncle Mort pretty well by now and should have known better than to get even a small percentage of her hopes up. And sure enough, the item he gave her caused the smile to evaporate right off her face. “Don’t lose it,” he repeated. Her eye twitched. “What is it?” “What does it look like?” “An oversize hole punch.” “Exactly.” “What?” she boomed as he went back to his papers. “You get guns, and Driggs gets the deadly Heisman, and all I get is an office supply?” “Yes. Don’t lose it.” It took every ounce of Lex’s strength to not kick the bubonic football into his face. Noticing this, Driggs swooped in and wrapped her in a calming, solid embrace. “Relax, spaz,” he said. “But he—” “—wouldn’t give you a bazooka. Oh, the unbearable trials and tribulations of the living.” Lex deflated. Nothing put things in perspective like remembering that your boyfriend had been killed not a few hours earlier and was now stuck in some hellish existence halfway between life and death. “Sorry,” she said, giving his arms a squeeze, happy that she could even do that. “That’s okay. Human problems are hard. Hangnails and tricky toothpaste tubes and getting shat on by birds and the like.” “Mondays suck too,” she mumbled into his chest. “Oh, Mondays are the worst

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.

The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that about 97 percent of postconsumer textile waste is recyclable. Yet only 20 percent gets recycled because the consumer simply does not know it can be. When I was a child, I remember watching a wooden mill turn old bed linens into beautiful paper sheets at the Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, but I had forgotten about the class field trip until today. Throughout the world, a small portion of worn-out textiles is currently being converted into rags for the construction, painting, and automobile industries; another percentage is shredded into flocking fibers for insulating, padding, upholstering, or soundproofing purposes. But the recyclers wish they could put their hands on all textile discards, including the extras that we simply throw away or hoard for the what-if. Resale giant Goodwill, along with mobile recycling bins, accept both natural and man-made fibers of any brand for recycling. Those items that have holes, rips, and stains beyond repair can be boxed, labeled “rags,” and donated to participating locations, where they are then dispatched to textile recyclers.