“
He promised all those things men promise when they are far away and can feel the phone lines stretching too tight, the wires and cables rapidly unraveling from their braids, snapping, recoiling, collapsing the poles along the way.
”
”
Salvador Plascencia (The People of Paper)
“
I know that I am lucky to be alive at the same time as you. I know that finding you was a cosmic needle in a haystack, a joke of Internet cables and telephone wires. But I also know that you are more afraid of opening up than losing me.
”
”
Trista Mateer (The Dogs I Have Kissed)
“
Stand here, he thought, and count the lighted windows of a city. You cannot do it. But behind each yellow rectangle that climbs, one over another, to the sky - under each bulb - down to there, see that spark over the river which is not a star? - there are people whom you will never see and who are your masters. At the supper tables, in the drawing rooms, in their beds and in their cellars, in their studies and in their bathrooms. Speeding in the subways under your feet. Crawling up in elevators through vertical cracks around you. Jolting past you in every bus. Your masters, Gail Wynand. There is a net - longer than the cables that coil through the walls of this city, larger than the mesh of pipes that carry water, gas and refuse - there is another hidden net around you; it is strapped to you, and the wires lead to every hand in the city. They jerked the wires and you moved. You were a ruler of men. You held a leash. A leash is only a rope with a noose at both ends.
”
”
Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)
“
We’re creatures of habit when it comes to mobile contracts and the wires piping high-speed data into our homes. It’s a pain to deal with transfers, installations, and customer service interactions, so we shrug and keep paying a premium.
”
”
Ian Lamont (Personal Finance For Beginners In 30 Minutes, Volume 1: How to cut expenses, reduce debt, and better align spending & priorities)
“
It's like we're strands of wire intertwined in a great cable that runs through a slot . . . Most people lead two-dimensional lives. All they can see is the face of the slot, a cross section, so that the wires look like a mass of separate little circles looking bigger or smaller according to how close you are. They don't--they can't see that these 'circles' are just cross sections of wires that run backward and forward infinitely and that there is a great surge through the whole cable and that anybody who is truly into the full bare essence of the thing...
”
”
Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test)
“
That's the thing about war: it's never enough to disable the buildings, to blow holes into their middles; instead, they're hit over and over again, as if to pound them to dust, to disintegrate them, to remove them from the earth, to deny that families ever lived in them. But people did live there. And they needed to return, even though there was nothing left to return to except forbidding piles of broken concrete and cable wires sticking out of the heaps like markers of malevolence.
”
”
Izzeldin Abuelaish (I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity)
“
Four cables, attached to tracks on the buildings, break through the stones, dragging up the net that encases Mitchell. It makes no sense — how instantly bloodied he is — until we see the barbs sticking from the wire that encases him. I know it immediately. It decorated the top of the fence around 12.
”
”
Suzanne Collins (Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3))
“
Every telecomm company is as big a corporate welfare bum as you could ask for. Try to imagine what it would cost at market rates to go around to every house in every town in every country and pay for the right to block traffic and dig up roads and erect poles and string wires and pierce every home with cabling. The regulatory fiat that allows these companies to get their networks up and running is worth hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars.
If phone companies want to operate in the “free market,” then let them: the FCC could give them 60 days to get all their rotten copper out of our dirt, or we’ll buy it from them at the going scrappage rates. Then, let’s hold an auction for the right to be the next big telecomm company, on one condition: in exchange for using the public’s rights-of-way, you have to agree to connect us to the people we want to talk to, and vice-versa, as quickly and efficiently as you can.
”
”
Cory Doctorow (Context: Further Selected Essays on Productivity, Creativity, Parenting, and Politics in the 21st Century)
“
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
What is there to be or do?
What's become of me or you?
Are we kind or are we true?
Sitting two and two, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall I build a tower, boys, knowing it will rend
Crack upon the hour, boys, waiting for the end?
Shall I pluck a flower, boys, shall I save or spend?
All turns sour, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall I send a wire, boys? Where is there to send?
All are under fire, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall I turn a sire, boys? Shall I choose a friend?
The fat is in the pyre, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall I make it clear, boys, for all to apprehend,
Those that will not hear, boys, waiting for the end,
Knowing it is near, boys, trying to pretend,
Sitting in cold fear, boys, waiting for the end?
Shall we send a cable, boys, accurately penned,
Knowing we are able, boys, waiting for the end,
Via the Tower of Babel, boys? Christ will not ascend.
He's hiding in his stable, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall we blow a bubble, boys, glittering to distend,
Hiding from our trouble, boys, waiting for the end?
When you build on rubble, boys, Nature will append
Double and re-double, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall we make a tale, boys, that things are sure to mend,
Playing bluff and hale, boys, waiting for the end?
It will be born stale, boys, stinking to offend,
Dying ere it fail, boys, waiting for the end.
Shall we go all wild, boys, waste and make them lend,
Playing at the child, boys, waiting for the end?
It has all been filed, boys, history has a trend,
Each of us enisled, boys, waiting for the end.
What was said by Marx, boys, what did he perpend?
No good being sparks, boys, waiting for the end.
Treason of the clerks, boys, curtains that descend,
Lights becoming darks, boys, waiting for the end.
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
Not a chance of blend, boys, things have got to tend.
Think of those who vend, boys, think of how we wend,
Waiting for the end, boys, waiting for the end.
- 'Just A Smack at Auden
”
”
William Empson (The Complete Poems)
“
The last wire to disappear will be the power cable, driven by advances in wireless power and power management.
”
”
Daniel Kellmereit (The Silent Intelligence - The Internet of Things)
“
There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,--not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break.
”
”
Helen Hunt Jackson (Ramona (Signet Classics))
“
Always something like that. Always. I heard an old mate tell Captain Colchester once that it had come to this with him, that he was afraid to open his mouth to give any sort of order. She was as much of a terror in harbour as at sea. You could never be certain what would hold her. On the slightest provocation she would start snapping ropes, cables, wire hawsers, like carrots. She was heavy, clumsy, unhandy—but that does not quite explain that power for mischief she had. You know, somehow, when I think of her I can't help remembering what we hear of incurable lunatics breaking loose now and then.
”
”
Joseph Conrad (The Complete Short Stories of Joseph Conrad)
“
One of the first problems to be faced at Niagara was how to get a wire over the gorge and its violent river. Ellet solved that nicely by offering five dollars to the first American boy to fly a kite over to the Canadian side. The prize was won by young Homer Walsh, who would tell the story for the rest of his days. Once the kite string was across, a succession of heavier cords and ropes was pulled over, and in a short time the first length of wire went on its way. After that, when the initial cable had been completed, Ellet decided to demonstrate his faith in it in a fashion people would not forget. He had an iron basket made up big enough to hold him and attached it to the cable with pulleys. Then stepping inside, on a morning in March 1848, he pulled himself over the gorge and back again, all in no more than fifteen minutes’ time, and to the great excitement of crowds gathered along both rims.
”
”
David McCullough (The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge)
“
The ghost was not a ghost at all, or so it claimed - it claimed to be a psychic energy baby, birthed in some ethereal dimension, and pulled into the phone by the powerful magnetism of phone signals. It remembered with perfect clarity how it came to be - remembered coalescing from the membranous surface of the world, streaked with reflected light, humming with surface tension under the pressure of emptiness underneath. The Psychic Energy Baby found form among the emanations of people's minds and the susurrus of their voices, it found flesh in the shapes of their lips and eyes made, the surprise of 'o's and the sibilations of 's's; its skin stretched taut like a soap bubble, forged from the wet sound of lips touching; its thoughts were the musky smells and the nerves twined around the transparent water balloons of the muscles like stems of toadflax, searching restlessly for every available crevice, stretching along cold rough surfaces. Its veins, tiny rivers, pumped heartbeats striking in unison, the dry dallying of billions of ventricular contractions. And it spoke, spoke endlessly, it spokes words that tasted of dark air and formic acid. It could speak long before it took it's final shape.
And when it happened, when all the sounds and smells and words in the world, when all the thoughts had aligned so that it could become - then it found itself pulled into the wires, surrounded by taut copper and green and red and yellow insulation; twined and quartered among the cables, rent open by millions of voices that shouted and whispered and pleaded and threatened, interspersed with the rasping of breaths and tearing laughter. It traveled through the criss-crossing of the wires so fast that it felt itself being pulled into a needle, head spearing into the future while its feet infinitely receded into the past, until it came into a dark quiet pool of the black rotary phone, where it could reassemble itself and take stock.
”
”
Ekaterina Sedia (The House of Discarded Dreams)
“
From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium—light waves, airwaves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, printing presses—information pours in. Behind it, in every imaginable form of storage—on paper, on video and audio tape, on discs, film, and silicon chips—is an ever greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are awash in information. And all the sorcerer has left us is a broom. Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been severed, i.e., information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose.
”
”
Neil Postman (Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology)
“
These axons can shuttle information around so quickly because they’re fatter than normal axons, and because they’re sheathed in a fatty substance called myelin. Myelin acts like rubber insulation on wires and prevents the signal from petering out: in whales, giraffes, and other stretched creatures, a sheathed neuron can send a signal multiple yards with little loss of fidelity. (In contrast, diseases that fray myelin, like multiple sclerosis, destroy communication between different nodes in the brain.) In sum, you can think about the gray matter as a patchwork of chips that analyze different types of information, and about the white matter as cables that transmit information between those chips. (And before we go further, I should point out that “gray” and “white” are misnomers. Gray matter looks pinkish-tan inside a living skull, while white matter, which makes up the bulk of the brain, looks pale pink. The white and gray colors appear only after you soak the brain in preservatives. Preservatives also harden the brain, which is normally tapioca-soft. This explains why the brain you might have dissected in biology class way back when didn’t disintegrate between your fingers.)
”
”
Sam Kean (The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons: The History of the Human Brain as Revealed by True Stories of Trauma, Madness, and Recovery)
“
The human brain is the most complex entity in the universe. It has between fifty and one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons, each branched to form thousands of possible connections with other nerve cells. It has been estimated that laid end to end, the nerve cables of a single human brain would extend into a line several hundred thousand miles long. The total number of connections, or synapses, is in the trillions. The parallel and simultaneous activity of innumerable brain circuits, and networks of circuits, produces millions of firing patterns each and every second of our lives. The brain has well been described as “a supersystcm of systems.”
Even though fully half of the roughly hundred thousand genes in the human organism are dedicated to the central nervous system, the genetic code simply cannot carry enough information to predetermine the infinite number of potential brain circuits. For this reason alone, biological heredity could not by itself account for the densely intertwined psychology and neurophysiology of attention deficit disorder.
Experience in the world determines the fine wiring of the brain. As the neurologist and neuroscientist Antonio Damasio puts it, “Much of each brain’s circuitry, at any given moment in adult life, is individual and unique, truly reflective of that particular organism’s history and circumstances.” This is no less true of children and infants. Not even in the brains of genetically identical twins will the same patterns be found in the shape of nerve cells or the numbers and configuration of their synapses with other neurons.
The microcircuitry of the brain is formatted by influences during the first few years of life, a period when the human brain undergoes astonishingly rapid growth. Five-sixths of the branching of nerve cells in the brain occurs after birth. At times in the first year of life, new synapses are being established at a rate of three billion a second. In large part, each infant’s individual experiences in the early years determine which brain structures will develop and how well, and which nerve centers will be connected with which other nerve centers, and establish the networks controlling behavior.
The intricately programmed interactions between heredity and environment that make for the development of the human brain are determined by a “fantastic, almost surrealistically complex choreography,” in the apt phrase of Dr. J. S. Grotstein of the department of psychiatry at UCLA. Attention deficit disorder results from the miswiring of brain circuits, in susceptible infants, during this crucial period of growth.
”
”
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
“
On Sunday, November 10, Kaiser Wilhelm II was dethroned, and he fled to Holland for his life. Britain’s King George V, who was his cousin, told his diary that Wilhelm was “the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war,” having “utterly ruined his country and himself.” Keeping vigil at the White House, the President and First Lady learned by telephone, at three o’clock that morning, that the Germans had signed an armistice. As Edith later recalled, “We stood mute—unable to grasp the significance of the words.” From Paris, Colonel House, who had bargained for the armistice as Wilson’s envoy, wired the President, “Autocracy is dead. Long live democracy and its immortal leader. In this great hour my heart goes out to you in pride, admiration and love.” At 1:00 p.m., wearing a cutaway and gray trousers, Wilson faced a Joint Session of Congress, where he read out Germany’s surrender terms. He told the members that “this tragical war, whose consuming flames swept from one nation to another until all the world was on fire, is at an end,” and “it was the privilege of our own people to enter it at its most critical juncture.” He added that the war’s object, “upon which all free men had set their hearts,” had been achieved “with a sweeping completeness which even now we do not realize,” and Germany’s “illicit ambitions engulfed in black disaster.” This time, Senator La Follette clapped. Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Lodge complained that Wilson should have held out for unconditional German surrender. Driven down Capitol Hill, Wilson was cheered by joyous crowds on the streets. Eleanor Roosevelt recorded that Washington “went completely mad” as “bells rang, whistles blew, and people went up and down the streets throwing confetti.” Including those who had perished in theaters of conflict from influenza and other diseases, the nation’s nineteen-month intervention in the world war had levied a military death toll of more than 116,000 Americans, out of a total perhaps exceeding 8 million. There were rumors that Wilson planned to sail for France and horse-trade at the peace conference himself. No previous President had left the Americas during his term of office. The Boston Herald called this tradition “unwritten law.” Senator Key Pittman, Democrat from Nevada, told reporters that Wilson should go to Paris “because there is no man who is qualified to represent him.” The Knickerbocker Press of Albany, New York, was disturbed by the “evident desire of the President’s adulators to make this war his personal property.” The Free Press of Burlington, Vermont, said that Wilson’s presence in Paris would “not be seemly,” especially if the talks degenerated into “bitter controversies.” The Chattanooga Times called on Wilson to stay home, “where he could keep his own hand on the pulse of his own people” and “translate their wishes” into action by wireless and cable to his bargainers in Paris.
”
”
Michael R. Beschloss (Presidents of War: The Epic Story, from 1807 to Modern Times)
“
I heard the fear in the first music I ever knew, the music that pumped from boom boxes full of grand boast and bluster. The boys who stood out on Garrison and Liberty up on Park Heights loved this music because it told them, against all evidence and odds, that they were masters of their own lives, their own streets, and their own bodies. I saw it in the girls, in their loud laughter, in their gilded bamboo earrings that announced their names thrice over. And I saw it in their brutal language and hard gaze, how they would cut you with their eyes and destroy you with their words for the sin of playing too much. “Keep my name out your mouth,” they would say. I would watch them after school, how they squared off like boxers, vaselined up, earrings off, Reeboks on, and leaped at each other.
I felt the fear in the visits to my Nana’s home in Philadelphia. You never knew her. I barely knew her, but what I remember is her hard manner, her rough voice. And I knew that my father’s father was dead and that my uncle Oscar was dead and that my uncle David was dead and that each of these instances was unnatural. And I saw it in my own father, who loves you, who counsels you, who slipped me money to care for you. My father was so very afraid. I felt it in the sting of his black leather belt, which he applied with more anxiety than anger, my father who beat me as if someone might steal me away, because that is exactly what was happening all around us. Everyone had lost a child, somehow, to the streets, to jail, to drugs, to guns. It was said that these lost girls were sweet as honey and would not hurt a fly. It was said that these lost boys had just received a GED and had begun to turn their lives around. And now they were gone, and their legacy was a great fear.
Have they told you this story? When your grandmother was sixteen years old a young man knocked on her door. The young man was your Nana Jo’s boyfriend. No one else was home. Ma allowed this young man to sit and wait until your Nana Jo returned. But your great-grandmother got there first. She asked the young man to leave. Then she beat your grandmother terrifically, one last time, so that she might remember how easily she could lose her body. Ma never forgot. I remember her clutching my small hand tightly as we crossed the street. She would tell me that if I ever let go and were killed by an onrushing car, she would beat me back to life. When I was six, Ma and Dad took me to a local park. I slipped from their gaze and found a playground. Your grandparents spent anxious minutes looking for me. When they found me, Dad did what every parent I knew would have done—he reached for his belt. I remember watching him in a kind of daze, awed at the distance between punishment and offense. Later, I would hear it in Dad’s voice—“Either I can beat him, or the police.” Maybe that saved me. Maybe it didn’t. All I know is, the violence rose from the fear like smoke from a fire, and I cannot say whether that violence, even administered in fear and love, sounded the alarm or choked us at the exit. What I know is that fathers who slammed their teenage boys for sass would then release them to streets where their boys employed, and were subject to, the same justice. And I knew mothers who belted their girls, but the belt could not save these girls from drug dealers twice their age. We, the children, employed our darkest humor to cope. We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most. Our parents resorted to the lash the way flagellants in the plague years resorted to the scourge.
”
”
Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
“
continued for five consecutive days. And they covered everything there was to know about the former Ranger and Delta Force operator, who was dubbed “a good guy, but troubled” by unnamed former colleagues. The newspapers and local cable channels built up a picture of a veteran who was having difficulties integrating back into society. They interviewed
”
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J.B. Turner (Hard Wired (Jon Reznick, #3))
“
Electronics: Spend money on upgrading your system instead of buying a new one. Donate computers, printers, or monitors (any brand) to a nonprofit or participating Goodwill location for refurbishing (some charities repair them and give them to schools and nonprofit organizations). For unrepairable cell phones and miscellaneous electronics, locate a nearby e-waste recycling facility or participate in a local e-waste recycling drive, or make a profit by selling them on eBay for parts. Best Buy collects remote controllers, wires, cords, cables, ink and toner cartridges, rechargeable batteries, plastic bags, gift cards, CDs and DVDs (including their cases), depending on store locations.
”
”
Bea Johnson (Zero Waste Home: The Ultimate Guide to Simplifying Your Life by Reducing Your Waste (A Simple Guide to Sustainable Living))
“
At their invitation we crowded into the spacious control cabin of the great airship, where scientific gear occupied every available cubic—perhaps hypercubic—inch. Among the fantastical glass envelopes and knottings of gold wire as unreadable to us as the ebonite control panels scrupulously polished and reflecting the Arctic sky, we were able here and there to recognize more mundane items—here Manganin resistance-boxes and Tesla coils, there Leclanché cells and solenoidal magnets, with electrical cables sheathed in commercial-grade Gutta Percha running everywhere. Inside, the overhead was much higher than expected, and the bulkheads could scarcely be made out in the muted light through three hanging Fresnel lenses, the mantle behind each glowing a different primary color, from sensitive-flames which hissed at different frequencies. Strange sounds, complex harmonies and dissonances, resonant, sibilant, and percussive at once, being monitored from someplace far Exterior to this, issued from a large brass speaking-trumpet, with brass tubing and valvework elaborate as any to be found in an American marching band running back from it and into an extensive control panel on which various metering gauges were ranked, their pointers, with exquisite Breguet-style arrowheads, trembling in their rise and fall along the arcs of italic numerals. The glow of electrical coils seeped beyond the glass cylinders which enclosed them, and anyone’s hands that came near seemed dipped in blue chalk-dust. A Poulsen’s Telegraphone, recording the data being received, moved constantly to and fro along a length of shining steel wire which periodically was removed and replaced. “Ætheric impulses,” Dr. Counterfly was explaining. “For vortex stabilization we need a membrane sensitive enough to respond to the slightest eddies. We use a human caul—a ‘veil,’ as some say.” “Isn’t a child born with a veil believed to have powers of second sight?” Dr. Vormance inquired. “Correct. And a ship with a veil aboard it will never sink—or, in our case, crash.” “Things have been done to obtain a veil,” darkly added a junior officer, Mr. Suckling, “that may not even be talked about.
”
”
Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
“
What in the—? My begonias!” he heard someone say behind him. Nick looked over his shoulder. A small but muscular woman in sweaty workout clothes was stepping out of a big shiny car in the neighbor’s driveway. She was gaping in horror at the chewed-up flowerbed and the smoking lawn mower. Scowling, she turned toward Uncle Newt’s house. And the scowl didn’t go away when she noticed Nick looking back at her. In fact, it got scowlier. Nick smiled weakly, waved, and hurried into the house. He closed the door behind him. “Whoa,” he said when his eyes adjusted to the gloom inside. Cluttering the long hall in front of him were dozens of old computers, a telescope, a metal detector connected to a pair of bulky earphones, an old-fashioned diving suit complete with brass helmet, a stuffed polar bear (the real, dead kind), a chainsaw, something that looked like a flamethrower (but couldn’t be … right?), a box marked KEEP REFRIGERATED, another marked THIS END UP (upside down), and a fully lit Christmas tree decorated with ornaments made from broken beakers and test tubes (it was June). Exposed wires and power cables poked out of the plaster and veered off around every corner, and there were so many diplomas and science prizes and patents hanging (all of them earned by Newton Galileo Holt, a.k.a. Uncle Newt) that barely an inch of wall was left uncovered. Off to the left was a living room lined with enough books to put some libraries to shame, a semitransparent couch made of inflated plastic bags, and a wide-screen TV connected by frayed cords to a small trampoline.
”
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Bob Pflugfelder (Nick and Tesla and the High-Voltage Danger Lab: A Mystery with Gadgets You Can Build Yourself ourself)
“
Before the war, five-stories was the rule, and commercial life was carried on primarily at ground level—in streets and showrooms, at sales counters, on exchange floors. After the war, office buildings went vertical, climbing to unprecedented heights—six stories, seven, eight. “Our business men are building up to the clouds,” one newsman exclaimed. The elevator made this possible. Lift technology had improved since the vertical screw used at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Now the “steam and drum” method was available. Steel wire cables were run over a drum at the top of the shaft, which was then revolved to raise or lower the cab. An alternative model hauled the cage up and down the shaft by looping its wire cable over a pulley, then attaching a wrought-iron bucket almost as weighty as the cage. When filled with water from a tank, the bucket descended by gravity, pulling the cage up. At the bottom, an operator emptied the bucket, shifting the weight balance in favor of the cage, which then descended and pulled the bucket back up.
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Mike Wallace (Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898)
“
committed a small oversight, and yet one that almost destroyed their venture. They had assumed that they would deliver the kerosene in bulk to various localities, and that the eager customers would line up with their own receptacles to be filled. The customers were expected to use old Standard Oil tin cans. But they did not. Throughout the Far East, Standard’s blue oil tins had become a prized mainstay of the local economies, used to construct everything from roofing to birdcages to opium cups, hibachis, tea strainers, and egg beaters. They were not about to give up such a valuable product. The whole scheme was now threatened—not by the machinations of 26 Broadway or by the politics of the Suez Canal, but by the habits and predilections of the peoples of Asia. A local crisis was created in each port, as the kerosene went unsold, and despairing telegrams began to flow into Houndsditch. In the quickness and ingenuity of his response to the crisis, Marcus proved his entrepreneurial genius. He sent out a chartered ship, filled with tinplate, to the Far East, and simply instructed his partners in Asia to begin manufacturing tin receptacles for the kerosene. No matter that no one knew how to do so; no matter that no one had the facilities. Marcus persuaded them they could do it. “How do you stick on the wire handles?” the agent in Singapore wrote to Samuel’s representative in Japan. Instructions were sent. “What color do you suggest?” cabled the agent in Shanghai. Mark gave the answer—“Red!
”
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Daniel Yergin (The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power)
“
Steiger presented another analysis by a professional engineer, who saw the wall carvings at Dendera as an accurate illustration of an electrical device—one which would not be out of place in a modern electrical blueprint file. "In regards to the ancient Egyptian electron tubes, electromagnetic engineer Professor S.R. Harris identified a box-and braided cable in the picture as 'virtually an exact copy of engineering illustration used today for representing a bundle of conducting wires.' The cable runs from the box the full length of the floor and terminates at both the ends and at the bases of two peculiar objects resting on two pillars. Professor Harris is said to have identified these representations as high voltage insulators.
”
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Christopher Dunn (The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt)
“
Receptor neurons bundle together into cables called axons, feeding up through holes in a perforated bone just behind the eyeballs called the cribriform plate. (In a serious head injury, the skull can shift, and the lateral movement of the cribriform plate shears those axons like a knife through spaghetti. Snip! No more sense of smell.) Once through the plate, the axons connect to two projections from the brain called the olfactory bulbs. There, in blobs of neurons called glomeruli, is where the bulk of the computation gets done. Mice, known for their acute sense of smell, have just about 1,800 glomeruli—but 1,000 genes that code for olfactory receptors. That’s a lot of perceivable smells. Humans have a seemingly pathetic 370 genes for receptors, but we have 5,500 glomeruli per bulb. That’s a lot of processing power. It must be doing something. The part of the brain that integrates all this information, the olfactory cortex, also gets inputs from the limbic region and other areas that deal with emotion—the amygdala and hypothalamus, among others. Processing of smells in the brain, then, is tied to not only the chemical perception of a molecule but also how we feel about it, and how we feel in general. Every other sense in the body is, in a way, indirect. In vision, light impinges on the retina, a sheet of cells at the back of the eye that makes pigments and connects to the optic nerve. In hearing, sound (which is really just waves of changing air pressure) pushes the eardrum in and out at particular frequencies, which translate via a series of tiny bones to nerves. Touch and taste are the same. Some cell, built to do the hard work of reception, gets between the stimulus and the nerves that lead to the brain for processing. Some physical effect—air pressure, reflected photons, whatever—gets between the stimulus and the perception. It’s all a first-order derivative. Not smell, though. When we smell something, we are smelling tiny pieces of that thing that have broken off, wafted through the air, and then touched actual neurons wired to actual pieces of brain. Olfaction is direct, with nothing between the thing we’re smelling, the smell it has, and how we perceive that smell. It is our most intimate sense.
”
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Adam Rogers (Proof: The Science of Booze)
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them stared at the body now. A face without skin looked vaguely industrial, Darger thought. Red sinew wired the cheekbones to the jaw like the suspension cables of a bridge. Angular bone jutted here and there like the metal struts along a factory ceiling.
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L.T. Vargus (Dark Passage (Violet Darger #7))
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My favoured method is: 1. Create a cage with chicken wire or netting and a single wooden structure as the base (a pallet works just fine). 2. Cover the pallet with wire mesh or similar to avoid materials falling through. 3. Make an upright hoop of the mesh that will sit on the pallet and secure the ends with cable ties. 4. Fill the cage up with leaves. Make sure they are moist. If they are really dry, water them and check every few months, repeating the process if you find any dry spots. Remember that leaf mould takes a bit longer to decompose than most other organic substances as it’s primarily decomposed by fungal activity. To speed up the process you could add something nitrogen-rich like grass clippings or coffee grounds and it will help to get leaf mould quicker.
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Alessandro Vitale (Rebel Gardening: A Beginner's Handbook to Creating an Organic Urban Garden)
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If you haven’t had the pleasure of physically comparing different Wall Street trading floors, you needn’t bother. They are all basically alike. The floor itself is a checkerboard of stained carpet squares covering a maze of twisted wires and electronic equipment. These removable squares serve as the lid of a massive trash can, and hidden below are dozens of half-empty Chinese food containers and mice. (Mice love trading floors, and banking employees are constantly discussing creative ways to trap and kill them.) If you stop by virtually any trading floor on Wall Street, this is what you will inevitably encounter: Hundreds of telephones are ringing. Television monitors are blasting news and flashing scattered bond quotes. One of the checkerboard squares is upended, and several maintenance men are taking a break to yell at each other in front of a pile of circuits and cables. Dozens of traders and salespeople are standing at three-foot intervals face-to-face at several long rectangular desks, which are stacked with a rainbow of colorful computers, flashing monitors, blue Reuters and green Telerate screens, beige Bloomberg data systems, and customized black broker quote boxes.
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Frank Partnoy (FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street)
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In a small, stuffy, perpetually dark, hot-plastic-scented wiring closet, in a cubicled office suite leased by Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Incorporated, sandwiched between an escrow company and a discount travel agent in the most banal imaginable disco-era office building in Los Altos, California, a modem wakes up and spews noise down a wire. The noise eventually travels under the Pacific as a pattern of scintillations in a filament of glass so transparent that if the ocean itself were made out of the same stuff, you’d be able to see Hawaii from California. Eventually the information reaches Randy’s computer, which spews noise back. The modem in Los Altos is one of half a dozen that are all connected to the back of the same computer, an entirely typical looking tower PC of a generic brand, which has been running, night and day, for about eight months now. They turned its monitor off about seven months ago because it was just wasting electricity. Then John Cantrell (who is on the board of Novus Ordo Seclorum Systems Inc., and made arrangements to put it in the company’s closet) borrowed the monitor because one of the coders who was working on the latest upgrade of Ordo needed a second screen. Later, Randy disconnected the keyboard and mouse because, without a monitor, only bad information could be fed into the system. Now it is just a faintly hissing off-white obelisk with no human interface other than a cyclopean green LED staring out over a dark landscape of empty pizza boxes. But there is a thick coaxial cable connecting it to the Internet. Randy’s computer talks to it for a few moments, negotiating the terms of a Point-to-Point Protocol, or PPP connection, and then Randy’s little laptop is part of the Internet, too; he can send data to Los Altos, and the lonely computer there, which is named Tombstone, will route it in the general direction of any of several tens of millions of other Internet machines.
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Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon)
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State-run broadcast TV had been around for decades, but poor reception and a dearth of programming meant there simply wasn’t much reason to watch. But lately, thanks to a steep fall in the price of equipment and distribution, great swaths of India have been wired for cable and satellite TV. Between 2001 and 2006, some 150 million Indians received cable for the first time, their villages suddenly crackling with the latest game shows and soap operas, newscasts and police procedurals, beamed from the big cities of India and abroad. TV gave many Indian villagers their first good look at the outside world.
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Steven D. Levitt (SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes And Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance)
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Indeed, leading Airbus engineer Bernard Ziegler – an evangelist for fly-by-wire – was reputed to have exclaimed on one occasion, ‘My cleaning lady could fly it!’ (He could be forgiven for being more cautious than others, too; as a French air force pilot he had flown his jet fighter under a cable car in the ski resort of Chamonix, severing the cable and killing the occupants of three cars which crashed 500ft to ground.) The
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Macarthur Job (Air Disaster 3: Terror In The Sky)
“
As it turns out, skiing trips are pretty bloody annoying anyway. It’s mostly about queuing, skiing. You queue to get your breakfast in the stupid wooden hotel, you queue to get on the minibus or find a taxi to take you to the stupid skiing place at the bottom of the stupid hill. You queue to buy a pass, which you lose later in the day and then you get down to the serious queuing, at the point where you get on the lift at the bottom of the mountain to take you to the top. This, technically, isn’t queuing, it’s something more akin to fighting, so I preferred this bit. You hang around in a big crowd on a sort of train platform. Except there are no tracks, just a big wire overhead. Eventually, the cable car device lumbers into view and disgorges a load of really annoying people with stupid smiles under their stupid hats on to the other side of the platform. The car never stops; it just swings around the bottom of the platform on a huge, horizontal wheel until it comes up the side on which you and several million Germans are loitering, ready to get on board. Then there is a really massive fight, lots of shouting, some vicious pushing and, the next thing you know, you’re on the cable car, face pressed to the frosted glass, staring through it at crying kids back on the platform, disappointed mothers and bereft lovers waving mournfully as the other half of their life is transported away on the carriage that someone, usually you, prevented them from getting on by elbowing them in the face and jabbing a ski pole into their groin. It’s really rather good fun. But only that part is fun; the rest of it is terrible.
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Richard Hammond (As You Do: Adventures With Evel, Oliver, and The Vice-President Of Botswana)
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To live in Manhattan is to be persistently amazed at the worlds squirreled inside one another, the chaotic intricacy with which realms interweave, like those lines of television cable and fresh water and steam heat and outgoing sewage and telephone wire and whatever else which cohabit in the same intestinal holes that pavement demolishing workmen periodically wrench open into daylight and to our passing, disturbed glances.
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Jonathan Lethem
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We stood in the alley where we shot basketballs through hollowed crates and cracked jokes on the boy whose mother wore him out with a beating in front of his entire fifth-grade class. We sat on the number five bus, headed downtown, laughing at some girl whose mother was known to reach for anything—cable wires, extension cords, pots, pans. We were laughing, but I know that we were afraid of those who loved us most.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
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the old mantra—“Either I can beat him or the police.” I understood it all—the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
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Another scenario is possible, and that is the e-book will succeed and that books will be downloaded from the Internet. But at the same time, it may be the case that the digital network and the terminals that tap into it will become saturated as limits to growth of computer memory and speed of operation are reached at the same time that electronic traffic becomes gridlocked with e-mail and World Wide Web use. If that were to happen, there would likely be pressure to keep older books in print form, and perhaps even continue to issue newer books that way, rather than clutter the Internet with more and more information. Under such a scenario, older books might not be allowed to circulate because so few copies of each title will have survived the great CD digital dispersal, leaving printed editions that will be as rare as manuscript codices are today.
In spite of potential problems, the electronic book, which promises to be all books to all people, is seen by some visionaries as central to any scenario of the future. But what if some electromagnetic catastrophe or a mad computer hacker were to destroy the total electronic memory of central libraries? Curious old printed editions of dead books would have to be disinterred from book cemeteries and re-scanned. But in scanning rare works into electronic form, surviving books might have to be used in a library's stacks, the entrance to which might have to be as closely guarded as that to Fort Knox. The continuing evolution of the bookshelf would have to involve the wiring of bookstacks for computer terminal use. Since volumes might be electronically chained to their section in the stacks, it is also likely that libraries would have to install desks on the front of all cases so that portable computers and portable scanners could be used to transcribe books within a telephone wire's or computer cable's reach of where they were permanently kept. The aisles in a bookstack would most likely have to be altered also to provide seating before the desks, and in time at least some of the infrastructure associated with the information superhighway might begin again to resemble that of a medieval library located in the tower of a monastery at the top of a narrow mountain road.
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Petroski, Henry
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Now at night, I held you and a great fear, wide as all our American generations, took me. Now I personally understood my father and the old mantra - 'Either I can beat him or the police.' I understood it all - the cable wires, the extension cords, the ritual switch. Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered. I think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. This is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing, who are made to fear not just the criminals among them but the police who lord over them with all the moral authority of a protection racket. It was only after you that I understood this love, that I understood the grip of my mother's hand. She knew that the galaxy itself could kill me, that all of me could be shattered and all of her legacy spilled upon the curb like bum wine. And no one wold be brought to account for this destruction, because my death would not be the fault of any human but the fault of some unfortunate but immutable fact of 'race,' imposed upon an innocent country by the inscrutable judgment of invisible gods.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me)
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In his book The Shadow Presidents, author Michael Medved relates the extreme disappointment of H.R. Haldeman over his failure to implement his plan to link up all the homes in America by coaxial cable. In Haldeman’s words, “There would be two-way communication. Through computer, you could use your television set to order up whatever you wanted. The morning paper, entertainment services, shopping services, coverage of sporting events and public events...Just as Eisenhower linked up the nation's cities by highways so that you could get there, the Nixon legacy would have linked them by cable communication so you wouldn't have to go there." One can almost see the dreamy eyes of Nixon and Haldeman as they sat around discussing a plan that would eliminate the need for newspapers, seemingly oblivious to its Big Brother aspects. Fortunately the Watergate scandal intervened, and Nixon was forced to resign before "the Wired Nation" could be hooked up.
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David Wallechinsky (The People's Almanac Presents The Book of Lists #2)
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I knew there were wire cutters on board Gemini 9, so I made a suggestion that one of the astronauts do a space walk outside the spacecraft and use the wire cutters to cut the cables to release the Angry Alligator and get it to unlock. I knew that time was of the essence and that the system worked on hydraulics, so if the cable could be released, it might be a quick solution. Unfortunately, perhaps because of my semi-inebriated condition, my suggestion didn’t make much sense to my superiors.
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Buzz Aldrin (No Dream Is Too High: Life Lessons From a Man Who Walked on the Moon)
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The individual is a smiling, lonely monad who walks in the urban space in tender continuous interaction with the photos, the tweets, the games that emanate from a personal screen. The social relation is transformed into a cabled interconnection whose rules and procedures are hidden in the coded linguistincs of the web. Perfectly insulated and perfectly wired, the organism becomes a smooth interface of the flow. In order to access the interaction, the individual must adapt to the format, and their enunciations must be compatible with the code.
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Anonymous
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The 7 Timeless Virtues of Enlightened Living Virtue Symbol 1 Master Your Mind The Magnificent Garden 2 Follow Your Purpose The Towering Lighthouse 3 Practice Kaizen The Sumo Wrestler 4 Live with Discipline The Pink Wire Cable 5 Respect Your Time The Gold Stopwatch 6 Selflessly Serve Others The Fragrant Roses 7 Embrace the Present The Path of Diamonds
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Robin S. Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny)
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The telegraph not only linked the world in real time but became a bridge to subsequent international communications breakthroughs—the radio in the 1920s, the telephone in the 1950s, the Internet in the 1990s. Even the magic of the wireless Internet rests on a solid foundation of wire cables, just like the magic of the telegraph.
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Jeffrey E. Garten (From Silk to Silicon: The Story of Globalization Through Ten Extraordinary Lives)
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At the back of the house, dogs imprisoned in small yards ran in circles. Telephone cables, electric wires, and clothes lines crossed and recrossed, giving the houses, light poles, and leafless trees the quality of a contour drawing, one continuous line.
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Paula Fox (Desperate Characters)
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The garden keeps me focused on inspiring thoughts, the lighthouse reminds me that the purpose of life is a life of purpose, the sumo wrestler keeps me centered on continuous self-discovery, while the pink wire cable links me to the wonders of willpower.
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Robin S. Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Fable About Fulfilling Your Dreams & Reaching Your Destiny)
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The prince with the red hair also lifted a beckoning finger that gestured to a nearby chair over which lay a network of fine wires that led to a cable lying on the floor. Lori bent a suspicious look at the wires that seemed to promise trickery, but the maiden pushed him back gently and he sank into the chair.
Another slave girl approached and laced upon his head an odd-shaped metal cap, smiling as she did so. He heard a light whisper in his own familiar tongue as she bent over him.
“Be not afraid. The Red One is kindly. You have nothing to fear from these wires.”
Lori stiffened, still suspicious, and sat motionless, awaiting the event. He became aware of a silvery mist that began to form between himself and the throned prince, a mist that as it grew thicker shaped strangely into pictures and words and he realized with a start that the pictures came from his own mind as did the thoughts there framed into words.
At this betraying mist the Red One looked long, reading his captive’s inmost self. Then words issued absently from his lips, as if he spoke only to himself.
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Richard S. Shaver (The Shaver Mystery, Book One)
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This was America's new cable-wired, online nationalism, honey-combed lives intersecting during collective agony, the knee-pad titillation of Oval Office sex, the rubbernecking of celebrity violence. Until the Women's World Cup, the two biggest sports-related stories of the 1990s were the murder trial of O.J. Simpson and the knee-whacking shatter of figure skating's porcelain myth. Fans cheer for professional city teams and alma maters, but there is no grand, cumulative rooting in the United States except for the disposable novelty of the Olympics. With the rare exception of the Super Bowl is background noise, commercials interrupted by a flabby game, the Coca-Cola bears more engaging than the Chicago Bears.
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Jere Longman (The Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women's Soccer Team and How It Changed the World)
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You are sitting in the middle of a magnificent, lush, green garden. This garden is filled with the most spectacular flowers you have ever seen. The environment is supremely tranquil and silent. Savor the sensual delights of this garden and feel as if you have all the time in the world to enjoy this natural oasis. As you look around, you see that in the center of this magical garden stands a towering, red lighthouse, six stories high. Suddenly, the silence of the garden is disturbed by a loud creaking as the door at the base of the lighthouse opens. Out stumbles a nine-foot-tall, nine-hundred-pound Japanese sumo wrestler who casually wanders into the center of the garden. “It gets better,” chuckled Julian. “The Japanese sumo wrestler is almost totally naked. He has a pink wire cable covering his private parts.” As this sumo wrestler starts to move around the garden, he finds a shiny gold stopwatch which someone had left behind many years earlier. He slips it on and falls to the ground with an enormous thud. The sumo wrestler is rendered unconscious and lies there, silent and still. Just when you think he has taken his last breath, the wrestler awakens, perhaps stirred by the fragrance of some fresh yellow roses blooming nearby. Energized, the wrestler jumps swiftly to his feet and intuitively looks to his left. He is startled by what he sees. Through the bushes at the very edge of the garden he observes a long winding path covered by millions of sparkling diamonds. Something seems to instruct the wrestler to take the path, and to his credit, he does. This path leads him down the road of everlasting joy and eternal bliss.
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Robin S. Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Remarkable Story About Living Your Dreams)
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Standing out from the (New York City) map's delicate tracery of gridirons representing streets are heavy lines, lines girdling the city or slashing across its expanses. These lines denote the major roads on which automobiles and trucks move, roads whose very location, moreover, does as much as any single factor to determine where and how a city's people live and work. With a single exception, the East River Drive, Robert Moses built every one of those roads.
(...)
Only one borough of New York City—the Bronx—is on the mainland of the United States, and bridges link the island boroughs that form metropolis. Since 1931, seven such bridges were built, immense structures, some of them anchored by towers as tall as seventy-story buildings, supported by cables made up of enough wire to drop a noose around the earth. (...) Robert Moses built every one of those bridges.
(He also built) Lincoln Center, the world's most famous, costly and imposing cultural complex. Alongside another stands the New York Coliseum, the glowering exhibition tower whose name reveals Moses' preoccupation with achieving an immortality like that conferred on the Caesars of Rome.
The eastern edge of Manhattan Island, heart of metropolis, was completely altered between 1945 and 1958. (...) Robert Moses was never a member of the Housing Authority and his relationship with it was only hinted at in the press. But between 1945 and 1958 no site for public housing was selected and no brick of a public housing project laid without his approval.
And still further north along the East River stand the buildings of the United Nations headquarters. Moses cleared aside the obstacles to bringing to New York the closest thing to a world capitol the planet possesses, and he supervised its construction.
When Robert Moses began building playgrounds in New York City, there were 119. When he stopped, there were 777. Under his direction, an army of men that at times during the Depression included 84,000 laborers.
(...)
For the seven years between 1946 and 1953, no public improvement of any type—not school or sewer, library or pier, hospital or catch basin—was built by any city agency, even those which Robert Moses did not directly control, unless Moses approved its design and location. To clear the land for these improvements, he evicted the city's people, not thousands of them or tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands, from their homes and tore the homes down. Neighborhoods were obliterated by his edict to make room for new neighborhoods reared at his command.
“Out from the heart of New York, reaching beyond the limits of the city into its vast suburbs and thereby shaping them as well as the city, stretch long ribbons of concrete, closed, unlike the expressways, to trucks and all commercial traffic, and, unlike the expressways, bordered by lawns and trees. These are the parkways. There are 416 miles of them. Robert Moses built every mile.
(He also built the St. Lawrence Dam,) one of the most colossal single works of man, a structure of steel and concrete as tall as a ten-story apartment house, an apartment house as long as eleven football fields, a structure vaster by far than any of the pyramids, or, in terms of bulk, of any six pyramids together. And at Niagara, Robert Moses built a series of dams, parks and parkways that make the St. Lawrence development look small.
His power was measured in decades. On April 18, 1924, ten years after he had entered government, it was formally handed to him. For forty-four years thereafter (until 1968), he held power, a power so substantial that in the field s in which he chose to exercise it, it was not challenged seriously by any (of 6) Governors of New York State or by any Mayor of New York City.
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Robert Caro
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Grassroots leaders must weave a hundred voices and wills into a single, strong thread to wind with others into a cable that can, with more cables, hold up a bridge in partnership with bigger forces. Reverend Johnny Ray Youngblood and Yolanda Garcia, for example, weren’t afraid to hold power. They understood that for all the danger it presents, sometimes the righteous must wrap their hands around the live wire in order to achieve the greater good. In short, people have to step up and find the courage to lead, but no one can lead all the time. They must also let themselves be led by others.
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Thomas Dyja (New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation (Must-Read American History))
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The message left Kiel at a speed of 300,000 kilometres per second. The sequence of words keyed into Erwin Suess’s laptop at the Geomar Centre entered the net in digital form. Converted by laser diodes into optical pulses, the information raced along with a wavelength of 1.5 thousandths of a millimetre, shooting down a transparent fibreoptic cable with millions of phone conversations and packets of data. The fibres bundled the stream of light until it was no thicker than two hairs, while total internal reflection stopped it escaping. Whizzing towards the coast, the waves surged along the overland cable, speeding through amplifiers every fifty kilometres until the fibres vanished into the sea, protected by copper casing and thick rubber tubing, and strengthened by powerful wires. The underwater cable was as thick as a muscular forearm. It stretched out across the shelf, buried in the seabed to protect it from anchors and fishing-boats. TAT 14, as it was officially known, was a transatlantic cable linking Europe to the States. Its capacity was higher than that of almost any other cable in the world. There were dozens of such cables in the North Atlantic alone. Hundreds of thousands of kilometres of optical fibre extended across the planet, making up the backbone of the information age. Three-quarters of their capacity was devoted to the World Wide Web. Project Oxygen linked 175 countries in a kind of global super Internet. Another system bundled eight optical fibres to give a transmission capacity of 3.2 terabits per second, the equivalent of 48 million simultaneous phone conversations. The delicate glass fibres on the ocean bed had long since supplanted satellite technology.
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Frank Schätzing (The Swarm: A Novel)
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Solar power is the king of modularity. It is also the lowest-risk project type of any I’ve tested in terms of cost and schedule. That’s no coincidence. Wind power? Also extremely modular. Modern windmills consist of four basic factory-built elements assembled on-site: a base, a tower, the “head” (nacelle) that houses the generator, and the blades that spin. Snap them together, and you have one windmill. Repeat this process again and again, and you have a wind farm. Fossil thermal power? Look inside a coal-burning power plant, say, and you’ll find that they’re pretty simple, consisting of a few basic factory-built elements assembled to make a big pot of water boil and run a turbine. They’re modular, much as a modern truck is modular. The same goes for oil- and gas-fired plants. Electricity transmission? Parts made in a factory are assembled into a tower, and factory-made wires are strung along them. Repeat. Or manufactured cables are dug into the ground, section by section. Repeat again.
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Bent Flyvbjerg (How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors That Determine the Fate of Every Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration and Everything In Between)
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American writer and biologist Frederick Kenyon (1867-1941) was the first to explore the inner workings of the bee brain. His 1896 study, in which he managed to dye and characterize numerous types of nerve cells of the bee brain, was, in the words of the world's foremost insect neuroanatomist, Nick Strausfeld, 'a supernova.' Not only did Kenyon draw the branching patterns of various neuron types in painstaking detail, but he also highlighted, for the first time in any organism, that these fell into clearly identifiable classes, which tended to be found only in certain areas of the brain.
One such type he found in the mushroom bodies is the Kenyon cells, named in his honor. Their cell bodies -- the part of the neuron that contains the chromosomes and the DNA -- decoding machinery -- are in a peripheral area enclosed by the calyx of each mushroom body (the mushroom's 'head'), with a few additional ones on the sides of or underneath the calyces. A finely arbored dendritic tree (the branched structure that is a nerve cell's signal 'receiver') extends into the mushroom body calyx, and a single axon (the neuron's 'information-sending output cable') extends from each cell into the mushroom body pedunculus (the mushroom's 'stalk').
Extrapolating from just a few of these characteristically shaped neurons that he could see, Kenyon suggested (correctly) that there must be tens of thousands of such similarly shaped cells, with parallel outputs into each mushroom body pedunculus. (In fact, there are about 170,000 Kenyon cells in each mushroom body.) He found neurons that connect the antennal lobes (the primary relays processing olfactory sensory input) with the mushroom body input region (the calyces, where the Kenyon cells have the fine dendritic trees) -- and even suggested, again correctly, that the mushroom bodies were centers of multisensory integration.
Kenyon's 1896 brain wiring diagram [is a marvel]. It contains several classes of recognizable neuron types, with some suggestions for how they might be connected. Many neurons have extensions as widely branched as fullgrown trees -- only, of course, much smaller. Consider that the drawing only shows around 20 of a honey bee brain's ~850,000 neurons. We now know that each neuron, through its many fine branches, can make up to 10,000 connection points (synapses) with other neurons. There may be a billion synapses in a honey bee's brain -- and, since the efficiency of synapses can be modified by experience, near-infinite possibility to alter the information flow through the brain by learning and memory. It is a mystery to me how, after the publication of such work as Kenyon's, anyone could have suggested that the insect brain is simple, or that the study of brain size could in any way be informative about the complexities of information processing inside a brain.
Kenyon apparently suffered some of the anxieties all too familiar to many early-career researchers today. Despite his scientific accomplishments, he had trouble finding permanent employment, and moved between institutions several times, facing continuous financial hardship. Eventually, he appears to have snapped, and in 1899 Kenyon was arrested for 'erratic and threatening behavior' toward colleagues, who subsequently accused him of insanity. Later that year, he was permanently confined to a lunatic asylum, apparently without any opportunity ever to rehabilitate himself, and he died there more than four decades later -- as Nick Strausfeld writes, 'unloved, forgotten, and alone.'
It was not to be the last tragedy in the quest to understand the bee brain.
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Lars Chittka (The Mind of a Bee)
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She enjoyed this benign memory; there were other strands of reflection reaching back over the years that were akin to electric cables, able to shock if touched. Those hot wires of remembrance were all around her.
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Jacqueline Winspear (The White Lady)
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April 21, 1897, by one of the most prominent citizens in Kansas, Alexander Hamilton. In an affidavit quoted in several recent UFO books and journals, Hamilton states that he was awakened by a noise among the cattle and went out with two other men. He then saw an airship descend gently toward the ground and hover within fifty yards of it. It consisted of a great cigar-shaped portion, possibly three hundred feet long, with a carriage underneath. The carriage was made of glass or some other transparent substance alternating with a narrow strip of some material. It was brilliantly lighted within and everything was plainly visible—it was occupied by six of the strangest beings I ever saw. They were jabbering together, but we could not understand a word they said. Upon seeing the witnesses, the pilots of the strange ship turned on some unknown power, and the ship rose about three hundred feet above them: It seemed to pause and hover directly over a two-year-old heifer, which was bawling and jumping, apparently fast in the fence. Going to her, we found a cable about a half-inch in thickness made of some red material, fastened in a slip knot around her neck, one end passing up to the vessel, and the heifer tangled in the wire fence. We tried to get it off but could not, so we cut the wire loose and stood in amazement to see the ship, heifer and all, rise slowly, disappearing in the northwest. Hamilton was so frightened he could not sleep that night: Rising early Tuesday, I started out by horse, hoping to find some trace of my cow. This I failed to do, but coming back in the evening found that Link Thomas, about three or four miles west of Leroy, had found the hide, legs and head in his field that day. He, thinking someone had butchered a stolen beast, had brought the hide to town for identification, but was greatly mystified in not being able to find any tracks in the soft ground. After identifying the hide by my brand, I went home. But every time I would drop to sleep I would see the cursed thing, with its big lights and hideous people. I don’t know whether they are devils or angels, or what; but we all saw them, and my whole family saw the ship, and I don’t want any more to do with them.
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Jacques F. Vallée (Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers)
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Like Robert frost, my heart ached to be in the pastoral countryside. On the Interstate, you really never leave the city. The two asphalt slabs are always surrounded by a continuous, homogeneous channel of pavement, cables and wires, and urban sprawl.
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Dan Grajek (The Last Hobo: A Clueless Detroit Kid Hitchhikes Across America the Summer the Seventies Ran Out of Gas)
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President Kennedy was not so sure. He was appalled that Diem and Nhu had been killed. Three days later, he dictated his own rueful account of the coup and his concerns for the future. Monday, November 4, 1963. Over the weekend the coup in Saigon took place. It culminated three months of conversation which divided the government here and in Saigon….I feel that we [at the White House] must bear a good deal of responsibility for it, beginning with our cable of…August in which we suggested the coup. In my judgment that wire was badly drafted. It should never have been sent on a Saturday. I should not have given consent to it without a roundtable conference at which McNamara and Taylor could have presented their views. While we did redress that in later wires, that first wire encouraged Lodge along a course to which he was in any case inclined. I was shocked by the deaths of Diem and Nhu. I’d met Diem…many years ago. He was an extraordinary character. While he became increasingly difficult in the last months, nevertheless over a ten-year period, he’d held his country together, maintained its independence under very adverse conditions. The way he was killed made it particularly abhorrent. The question now is whether the generals can stay together and build a stable government or whether…public opinion in Saigon—the intellectuals, students, etc.—will turn on this government as repressive and undemocratic in the not too distant future.
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Geoffrey C. Ward (The Vietnam War: An Intimate History)
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The garden keeps me focused on inspiring thoughts, the lighthouse reminds me that the purpose of life is a life of purpose, the sumo wrestler keeps me centered on continuous self-discovery, while the pink wire cable links me to the wonders of willpower. A day doesn’t pass without me thinking about the fable and considering the principles Yogi Raman taught me.” “And exactly what does the shiny gold stopwatch represent?’ “It is a symbol of our most important commodity — time.
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Robin S. Sharma (The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Remarkable Story About Living Your Dreams)
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Hammer Airflow truly wireless Bluetooth earbuds comes with the latest Bluetooth v5.0 technology. Through this you can easily pair any Bluetooth enabled device within 10 Meter of radius. Get a long battery backup with a magnetic charging case(400mah).
This truly wirelessBluetooth earphone is the best wireless Bluetooth for music. You can enjoy music with deep bass and answering the call by built in Microphone feature.
Hammer Airflow Truly Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds (TWS)
Hammer Airflow Truly Wireless Bluetooth Earbuds Features
Usage: Hammer Airflow truly wireless Bluetooth earphones are designed for calling, music, gaming, sports and active lifestyle.
Battery: Hammer Airflow wireless Bluetooth battery backup is up to 4 hours with music and calling on a single full charge. This wireless Bluetooth earphone is charge quickly within only 1.5
best truly wireless earbuds in India
hours and 100 hours of standby time.
Bluetooth 5.0: Airflow wireless Bluetooth earphone having latest technology Bluetooth v5.0. Which is maximizes the stability, performance and connectivity of Bluetooth earbuds which effectively reduces the power consumption.
Stylish charging case: Hammer Airflow wireless Bluetooth earbuds comes with a stylish magnetic charging case (400mah) which makes the earbuds safe & dustproof.
Monopod capability: Hammer Airflow wireless earphone buds can be used as two independent monopods.
Comfort fit: Super-secure Airflow buds come with 2 ear-tips which provide perfect fit and comfort for all-day wearing with no distractions
Product description
TWS EARBUDS WITH ULTRA LONG BATTERY LIFE: Earbuds with charging case of 400 mah can charge your truly wireless earbuds about 7 to 8 times. Once the Bluetooth earbuds are in the charging case, they will be charged automatically and only takes about 1 hour to fully charge. You get about 4 hours of music playback time in a single charge of earbuds.
TRULY WIRELESS EARBUDS WITH MIC: Truly wireless Bluetooth earbuds are best for calling. You will never have to worry about the wire linking, as Hammer Bluetooth earbuds are cable free and the Bluetooth connection has a strong signal upto 10 meters.
BLUETOOTH EARBUDS WIRELESS PAIRING TECHNOLOGY: Pressing the right earbud thrice will make it the master earbud. Turn on Bluetooth on your phone, scan available Bluetooth devices, select Hammer Airflow the main earbud voice prompts your device is connected. The earbuds are connected successfully, now you can use it for music or calls.
true wireless earbuds for sports
INTEGRATED CONTROL BUTTON: With multi-function button you can play / pause music, next/ previous song, increase/ decrease volume, answer / reject calls and activate Siri / Google voice assistant.
Additional Features:
Bluetooth Headphones, Siri Google Assistant, Wireless Earphones, Long Lasting Battery, 3-4 Hours Playtime, Wireless Earbuds Headset Mic Headphones, True Wireless Design Bluetooth 5.0, Stylish Earphone, Deep Bass, Mono Calling (Single Earbud), Working Distance 10M, Standby time 60 Hours
Compatible Devices: Compatible with iOS/Android
Brand: Hammer
Model number: AIRFLOW
Battery Cell Composition: Lithium Polymer
Item Weight: 40.8 g
Warranty Details:
Hammer Airflow comes with 6 months Replacement warranty only in case of manufacturing defects. Product Registration is mandatory at Warranty page within 10 days of your purchase to claim the warranty. Customer Care:
Email: info@hammeronline.in
MOB: 9991 108 081
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Hammer
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What does True Wireless Earbuds Mean
Where are my earphones? Ahh!! There they are….and they are tangled (with irksome scream inside your head). There is nothing more frustrating than going on a search operation for your headphones and finally finding them entangled. Well thanks to the advance technology these days one of your daily struggles is gone with the arrival of wireless earphones in the market. No wire means no entanglement. ‘Kill the problem before it kills you’, you know the saying. Right!
So what actually truly wireless earbuds are? Why should you replace your old headphones and invest in wireless ones?
Without any further delay let’s dig deep into it.
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WHAT ARE TRUE WIRELESS EARBUDS?
A lot of people misunderstand true wireless earbuds and wireless earphones as the same thing. When it’s not. A true wireless earbuds which solely connects through Bluetooth and not through any wire or cord or through any other source.
While wireless earphones are the ones which are connected through Bluetooth to audio source but the connection between the two ear plugs is established through a cable between them.
Why true wireless earbuds?
Usability: Who doesn’t like freedom! With no wire restrictions, it’s easier to workout without sacrificing your music motivation. From those super stretch yoga asanas to marathon running, from weight training to cycling - you actually can do all those without worrying about your phone safety or the dilemma of where to put them. With no wire and smooth distance connection interface, you have the full freedom of your body movement. They also comes with a charging case so you don’t have to worry about it’s battery.
Good audio quality and background noise cancellation: With features like active noise cancellation, which declutter the unwanted background voice giving you the ultimate audio quality. These earbuds has just leveled up the experience of music and prevents you from getting distracted.
Comfort and design: These small ear buddies are friendly which snuggles into your ear canal and don’t put too much pressure on your delicate ears as they are light weight. They are style statement maker and are comfortable to use even when you are on move, they stick to your ear and don’t fall off easily. Apart from all that you can easily answer your call on go, pause your music or whatever you are listening, switch to next by just touching your earplugs.
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Convenience: You don’t necessarily have to have your phone on you like the wired ones. The farthest distance you could go was the length of the cable. But with wireless ones this is not the case, they could transmit sound waves from 8 meter upto 30 meters varying from model to model. Which allows you multi-task and make your household chores interesting. You can enjoy your podcasts or music or follow the recipe while cooking in your kitchen when your phone is lying in your living room.
Voice assistance: How fascinating was it to watch all those detective/ secret agent thriller movies while they are on run and getting directions from their computer savvy buddies. Ethan Hunt from Mission Impossible….. Remember! Many wireless earphones comes with voice assistance feature which makes it easy to go around the places you are new to. You don’t have to stop and look to your phone screen for directions which makes it easier to move either on foot or while driving.
Few things for you to keep in mind and compare before investing in a true wireless earphones :-
Sound Quality
Battery Life
Wireless Range
Comfort and design
Warranty
Price
Gone are those days when true wireless earbuds were expensive possession. They are quite economical now and are available with various features depending upon different brands in your price range.
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Hammer
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The electrical ring main that is widely used in the United Kingdom (UK) to wire electrical outlets is by definition a wiring error, as it permits unbalanced currents to flow in the electrical cables.
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Steven Magee
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Examining the tangle of assorted wires and leads, there seemed to be every cable ever made, but none with the right combination.
Frustration brought him to the boil, as he yanked and tugged at this unyielding ball. He only succeeded in winding them into ever-tighter knots.
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Jim Lowe (New Reform (New Reform Quartet #1))
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Twenty-five-foot steel pylons spaced seventy-five feet apart. Bundles of conductors stretched between them, separated every ten feet with spacers. The cables an inch thick, studded with spikes and enwrapped with razor wire.
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Blake Crouch (Wayward (Wayward Pines, #2))
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Now, that curiosity was replaced as she stared up at the fence and wondered, What the hell? It was silent. No electricity humming through its veins. Stupid thing to do, but she couldn’t resist. Reaching out, she grabbed hold of the thick steel cable. Barbs bit into her palm but that was it. No jolt. There was something strangely illicit, erotic even, about touching the wire.
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Blake Crouch (The Last Town (Wayward Pines, #3))
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Compared with all the other animals, humans are the ones doing all the change. When you look at our species’ behavior relative to the others, we’re the change animals. This seems to be the outcome when our seeking systems (which other mammals share) teams up with the prefrontal cortex (the new part of our brain that lets us simulate the future, which other mammals don’t share).9 Put these two parts of the brains together, and humans are biologically wired for innovation and change.
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Daniel M. Cable (Alive at Work: The Neuroscience of Helping Your People Love What They Do)
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Buffalo Bill is important to me as the symbol of the growth of our nation, for his life spanned the settlement of the Great Plains, the Indian
Wars, the Gold Rush, the Pony Express, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the enduring romance of the American frontier-especially the Great Plains. Consider what he witnessed in his lifetime: the invention of the telephone, the transatlantic cable, the automobile, the airplane, and the introduction of modem warfare, with great armies massed against each other, with tanks, armored cars, flame-throwers, and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians. Nor, though it is not usually considered a milestone in American history, should we forget Joseph F. Glidden's 1874 invention of barbed wire, which, more than the rifle or the plow, transformed Buffalo Bill's Great Plains by insuring the survival of thousands of family farms, and making possible the growth of enormous-and enormously profitable-cattle ranches.
In addition, I feel a personal connection.
In April 1855 my great-granduncle Alexander Carter Jr. and his younger brother, Thomas Marion Carter, left their home in Scioto County, Ohio, and headed west. Starting by steamboat, the two brothers floated down the Ohio River until it joined the Mississippi and then traveled upstream to St. Louis. In St. Louis they found little transportation west, so they walked, hitched rides, and rode horseback to reach St. Joseph, Missouri. There they caught a stagecoach to Council Bluffs, Iowa, riding on top of the stage, with seventeen men and women-a three-day ordeal.
On May 14, nineteen days after leaving St. Louis, the brothers crossed the Missouri River and landed on the town site of Omaha, then a community of cotton tents and shanties, where lots were being offered to anyone willing to build on them. They refused this offer and pressed on to their final destination, DeSoto, Washington County, Nebraska Territory, where
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Robert A. Carter (Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend)
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The original Ethernet consisted of a fat cable into which a wire coming from each computer was forcibly inserted using what was euphemistically referred to a vampire tap.
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Andrew Tanenbaum
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DESPITE THE HIGH drama of the Shimon case, the wiretapping itself was standard stuff. Shimon or his associates walked up to basement phone boxes and installed their taps right on the premises. All they needed to know was which cable to tap, and they got that information by calling the phone company and posing as repairmen out in the field. Helpful but clueless receptionists at headquarters always gave them the wiring details they needed.
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Eamon Javers (Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage)
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Tensegrity, a principle elaborated by Snelson and Buckminster Fuller, produces structural integrity by placing tension on independent units. Snelson’s sculptures consist of hollow metal rods, none of which touch one another, connected by means of a continuous wire cable that is tightened until a stable structure is achieved. (The children’s toy Skwish is a tensegrity structure based on Snelson’s idea.) Then, about 1990, Ingber and Heidemann realized that the proteins that give cells their structural integrity have many of the properties of Snelson’s sculptures. These proteins are also made of alternating rigid rods linked by flexible regions. They proposed that proteins may have the properties of tensegrity sculptures, an idea sufficiently provocative to have illustrated the cover of Scientific American in January 1998.
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Robert Root-Bernstein (Sparks of Genius: The 13 Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People)