Zero Degree Quotes

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If it’s zero degrees outside today and it’s supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be?
Steven Wright
Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.
Simon Baron-Cohen (Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty)
Just let me wait a little while longer, Under your window in the quite snow. Let me stand here and shiver, I’ll be stronger If I can see your light before I go. All through the weeks I’ve tried to keep my balance. Leaves fell, then rain, then shadows, I fell too. Easy restraint is not among my talents, Fall turned to Winter and I came to you. Kissed by the snow I contemplate your face. Oh, do not hide it in your pillow yet! Warm rooms would never lure me from this place, If only I could see your silhouette. Turn on your light, my sun, my summer love. Zero degrees down here, July above.
Polly Shulman (Enthusiasm)
Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn.
James Joyce (Ulysses)
empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.
Simon Baron-Cohen (Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty)
We have a language that is full of ambiguities; we have a way of expressing ourselves that is often complex and elusive, poetic and modulated; all our thoughts can be rendered with absolute clarity if we bother to put the right dots and squiggles between the words in the right places. Proper punctuation is both the sign and the cause of clear thinking. If it goes, the degree of intellectual impoverishment we face is unimaginable.
Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.
Jack London (To Build a Fire)
Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero & Elements of Semiology)
I remember sitting in the Beth Shalom synagogue in Cambridge on the night of Kol Nidre. Peter Lipton, a friend and an atheist philosopher, was giving a sermon on the theme of “atonement:” “If we treat another person as essentially bad, we dehumanize him or her. If we take the view that every human being has some good in them, even if it is only 0.1 percent of their makeup, then by focusing on their good part, we humanize them. By acknowledging and attending to and rewarding their good part, we allow it to grow, like a small flower in a desert.
Simon Baron-Cohen (Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty)
I knew it was cold, but singing familiar Christmas songs and the fellowship warmed me through and through—until we stopped in front of a bank and saw the temperature on its marquee: six degrees below zero!
Larada Horner-Miller (Hair on Fire: A Heartwarming & Humorous Christmas Memoir)
الفن لا شئ سوى الكمال في تقليد الواقع
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
اللغة بطبيعتها تميل إلى تدمير ذاتها
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time.
Dava Sobel (Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time)
فالشكل يتراءى معلقا أمام الأنظار وكأنه موضوع . وهو مستنكر كيفما كان إن كان فخما بدا زيا قديما وإن كان فوضويا بدا غير إجتماعي ومتميزا بالنسبة إلى العصر أو الناس وعلى أي وجه بدا فهو عزلة
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
Despite my resistance to hyperbole, the LHC belongs to a world that can only be described with superlatives. It is not merely large: the LHC is the biggest machine ever built. It is not merely cold: the 1.9 kelvin (1.9 degrees Celsius above absolute zero) temperature necessary for the LHC’s supercomputing magnets to operate is the coldest extended region that we know of in the universe—even colder than outer space. The magnetic field is not merely big: the superconducting dipole magnets generating a magnetic field more than 100,000 times stronger than the Earth’s are the strongest magnets in industrial production ever made. And the extremes don’t end there. The vacuum inside the proton-containing tubes, a 10 trillionth of an atmosphere, is the most complete vacuum over the largest region ever produced. The energy of the collisions are the highest ever generated on Earth, allowing us to study the interactions that occurred in the early universe the furthest back in time.
Lisa Randall (Knocking on Heaven's Door: How Physics and Scientific Thinking Illuminate the Universe and the Modern World)
كل كتابة ثقافية هي أولى طفرات الفكر
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
اللسان والأسلوب هما قوة عشواء أما الكتابة فهي فعل تضامن تاريخي
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
الأدب مثل الفوسفور يكون أكثر لمعانا لحظة موته
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
During Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition—the first to circumnavigate the globe, in 1522—a scribe onboard wrote that the pilots “will not speak of the longitude.” Longitudinal lines, which run perpendicular to the parallels of latitude, have no fixed reference point, like the equator. And so navigators must establish their own demarcation—their home port or some other arbitrary line—from which to gauge how far east or west they are. (Today, Greenwich, England, is designated the prime meridian, marking zero degrees longitude.)
David Grann (The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder)
You Bastard was thinking: there seems to be some growing dimensional instability here, swinging from zero to nearly forty-five degrees by the look of it. How interesting. I wonder what’s causing it? Let V equal 3. Let Tau equal Chi/4. cudcudcud Let Kappa/y be an Evil-Smelling-Bugger* (* Renowned as the greatest camel mathematician of all time, who invented a math of eight-dimensional space while lying down with his nostrils closed in a violent sandstorm.) differential tensor domain with four imaginary spin co-efficients. . .
Terry Pratchett (Pyramids (Discworld, #7))
Followers of Jesus need to come back to the reality that baptism is their primary pledge of allegiance,40 contempt has zero place in the heart of those who claim to apprentice under Jesus, and the litmus test of our faith is the degree to which we love our enemy.
John Mark Comer (Live No Lies: Recognize and Resist the Three Enemies That Sabotage Your Peace)
اللسان إذن ما قبل الأدب والأسلوب هو مابعده تقريبا فالصور والإلقاء تولد من جسم الكاتب وماضيه لتغدو شيئا فشيئا آليات فنه ذاتها
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
في الحالة الراهنة للتاريخ لا يمكن لأي كتابة سياسية إلا أن تكون دعما لعالم بوليسي كما أن أي كتابة ثقافية لا يمكنها إلا أن تؤسس عالما يتجاوز الأدب ولا تملك الجرأة على ذكر إسمه
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
الرواية موت , وهي تجعل من الحياة قدرا , ومن الذكرى فعلا مفيدا , ومن الديمومة زمنا موجها له دلالة
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
The wind was blowing, but not too hard, and everyone was so happy and gay for it was only twenty degrees below zero and the sun shone.
Laura Ingalls Wilder (These Happy Golden Years (Little House on the Prairie #8))
But if you haven't figured it out by now, then let me assure you, Lula - nobody's normal. And pretty much everybody you meet in life is trying to figure out how to be a so-called 'normal person'. As if it's some fixed point that you reach, like zero degrees Celsius. But everybody's just who they are. Weird, flawed, good at some things, bad at others. There's no single person who's doing everything right all the time. Trust me on that. There is no such thing as normal" -Sam
Meagan Brothers (Weird Girl and What's His Name)
In this summer heat, I must remember that the realest things are the closest and farthest away, like the warmth found in winter: the heat hidden in the folds of one's coat, a lost floating breath, a kiss across the distance of zero degrees.
Meia Geddes
The zero-degree parallel of latitude is fixed by the laws of nature, while the zero-degree meridian of longitude shifts like the sands of time. This difference makes finding latitude child’s play, and turns the determination of longitude, especially at sea, into an adult dilemma—one that stumped the wisest minds of the world for the better part of human history.
Dava Sobel (Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of his Time)
Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]
Roland Barthes (Writing Degree Zero)
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant 80 odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on, it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely 50 degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.
Jack London (To Build a Fire)
Perhaps we ought to feel with more imagination. As today the sky 70 degrees above zero with lines falling The way September moves a lace curtain to be near a pear, The oddest device can't be usual. And that is where The pejorative sense of fear moves axles. In the stars There is no longer any peace, emptied like a cup of coffee Between the blinding rain that interviews. You were my quintuplets when I decided to leave you Opening a picture book the pictures were all of grass Slowly the book was on fire, you the reader Sitting with specs full of smoke exclaimed How it was a rhyme for "brick" or "redder." The next chapter told all about a brook. You were beginning to see the relation when a tidal wave Arrived with sinking ships that spelled out "Aladdin." I thought about the Arab boy in his cave But the thoughts came faster than advice. If you knew that snow was a still toboggan in space The print could rhyme with "fallen star.
John Ashbery (Rivers and Mountains)
Shining my headlamp on a dime-store thermometer clipped to the parka I’d been using as a pillow, I saw that the temperature inside the cramped two-person tent was seven degrees below zero Fahrenheit.
Jon Krakauer (Into Thin Air)
It was the second week of February, a rainy Wednesday, a generous few degrees above zero, and some absolute twat on the Entertainment committee had decided that what the student body really needed was a Beach Party theme night.
Erin Lawless (Little White Lies)
Among the many spots used by philosophers and astronomers over the centuries to mark the meridian for zero degrees longitude were Ferro, in the Canary Islands; Ujjain, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh; the “agonic line” (a line along which true north and magnetic north coincide, but not forever) that passed through the Azores; the Paris Observatory; the Royal Observatory at Greenwich; the White House; and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.
Neil deGrasse Tyson (Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military (Astrophysics for People in a Hurry Series))
Our sense of a composition largely inheres in how we feel about the individual parts; narrative arcs are almost always essential in drama but (unless there are lyrics involved) often less essential in music. All of this is, I suspect, again symptomatic of human memory limitations. We live, to a remarkable degree, in the present; what happened thirty seconds ago is already rapidly fading from our memory (or at least rapidly becomes harder for us to retrieve).
Gary F. Marcus (Guitar Zero)
Note that a rotation by 360 degrees is equivalent to doing nothing at all, or rotating by zero degrees. This is known as the identity transformation. Why bother to define such a transformation at all? As we shall see later in the book, the identity transformation plays a similar role to that of the number zero in the arithmetic operation of addition or the number one in multiplication-when you add zero to a number or multiply a number by one, the number remains unchanged.
Mario Livio (The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry)
The West, having destroyed its own values, finds itself back at the zero degree of symbolic power, and in a turnabout, it wants to impose the zero degree on everyone. It challenges the rest of the world to annihilate itself symbolically as well. It demands that the rest of the world enter into its game, participate in the generalised, planetary exchange and fall into its trap…There is a moral and philosophical confrontation, almost a metaphysical one, beyond Good and Evil.
Jean Baudrillard
Not that this deterred him and his friend Klapaucius from further experimentation, which showed that the extent of a dragon's existence depends mainly on its whim, though also on its degree of satiety, and that the only sure method of negating it is to reduce the probability to zero or lower. All this research, naturally enough, took a great deal of time and energy; meanwhile the dragons that had gotten loose were running rampant, laying waste to a variety of planets and moons. What was worse, they multiplied. Which enabled Klapaucius to publish an excellent article entitled "Covariant Transformation from Dragons to Dragonets, in the Special Case of Passage from States Forbidden by the Laws of Physics to Those Forbidden by the Local Authorities.
Stanisław Lem (The Cyberiad)
There were, in Feo's experience, five kinds of cold. There was wind cold, which Feo barely felt. It was fussy and loud and turned your cheeks as red as if you'd been slapped, but couldn't kill you even if it tried. There was snow cold, which plucked at your arms and chapped your lips, but brought real rewards. It was Feo's favorite weather: The snow was soft and good for making snow wolves. There was ice cold, which might take the skin off your palm if you let it, but probably wouldn't if you were careful. Ice cold smelled sharp and knowing. It often came with blue skies and was good for skating. Feo had respect for ice cold. Then there was hard cold, which was when the ice cold got deeper and deeper until at the end of a month you couldn't remember if the summer had ever really existed. Hard cold could be cruel. Birds died in midflight. It was the kind of cold that you booted and kicked your way through. And then there was blind cold. Blind cold smelled of metal and granite. It took all the sense out of your brain and blew the snow into your eyes until they were glued shut and you had to rub spit into them before they would blink. Blind cold was forty degrees below zero. This was the kind of cold that you didn't sit down to think in, unless you wanted to be found dead in the same place in May or June. Feo had felt blind cold only once.
Katherine Rundell (The Wolf Wilder)
I once saw a woman wearing a low-cut dress; she had a glazed look in her eyes, and she was walking the streets of Ljubljana when it was five degrees below zero. I thought she must be drunk, and I went to help her, but she refused my offer to lend her my jacket. Perhaps in her world it was summer and her body was warmed by the desire of the person waiting for her. Even if that person only existed in her delirium, she had the right to live and die as she wanted, don’t you think?” Veronika didn’t know what to say, but the madwoman’s words made sense to her. Who knows; perhaps she was the woman who had been seen half-naked walking the streets of Ljubljana? “I’m going to tell you a story,” said Zedka. “A powerful wizard, who wanted to destroy an entire kingdom, placed a magic potion in the well from which all the inhabitants drank. Whoever drank that water would go mad. “The following morning, the whole population drank from the well and they all went mad, apart from the king and his family, who had a well set aside for them alone, which the magician had not managed to poison. The king was worried and tried to control the population by issuing a series of edicts governing security and public health. The policemen and the inspectors, however, had also drunk the poisoned water, and they thought the king’s decisions were absurd and resolved to take no notice of them. “When the inhabitants of the kingdom heard these decrees, they became convinced that the king had gone mad and was now giving nonsensical orders. They marched on the castle and called for his abdication. “In despair the king prepared to step down from the throne, but the queen stopped him, saying: ‘Let us go and drink from the communal well. Then we will be the same as them.’ “And that was what they did: The king and the queen drank the water of madness and immediately began talking nonsense. Their subjects repented at once; now that the king was displaying such wisdom, why not allow him to continue ruling the country? “The country continued to live in peace, although its inhabitants behaved very differently from those of its neighbors. And the king was able to govern until the end of his days.” Veronika laughed. “You don’t seem crazy at all,” she said. “But I am, although I’m undergoing treatment since my problem is that I lack a particular chemical. While I hope that the chemical gets rid of my chronic depression, I want to continue being crazy, living my life the way I dream it, and not the way other people want it to be. Do you know what exists out there, beyond the walls of Villete?” “People who have all drunk from the same well.” “Exactly,” said Zedka. “They think they’re normal, because they all do the same thing. Well, I’m going to pretend that I have drunk from the same well as them.
Paulo Coelho (Veronika Decides to Die)
seldom list my formal academic credentials because, honestly, I don’t think they are important. I have met so many broke people with financial credentials that I almost think it discredits me to have had formal training. Yes, I have a degree in finance. Yes, I have been or am licensed in real estate, insurance, and investments. Yes, I do have many of the stupid letters to put after my name. But the thing that qualifies me most to teach about money is that I have done stupid things with zeros on the end. I have been there, done that. I have a PhD in D-U-M-B.
Dave Ramsey (The Total Money Makeover: A Proven Plan for Financial Fitness)
Ayaana was surveying the longest line on the globe’s three dimensional grid, the equator, the first line of latitude. Her special point zero, 40,075 kilometers long; 78.7 percent across water, 21.3 percent over land, zero degrees, all the Kenya equator places she had never imagined to claim as her own: Nanyuki, Mount Kenya. The invisible equator line crossed only thirteen countries - Kenya, Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, São Tomé and Principe, Gabon, Republic of Congo, Uganda, Somalia, Maldives, Indonesia, and Kiribati - thirteen countries that were the center of the world, and hers was one of them.
Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor (The Dragonfly Sea: A novel)
When the Starbursts cost a cent apiece, the average number of candies per customer was 3.5, but when the price went down to zero, the average went down to 1.1 per customer. The students limited themselves to a large degree when the candy was free. In fact, almost all the students applied a very simple social-norm rule in this situation—they politely took one and only one Starburst. ... What these results mean is that when price is not a part of the exchange, we become less selfish maximizers and start caring more about the welfare of others. We saw this demonstrated by the fact that when the price decreased to zero, customers restrained themselves and took far fewer units.
Dan Ariely (Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions)
The non-event is not when nothing happens. It is, rather, the realm of perpetual change, of a ceaseless updating, of an incessant succession in real time, which produces this general equivalence, this indifference, this banality that characterizes the zero degree of the event. A perpetual escalation that is also the escalation of growth - or of fashion, which is pre-eminently the field of compulsive change and built-in obsolescence. The ascendancy of models gives rise to a culture of difference that puts an end to any historical continuity. Instead of unfolding as part of a history, things have begun to succeed each other in the void. A profusion of language and images before which we are defenceless, reduced to the same powerlessness, to the same paralysis as we might show on the approach of war. It isn't a question of disinformation or brainwashing. It was a naIve error on the part of the FBI to attempt to create a Disinformation Agency for purposes of managed manipulation - a wholly useless undertaking, since disinformation comes from the very profusion of information, from its incantation, its looped repetition, which creates an empty perceptual field, a space shattered as though by a neutron bomb or by one of those devices that sucks in all the oxygen from the area of impact. It's a space where everything is pre-neutralized, including war, by the precession of images and commentaries, but this is perhaps because there is at bottom nothing to say about something that unfolds, like this war, to a relentless scenario, without a glimmer of uncertainty regarding the final outcome.
Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact (Talking Images))
In effect, two men - excuse me, two billionaires - turned a United States senator 180 degrees merely by threatening to spend big money. And they did it so brazenly that Senator Moran had to publicly humiliate himself to satisfy the brothers' demand.... My sympathy level for anyone who gives in to this kind of pressure is exactly zero. If my job ever depends on pleasing a couple of billionaires, I'll quit.
Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
Once, near the Metsovon pass, in December, when it was twenty degrees below zero because there was no cloud, the Italians sent up a starshell. It exploded in a cascade of brilliant blue light against the face of the full moon, and the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels. As that small magnesium sun hovered and blazed, the black pines stepped out of their modest shadows as though previously they had been veiled like virgins but had now decided to be seen as they are in heaven. The drifts of snow pulsed with the incandescence of the absolute chastity of ice, a mortar coughed disconsolately, and an owl whooped. For the first time in my life I shivered physically from something other than the cold; the world had sloughed away its skin and revealed itself as energy and light.
Louis de Bernières (Captain Corelli's Mandolin filmscript)
... by saying that the work we perform in the home is capitalist production, we are not expressing a wish to be legitimated as part of the 'productive forces,' in other words, it is not a resort to moralism. Only from a capitalist viewpoint being productive is a moral virtue, if not a moral imperative. From the viewpoint of the working class, being productive simply means being exploited. As Marx recognized, 'to be a productive laborer is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.' Thus we derive little 'self-esteem' from it. But when we say that housework is a moment of capitalist production we clarify our specific function in the capitalist division of labor and the specific forms that our revolt against it must take. Ultimately, when we say that we produce capital, we say that we can and want to destroy it, rather than engage in a losing battle to move from one form and degree of exploitation to another.
Silvia Federici (Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle (Common Notions))
I pin the laser on the Impala and take another reading. Four hundred thirty yards, line of sight. I push a button on the rangefinder and switch to inclinometer mode. The device calculates the cosine of the angle made between true horizontal and my line of sight. The digital reading is zero-point-eight-seven, equivalent to about thirty degrees. A quick mental calculation gives me the range adjustment. The horizontal range is three hundred and seventy-five yards.
Cameron Curtis (Danger Close (Breed Thriller, #1))
The key to this technology is superconductors. It has been known since 1911 that mercury, when cooled to four degrees (Kelvin) above absolute zero, loses all electrical resistance. This means that superconducting wires have no energy loss whatsoever, since they lack any resistance. (This is because electrons moving through a wire lose energy as they collide with atoms. But at near absolute zero, these atoms are almost at rest, so the electrons can easily slip through them without losing energy.)
Michio Kaku (Physics of the Future: How Science Will Shape Human Destiny and Our Daily Lives by the Year 2100)
One should not conclude too hastily that the degradation of American political practices is a decline in power. Behind this masquerade, there is a vast political strategy (certainly not deliberate; it would require too much intelligence) that belies our eternal democratic illusions. By electing Schwarzenegger (or in Bush's rigged election in 2000), in this bewildering parody of all systems of representation, America took revenge for the disdain of which it is the object. In this way, it proved its imaginary power because no one can equal it in its headlong course into the democratic masquerade, into the nihilist enterprise of liquidating value and a more total simulation than even in the areas of finance and weapons. America has a long head start. This extreme, empirical and technical form of mockery and the profanation of values, this radical obscenity and total impiety of a people, otherwise known as "religious," this is what fascinates everyone. This is what we enjoy even through rejection and sarcasm: this phenomenal vulgarity, a (political, televisual) universe brought to the zero degree of culture. It is also the secret of global hegemony.
Jean Baudrillard (The Agony of Power)
The first days of January 1942 brought enormous amounts of snow. The reader already knows what snow meant for the clergy. But this time the torture surpassed the bounds of the endurable. At the same time the thermometer hovered between 5 and 15 degrees below zero. From morning till night we scraped, shoveled, and pushed wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of snow to the brook. The work detail consisted of more than 1,000 clergymen, forced to keep moving by SS men and Capos who kicked us and beat us with truncheons. We had to make rounds with the wheelbarrows from the assembly square to the brook and back. Not a moment of rest was allowed, and much of the time we were forced to run. At one point I tripped over my barrow and fell, and it took me a while to get up again. An SS man dashed over and ordered me to turn with the full load. He ran beside me, beating me constantly with a leather strap. When I got to the brook I was not allowed to dump out the heavy snow, but had to make a second complete round with it instead. When the guard finally went off and I tried to let go of the wheelbarrow, I found that one of my hands was frozen fast to it. I had to blow on it with warm breath to get it free.
Jean Bernard (Priestblock 25487: a Memoir of Dachau)
Karen Arnold, a researcher at Boston College, followed eighty-one high school valedictorians and salutatorians from graduation onward to see what becomes of those who lead the academic pack. Of the 95 percent who went on to graduate college, their average GPA was 3.6, and by 1994, 60 percent had received a graduate degree. There was little debate that high school success predicted college success. Nearly 90 percent are now in professional careers with 40 percent in the highest tier jobs. They are reliable, consistent, and well-adjusted, and by all measures the majority have good lives. But how many of these number-one high school performers go on to change the world, run the world, or impress the world? The answer seems to be clear: zero. Commenting
Eric Barker (Barking Up the Wrong Tree: The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong)
[...] The West, having destroyed its own values, finds itself back at the zero degree of symbolic power, and in a turnabout, it wants to impose the zero degree on everyone. lt challenges the rest of the world to annihilate itself symbolically as well. lt demands that the rest of the world enter into its game, participate in the generalized, planetary exchange and fall into its trap. Then an extraordinary potlatch comes into play between global power and the powers opposing it, between those who wager their own death and those who cannot wager it because they no longer control it.The game does not end there. There is a moral and philosophical confrontation, almost a metaphysical one, beyond Good and Evil. Islam? The United States? lt doesn't matter! There is a confrontation between two powers. lt is an asymmetrical potlatch between terrorism and global power, and each side fights with its own weapons. Terrorism wagers the death of terrorists, which is a gesture with tremendous symbolic power and the West responds with its complete powerlessness. But this powerlessness is also a challenge. Challenge versus challenge. When people make fun of the carnival, the masquerade of the elections in America every four years, they are being too hasty. In the name of critical thought, of very European, very French thought, we do a contemptuous analysis of this kind of parody and self-denial. But we are wrong, because the empire of simulation, of simulacra, of parody, but also of networks, constitutes the true global power. It is more founded on this than on economic control. The essential is in the extraordinary trap set for the rest of the world so that everyone goes to the zero degree of value, a trap that fascinates the rest of the world.
Jean Baudrillard (The Agony of Power)
9:12 P.M.—GROUND ZERO, WASHINGTON, D.C. Without warning, the capital of the United States was obliterated. At precisely 9:12 p.m. Eastern, in a millisecond of time, in a blinding flash of light, the White House simply ceased to exist, as did everything and everyone else for miles in every direction. No sooner had the first missile detonated in Lafayette Park than temperatures soared into the millions of degrees. The firestorm and blast wave that followed consumed everything in its path. Gone was the Treasury building, and with it the headquarters of the United States Secret Service. Gone was the FBI building, and the National Archives, and the Supreme Court, and the U.S. Capitol and all of its surrounding buildings. Wiped away was every monument, every museum, every restaurant, every hotel, every hospital, every library and landmark of any kind, every sign of civilization.
Joel C. Rosenberg (Dead Heat: A Jon Bennett Series Political and Military Action Thriller (Book 5) (The Last Jihad series))
Often the flak was so thick the men could smell it through their oxygen masks; and the concentrated barrages exploded with such force that the concussions would have driven the pilots through the roofs of their planes had they not been strapped in. On some planes, men sat on sheets of lead to protect their genitals. Helpless in the flak field, all they could do was sit and take it. This was when pilots and crewmen alike learned that it was possible to sweat at 40 degrees below zero. Bombardier Theodore Hallock was not a praying man, but when he was in a tight spot over the target he would whisper to himself, “God, you gotta. You gotta get me back. God, listen, you gotta.” Many of the men promised the Almighty that if they got through they’d swear off liquor and women. Hallock said he never promised that “because I figured that if God was really God he’d be bound to understand how men feel about liquor and women.
Donald L. Miller (Masters of the Air: America's Bomber Boys Who Fought the Air War Against Nazi Germany)
there is nothing generic about a human life. When I was little, to get to my bus stop, I had to cross a field that had so much snow my parents fitted me with ski pants and knee-high thermal boots that were toasty to forty degrees below zero. I am excellent in the stern of a canoe, but I never got the hang of riding a bike with no hands. I have seen the northern lights because my parents always woke up the whole house when the night sky was painted with color. I love the smell of clover and chamomile because my sister and I used to pick both on the way home from swimming lessons. I spent weeks of my childhood riding around on my bike saving drowning worms after a heavy rain. My hair is my favorite feature even though it’s too heavy for most ponytails, and I still can’t parallel park. There is no life in general. Each day has been a collection of trivial details—little intimacies and jokes and screw-ups and realizations.
Kate Bowler
tried to go to a counselor, but it was just too weird. Talking to some stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit. I did go to the library, and I learned that behavior I considered commonplace was the subject of pretty intense academic study. Psychologists call the everyday occurrences of my and Lindsay’s life “adverse childhood experiences,” or ACEs. ACEs are traumatic childhood events, and their consequences reach far into adulthood. The trauma need not be physical. The following events or feelings are some of the most common ACEs: •​being sworn at, insulted, or humiliated by parents •​being pushed, grabbed, or having something thrown at you •​feeling that your family didn’t support each other •​having parents who were separated or divorced •​living with an alcoholic or a drug user •​living with someone who was depressed or attempted suicide •​watching a loved one be physically abused. ACEs happen everywhere, in every community. But studies have shown that ACEs are far more common in my corner of the demographic world. A report by the Wisconsin Children’s Trust Fund showed that among those with a college degree or more (the non–working class), fewer than half had experienced an ACE. Among the working class, well over half had at least one ACE, while about 40 percent had multiple ACEs. This is really striking—four in every ten working-class people had faced multiple instances of childhood trauma. For the non–working class, that number was 29 percent. I gave a quiz to Aunt Wee, Uncle Dan, Lindsay, and Usha that psychologists use to measure the number of ACEs a person has faced. Aunt Wee scored a seven—higher even than Lindsay and me, who each scored a six. Dan and Usha—the two people whose families seemed nice to the point of oddity—each scored a zero. The weird people were the ones who hadn’t faced any childhood trauma. Children with multiple ACEs are more likely to struggle with anxiety and depression, to suffer from heart disease and obesity, and to contract certain types of cancers. They’re also more likely to underperform in school and suffer from relationship instability as adults. Even excessive shouting can damage a kid’s sense of security and contribute to mental health and behavioral issues down the road. Harvard pediatricians have studied the effect that childhood trauma has on the mind. In addition to later negative
J.D. Vance (Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis)
The shoot-to-kill order came through at zero one fifteen, relayed over a satellite radio. It’d been just three hours since the two-man reconnaissance team had reported the sighting. They lay in a shallow dugout on a windblown ridge, the leeward slope falling away steeply to an impassable boulder field. A desert-issue tarp all but covered the hole, protected from view on the flanks by thorny scrub. Shivering, they blew into their bunched trigger-finger mitts. The daytime temperature had dropped twenty degrees or more, and fine sleet was melting on their blackened faces. Darren Proctor extended the folded stock of his L115A3 sniper rifle. He split the legs of the swivel bi-pod and aligned the swivel cheek piece with the all-weather scope. Flipping open the lens cap, he glassed the terrain cast a muted green by the night vision. The tree line was sparse, a smattering of pines and cedars shuddering in the biting wind. Glimpsing movement on a scree slope fifty metres or so beyond, he focused in. The eyes of a striped hyena shone like glow sticks. He watched as the scavenger ripped at the carcass of an ibex or wild sheep. A second later it sniffed the air, ears pricked, and scampered off.
Gary Haynes (State of Honour)
For women who spend all their hours doing unpaid work, the chores of the day kill the dreams of a lifetime. What do I mean by unpaid work? It’s work performed in the home, like childcare or other forms of caregiving, cooking, cleaning, shopping, and errands, done by a family member who’s not being paid. In many countries, when communities don’t have electricity or running water, unpaid work is also the time and labor women and girls spend collecting water and gathering wood. This is reality for millions of women, especially in poorer countries, where women do a much higher share of the unpaid work that makes a household run. On average, women around the world spend more than twice as many hours as men on unpaid work, but the range of the disparity is wide. In India, women spend 6 hours a day doing unpaid work, while men spend less than 1. In the US, women average more than 4 hours of unpaid work every day; men average just 2.5. In Norway, women spend 3.5 hours a day on unpaid work, while men spend about 3. There is no country where the gap is zero. This means that, on average, women do seven years more of unpaid work than men over their lifetimes. That’s about the time it takes to complete a bachelor’s and a master’s degree.
Melinda Gates (The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World)
The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all. I was out there every day from seven a.m. to seven p.m., and every day it was: How do we turn ten rand into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? How do I turn fifty into a hundred? At the end of the day we’d spend it on food and maybe some beers, and then we’d go home and come back and it was: How do we turn ten into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? It was a whole day’s work to flip that money. You had to be walking, be moving, be thinking. You had to get to a guy, find a guy, meet a guy. There were many days we’d end up back at zero, but I always felt like I’d been very productive. Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. Instead I was majoring in hustling, something no university would give me a degree for.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood)
Why did you come to the United States? Perhaps no one knows the real answer. I know that migrants, when they are still on their way here, learn the Immigrant’s Prayer. A friend who had been aboard La Bestia for a few days, working on a documentary, read it to me once. I didn’t learn the entire thing, but I remember these lines: “Partir es morir un poco / Llegar nunca es llegar”—“To leave is to die a little / To arrive is never to arrive.” I’ve had to ask so many children: Why did you come? Sometimes I ask myself the same question. I don’t have an answer yet. Before coming to the United States, I knew what others know: that the cruelty of its borders was only a thin crust, and that on the other side a possible life was waiting. I understood, some time after, that once you stay here long enough, you begin to remember the place where you originally came from the way a backyard might look from a high window in the deep of winter: a skeleton of the world, a tract of abandonment, objects dead and obsolete. And once you’re here, you’re ready to give everything, or almost everything, to stay and play a part in the great theater of belonging. In the United States, to stay is an end in itself and not a means: to stay is the founding myth of this society. To stay in the United States, you will unlearn the universal metric system so you can buy a pound and a half of cooked ham, accept that thirty-two degrees, and not zero, is where the line falls that divides cold and freezing. You might even begin to celebrate the pilgrims who removed the alien Indians, and the veterans who maybe killed other aliens, and the day of a president who will eventually declare a war on all the other so-called aliens. No matter the cost. No matter the cost of the rent, and milk, and cigarettes. The humiliations, the daily battles. You will give everything. You will convince yourself that it is only a matter of time before you can be yourself again, in America, despite the added layers of its otherness already so well adhered to your skin. But perhaps you will never want to be your former self again. There are too many things that ground you to this new life. Why did you come here? I asked one little girl once. Because I wanted to arrive.
Valeria Luiselli (Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions)
BUTTERSCOTCH BONANZA BARS Preheat oven to 350 degrees F., rack in the middle position.   ½ cup salted butter (1 stick, 4 ounces, ¼ pound) 2 cups light brown sugar*** (pack it down in the cup when you measure it) 2 teaspoons baking powder 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon vanilla extract 2 beaten eggs (just whip them up in a glass with a fork) 1 and ½cups flour (scoop it up and level it off with a table knife) 1 cup chopped nuts (optional) 2 cups butterscotch chips (optional) ***- If all you have in the house is dark brown sugar and the roads are icy, it’s below zero, and you really don’t feel like driving to the store, don’t despair. Measure out one cup of dark brown sugar and mix it with one cup regular white granulated sugar. Now you’ve got light brown sugar, just what’s called for in Leslie’s recipe. And remember that you can always make any type of brown sugar by mixing molasses into white granulated sugar until it’s the right color. Hannah’s Note: Leslie says the nuts are optional, but she likes these cookie bars better with nuts. So do I, especially with walnuts. Bertie Straub wants hers with a cup of chopped pecans and 2 cups of butterscotch chips. Mother prefers these bars with 2 cups of semi-sweet chocolate chips and no nuts, Carrie likes them with 2 cups of mini chocolate chips and a cup of chopped pecans, and Lisa prefers to make them with 1 cup of chopped walnuts, 1 cup of white chocolate chips, and 1 cup of butterscotch chips. All this goes to show just how versatile Leslie’s recipe is. Try it first as it’s written with just the nuts. Then try any other versions that you think would be yummy. Grease and flour a 9-inch by 13-inch cake pan, or spray it with nonstick baking spray, the kind with flour added. Set it aside while you mix up the batter. Melt the butter in a small saucepan over low heat on the stovetop, or put it in the bottom of a microwave-safe, medium-sized mixing bowl and heat it for 1 minute in the microwave on HIGH. Add the light brown sugar to the mixing bowl with the melted butter and stir it in well. Mix in the baking powder and the salt. Make sure they’re thoroughly incorporated. Stir in the vanilla extract. Mix in the beaten eggs. Add the flour by half-cup increments, stirring in each increment before adding the next. Stir in the nuts, if you decided to use them. Mix in the butterscotch chips if you decided to use them, or any other chips you’ve chosen. Spoon the batter into the prepared cake pan and smooth out the top with a rubber spatula. Bake the Butterscotch Bonanza Bars at 350 degrees F. for 20 to 25 minutes. (Mine took 25 minutes.) When the bars are done, take them out of the oven and cool them completely in the pan on a cold stove burner or a wire rack. When the bars are cool, use a sharp knife to cut them into brownie-sized pieces. Yield: Approximately 40 bars, but that all depends on how large you cut the squares. You may not believe this, but Mother suggested that I make these cookie bars with semi-sweet chocolate chips and then frost them with chocolate fudge frosting. There are times when I think she’d frost a tuna sandwich with chocolate fudge frosting and actually enjoy eating it!
Joanne Fluke (Devil's Food Cake Murder (Hannah Swensen, #14))
We chose not to discuss a world warmed beyond two degrees out of decency, perhaps; or simple fear; or fear of fearmongering; or technocratic faith, which is really market faith; or deference to partisan debates or even partisan priorities; or skepticism about the environmental Left of the kind I'd always had; or disinterest in the fates of distant ecosystems like I'd also always had. We felt confusion about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers, or at least an intuition that others would e easily confused about the science and its many technical terms and hard-to-parse numbers. we suffered from slowness apprehending the speed of change, or semi-conspiratorial confidence in the responsibility of global elites and their institutions, or obeisance toward those elites and their institutions, whatever we thought of them. Perhaps we felt unable to really trust scarier projections because we'd only just heard about warming, we thought, and things couldn't possibly have gotten that much worse just since the first Inconvenient Truth; or because we liked driving our cars and eating our beef and living as we did in every other way and didn't want to think too hard about that; or because we felt so "postindustrial" we couldn't believe we were still drawing material breaths from fossil fuel furnaces. Perhaps it was because we were so sociopathically good at collating bad news into a sickening evolving sense of what constituted "normal," or because we looked outside and things seemed still okay. Because we were bored with writing, or reading, the same story again and again, because climate was so global and therefore nontribal it suggested only the corniest politics, because we didn't yet appreciate how fully it would ravage our lives, and because, selfishly, we didn't mind destroying the planet for others living elsewhere on it or those not yet born who would inherit it from us, outraged. Because we had too much faith in the teleological shape of history and the arrow of human progress to countenance the idea that the arc of history would bend toward anything but environmental justice, too. Because when we were being really honest with ourselves we already thought of the world as a zero-sum resource competition and believed that whatever happened we were probably going to continue to be the victors, relatively speaking anyway, advantages of class being what they are and our own luck in the natalist lottery being what it was. Perhaps we were too panicked about our own jobs and industries to fret about the future of jobs and industry; or perhaps we were also really afraid of robots or were too busy looking at our new phones; or perhaps, however easy we found the apocalypse reflex in our culture and the path of panic in our politics, we truly had a good-news bias when it came to the big picture; or, really, who knows why-there are so many aspects to the climate kaleidoscope that transforms our intuitions about environmental devastation into n uncanny complacency that it can be hard to pull the whole picture of climate distortion into focus. But we simply wouldn't, or couldn't, or anyway didn't look squarely in the face of science.
David Wallace-Wells (The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming)
Specifically, they argue that digital technology drives inequality in three different ways. First, by replacing old jobs with ones requiring more skills, technology has rewarded the educated: since the mid-1970s, salaries rose about 25% for those with graduate degrees while the average high school dropout took a 30% pay cut.45 Second, they claim that since the year 2000, an ever-larger share of corporate income has gone to those who own the companies as opposed to those who work there—and that as long as automation continues, we should expect those who own the machines to take a growing fraction of the pie. This edge of capital over labor may be particularly important for the growing digital economy, which tech visionary Nicholas Negroponte defines as moving bits, not atoms. Now that everything from books to movies and tax preparation tools has gone digital, additional copies can be sold worldwide at essentially zero cost, without hiring additional employees. This allows most of the revenue to go to investors rather than workers, and helps explain why, even though the combined revenues of Detroit’s “Big 3” (GM, Ford and Chrysler) in 1990 were almost identical to those of Silicon Valley’s “Big 3” (Google, Apple, Facebook) in 2014, the latter had nine times fewer employees and were worth thirty times more on the stock market.47 Figure 3.5: How the economy has grown average income over the past century, and what fraction of this income has gone to different groups. Before the 1970s, rich and poor are seen to all be getting better off in lockstep, after which most of the gains have gone to the top 1% while the bottom 90% have on average gained close to nothing.46 The amounts have been inflation-corrected to year-2017 dollars. Third, Erik and collaborators argue that the digital economy often benefits superstars over everyone else.
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
Within sixty years of Columbus’s landfall, the Taino were extinct, reduced to zero from a population that modern demographic studies indicate may have been as high as eight million. In that regard, how a tribe has come to possess a knife or a machete—or even a rifle—would reveal more about its degree of contact with the outside world than the mere fact of its possession.
Scott Wallace (The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes)
You saw a double. A hologram perhaps. Many things, Marly, are perpetrated in my name. Aspects of my wealth have become autonomous, by degrees; at times they even war with one another. Rebellion in the fiscal extremities.
William Gibson (Count Zero (Sprawl, #2))
Jimmy’s goal since childhood, he explained to Siegel, had been to join the cast of Saturday Night Live. He was endearing. After a two-hour call, Siegel offered to represent him. She had one question, however. “Why don’t you stay and graduate?” Jimmy was a semester shy of a degree. Siegel suggested that they get started in the summer, so he’d have a bachelor’s degree to fall back on, just in case. “No, no,” Jimmy insisted. “I need to get on Saturday Night Live, and you’re going to make it happen, because you know Adam Sandler! I don’t want to do anything else.” Siegel knew this was a long shot—and a long-term endeavor—especially for an out-of-town kid with zero acting credits. But for some reason, she couldn’t turn him down; she had never met someone as focused and passionate about a single dream as this grinning bumpkin from the tiny town of Saugerties, New York. And though his skills were rough, given some time in the industry, she thought he might just make it. “OK, let’s do this,” she said. So, in January 1996 Jimmy quit college and moved to Los Angeles. For six months, Siegel booked him gigs on small, local stand-up comedy stages. Then, without warning, SNL put a call out for auditions; three cast members would be leaving the show. Having worked with one of the departing actors, David Spade, Siegel pulled a few strings and arranged a Hail Mary for the young Jimmy Fallon: an audition at The Comic Strip. SO HERE HE WAS. Fresh-faced, sweating in his light shirt, holding his Troll doll. In front of Lorne Michaels and a phalanx of Hollywood shakers. When Jimmy ended his three-minute bit, the audience clapped politely. True to his reputation, Michaels didn’t laugh. Not once. Jimmy went home and awaited word. Finally, the results came: SNL had invited Tracy Morgan, Ana Gasteyer, and Chris Kattan, each of whom had hustled in the comedy scene for years, to join the cast. Jimmy—the newbie whose well-connected manager had finagled an invite—was crushed. “Was he completely raw? A hundred percent,” Siegel says. But, the SNL people said, “Let’s keep an eye on him.
Shane Snow (Smartcuts: The Breakthrough Power of Lateral Thinking)
Some suit takes a friggin' swan dive off the penthouse, what's to investigate? Ya don't need a medical degree to determine the cause of death for this guy: Sudden Pause of Linear Accelerated Trajectory. Or, as I like to call it, SPLAT.
Matthew S. Cox (Division Zero (Division Zero, #1))
she was my kryptonite. Good God, the woman brought down my walls quicker than water froze in zero degree weather.
Lora Ann (Bound (Strand Brothers, #2))
Did you party too much and drop out?” “No, I got a philosophy degree.
Bobby Adair (Zero Day (Slow Burn, #1))
a mathematician could show how a triangle’s angles sum to 180 degrees, or any other geometric fact. On the other hand, calculus was based on faith.
Charles Seife (Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea)
If a navigator stands on the North Pole, the North Star will sit directly overhead at ninety degrees to the horizon in all directions. The top of the world is at ninety degrees latitude. On the equator, at zero degrees latitude, Polaris dances right on the horizon. So latitude can be directly determined by the angle between the polestar and the horizon. I will try to measure the angle of the North Star to the horizon to give me my latitude. Determining longitude is another matter entirely. To do so, the navigator equates arc with time. Each of the 360 degrees of the earth's circular belt line is divided into sixty minutes of arc. Each minute is one nautical mile—6076 feet. Since the earth spins once every twenty-four hours, the heavenly bodies pass over fifteen degrees of longitude every hour, or fifteen minutes of longitude every minute. Some astronomers in Greenwich, England, began and ended their demarcation of the globe by running the longitude line of zero degrees through their little town. Longitude can be calculated by comparing the time when a heavenly body appears overhead to the time when it would be over Greenwich. The difference in time is then converted to arc, which tells the observer how far east or west of Greenwich he is. Not until the advent of accurate timepieces was it possible to fix longitude.
Steven Callahan (Adrift: Seventy-Six Days Lost at Sea)
One way to avoid the design problems encountered by the transcendental meditation researchers would be to keep one of the variables fixed. This could be either the number of meditators or the “target” of consciousness-induced order. Beyond this, as philosopher Evan Fales and sociologist Barry Markovsky of the University of Iowa suggested after reviewing the Maharishi effect, “Presumably, if the material world can be influenced in purposive ways by collective meditation, inanimate detectors could be constructed and placed at varying distances from the collective meditators.”6 This is essentially the approach that we took, although our motivations were based upon a logical extension of laboratory research on mind-matter interactions using random-number generators, and not by the claims of the transcendental meditators. Properties of Consciousness Whatever else consciousness may be, let us suppose that it also has the following properties, derived from a combination of Western and Eastern philosophies.7 The first property is that consciousness extends beyond the individual and has quantum field–like properties, in that it affects the probabilities of events. Second, consciousness injects order into systems in proportion to the “strength” of consciousness present. This is a refinement of quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger’s observation about one of the most remarkable properties of life, namely, an “organism’s astonishing gift … of ‘drinking orderliness’ from a suitable environment.”8 Third, the strength of consciousness in an individual fluctuates from moment to moment, and is regulated by focus of attention. Some states of consciousness have higher focus than others. We propose that ordinary awareness has a fairly low focus of attention compared to peak states, mystical states, and other nonordinary states.9 Fourth, a group of individuals can be said to have “group consciousness.” Group consciousness strengthens when the group’s attention is focused on a common object or event, and this creates coherence among the group. If the group’s attention is scattered, then the group’s mental coherence is also scattered. Fifth, when individuals in a group are all attending to different things, then the group consciousness and group mental coherence is effectively zero, producing what amounts to background noise. We assume that the maximum degree of group coherence is related in some complicated way to the total number of individuals present in the group, the strength of their common focus of attention, and other psychological, physiological, and environmental factors. Sixth, physical systems of all kinds respond to a consciousness field by becoming more ordered. The stronger or more coherent a consciousness field, the more the order will be evident. Inanimate objects (like rocks) will respond to order induced by consciousness as well as animate ones (like people, or tossed dice), but it is only in the more labile systems that we have the tools to readily detect these changes in order. In sum, when a group is actively focused on a common object, the “group mind” momentarily has the “power to organize,” as Carl Jung put it.10 This leads us to a very simple idea: as the mind moves, so moves matter.
Dean Radin (The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena)
When Bouchard’s twin-processing operation was in full swing, he amassed a staff of eighteen—psychologists, psychiatrists, ophthalmologists, cardiologists, pathologists, geneticists, even dentists. Several of his collaborators were highly distinguished: David Lykken was a widely recognized expert on personality, and Auke Tellegen, a Dutch psychologist on the Minnesota faculty, was an expert on personality measuring. In scheduling his twin-evaluations, Bouchard tried limiting the testing to one pair of twins at a time so that he and his colleagues could devote the entire week—with a grueling fifty hours of tests—to two genetically identical individuals. Because it is not a simple matter to determine zygosity—that is, whether twins are identical or fraternal—this was always the first item of business. It was done primarily by comparing blood samples, fingerprint ridge counts, electrocardiograms, and brain waves. As much background information as possible was collected from oral histories and, when possible, from interviews with relatives and spouses. I.Q. was tested with three different instruments: the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, a Raven, Mill-Hill composite test, and the first principal components of two multiple abilities batteries. The Minnesota team also administered four personality inventories (lengthy questionnaires aimed at characterizing and measuring personality traits) and three tests of occupational interests. In all the many personality facets so laboriously measured, the Minnesota team was looking for degrees of concordance and degrees of difference between the separated twins. If there was no connection between the mean scores of all twins sets on a series of related tests—I.Q. tests, for instance—the concordance figure would be zero percent. If the scores of every twin matched his or her twin exactly, the concordance figure would be 100 percent. Statistically, any concordance above 30 percent was considered significant, or rather indicated the presence of some degree of genetic influence. As the week of testing progressed, the twins were wired with electrodes, X-rayed, run on treadmills, hooked up for twenty-four hours with monitoring devices. They were videotaped and a series of questionnaires and interviews elicited their family backgrounds, educations, sexual histories, major life events, and they were assessed for psychiatric problems such as phobias and anxieties. An effort was made to avoid adding questions to the tests once the program was under way because that meant tampering with someone else’s test; it also would necessitate returning to the twins already tested with more questions. But the researchers were tempted. In interviews, a few traits not on the tests appeared similar in enough twin pairs to raise suspicions of a genetic component. One of these was religiosity. The twins might follow different faiths, but if one was religious, his or her twin more often than not was religious as well. Conversely, when one was a nonbeliever, the other generally was too. Because this discovery was considered too intriguing to pass by, an entire additional test was added, an existing instrument that included questions relating to spiritual beliefs. Bouchard would later insist that while he and his colleagues had fully expected to find traits with a high degree of heritability, they also expected to find traits that had no genetic component. He was certain, he says, that they would find some traits that proved to be purely environmental. They were astonished when they did not. While the degree of heritability varied widely—from the low thirties to the high seventies— every trait they measured showed at least some degree of genetic influence. Many showed a lot.
William Wright (Born That Way: Genes, Behavior, Personality)
Discouraging risk-taking. Attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics have other, more subtle effects: they not only promote short-termism, as noted earlier, but also discourage initiative and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, their productivity would have seemed to be zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 percent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of their superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not have panned out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks. This is typical of situations involving long-term investments of manpower.
Jerry Z. Muller (The Tyranny of Metrics)
You are sitting on a gold mine. Whether you realize it or not, you already have the knowledge, passion, and skills to create an automated income stream that requires no college degree, zero employees, and less than fifty dollars to get started.
Graham Cochrane (How to Get Paid for What You Know: Turning Your Knowledge, Passion, and Experience into an Online Income Stream in Your Spare Time)
David Garrison challenged: If we want to be on mission with God we simply must pause long enough to understand how God is on mission. Only then can we know with some degree of certainty that we are aligned as his instruments and not misaligned as his obstacles.2
Peyton Jones (Church Zero: Raising 1st Century Churches out of the Ashes of the 21st Century Church)
usually does not present much of a problem. Some analysts use t-tests with ordinal rather than continuous data for the testing variable. This approach is theoretically controversial because the distances among ordinal categories are undefined. This situation is avoided easily by using nonparametric alternatives (discussed later in this chapter). Also, when the grouping variable is not dichotomous, analysts need to make it so in order to perform a t-test. Many statistical software packages allow dichotomous variables to be created from other types of variables, such as by grouping or recoding ordinal or continuous variables. The second assumption is that the variances of the two distributions are equal. This is called homogeneity of variances. The use of pooled variances in the earlier formula is justified only when the variances of the two groups are equal. When variances are unequal (called heterogeneity of variances), revised formulas are used to calculate t-test test statistics and degrees of freedom.7 The difference between homogeneity and heterogeneity is shown graphically in Figure 12.2. Although we needn’t be concerned with the precise differences in these calculation methods, all t-tests first test whether variances are equal in order to know which t-test test statistic is to be used for subsequent hypothesis testing. Thus, every t-test involves a (somewhat tricky) two-step procedure. A common test for the equality of variances is the Levene’s test. The null hypothesis of this test is that variances are equal. Many statistical software programs provide the Levene’s test along with the t-test, so that users know which t-test to use—the t-test for equal variances or that for unequal variances. The Levene’s test is performed first, so that the correct t-test can be chosen. Figure 12.2 Equal and Unequal Variances The term robust is used, generally, to describe the extent to which test conclusions are unaffected by departures from test assumptions. T-tests are relatively robust for (hence, unaffected by) departures from assumptions of homogeneity and normality (see below) when groups are of approximately equal size. When groups are of about equal size, test conclusions about any difference between their means will be unaffected by heterogeneity. The third assumption is that observations are independent. (Quasi-) experimental research designs violate this assumption, as discussed in Chapter 11. The formula for the t-test test statistic, then, is modified to test whether the difference between before and after measurements is zero. This is called a paired t-test, which is discussed later in this chapter. The fourth assumption is that the distributions are normally distributed. Although normality is an important test assumption, a key reason for the popularity of the t-test is that t-test conclusions often are robust against considerable violations of normality assumptions that are not caused by highly skewed distributions. We provide some detail about tests for normality and how to address departures thereof. Remember, when nonnormality cannot be resolved adequately, analysts consider nonparametric alternatives to the t-test, discussed at the end of this chapter. Box 12.1 provides a bit more discussion about the reason for this assumption. A combination of visual inspection and statistical tests is always used to determine the normality of variables. Two tests of normality are the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (also known as the K-S test) for samples with more than 50 observations and the Shapiro-Wilk test for samples with up to 50 observations. The null hypothesis of
Evan M. Berman (Essential Statistics for Public Managers and Policy Analysts)
Those with AS engage in bullying, too. It is often directed only at those in their home; hence when NT adults or children complain about abuse in their home, they often are not believed. Until empathy disorders, the symptoms of mind blindness, context blindness and zero degrees of empathy are understood, it is very difficult for outsiders to comprehend the chaos and abuse of which Aspies are capable.
Kathy J. Marshack (Out of Mind - Out of Sight : Parenting with a Partner with Asperger Syndrome (ASD) ("ASPERGER SYNDROME" & Relationships: (Five books to help you reclaim, refresh, and perhaps save your life) Book 3))
The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra If is a polynomial of degree , then has at least one zero in the complex number domain. In other words, there is at least one complex number such that .
CK-12 Foundation (CK-12 Math Analysis)
thought you went to college here. Did you party too much and drop out?” “No, I got a philosophy degree.” “Oh.” “I’ll get the guns.
Bobby Adair (Zero Day (Slow Burn, #1))
Human beings are the most adaptable animals on Earth. Human beings are the most intelligent animal, but there are a number of events that could wipe us out. Our vast intellect may not be enough to counter meteors, plagues,  weather changes, radiation, etc. One animal has survived all of these – the tardigrade. The tardigrade is a half-millimeter sized microorganism. So what makes the tardigrade so special? It’s the only animal to survive ALL five mass extinctions. It existed the same time as trilobites hundreds of millions of years ago and it’s still alive today. So how does it survive? To understand why it’s so strong, you need to understand what makes it weak. A tardigrade needs water. Lots of water.  If it stops drinking water for even a few minutes, it goes into a coma. When it’s in a coma, it’s practically indestructible. It’s so hard, you could smash it with a sledgehammer (and scientists have) and it didn’t leave a dent. It can withstand boiling heat, one degree above absolute zero, pressure six times stronger than the bottom of the ocean, meteor strikes, and radioactive fallout. It can even survive the depths of space. No one knows how long it can survive in this coma for but it’s been documented to last at least seventy years. If you give it a drop of water, it will come out of its coma within seconds and revert back to normal.
James Egan (The Mega Misconception Book (Things People Believe That Aren't True 5))
It was eleven forty-five, overcast, fourteen degrees above zero, and damp. Cold for any month of the year, even January. The forecast called for a major snowstorm. They said it was moving in from Chicago. Ten to fifteen inches by nightfall. It was not the best day to be standing outside, but the congressman from Arizona was oblivious to the weather.
Eric Rill (Pinnacle Of Deceit)
Noah Kagan went to UC Berkeley and graduated with degrees in Business and Economics. He worked at Intel for a short stint, and then found himself at Facebook, as employee #30. You’d think this is where the story would get really good: Noah went on to become the head of product and is now worth 10 billion dollars! That’s not what happened. Instead, he was fired after eight months. Noah has been very public about this, and it’s well documented. He even wrote about why it happened, which mostly comes down to the fact that he was young and inexperienced. Here’s where the real story gets interesting. After being fired, Noah spent ten months at Mint, another successful startup. For Noah, that was a side-hustle. After Mint, he founded KickFlip, a payment provider for social games. He also started an ad company called Gambit. Both of those companies fluttered around for a while and then fizzled out. Next came AppSumo, a daily deals website for tech software. AppSumo has done very well, and it’s still in business as of this writing, but Noah eventually turned his attention to another opportunity. While building up his other businesses, he had become an expert at email marketing, and realized there was a huge need for effective marketing tools. So he created SumoMe, a software company that helps people and companies build their email lists. SumoMe has exploded since its launch. Over 200,000 sites now use it in some capacity, and that number is growing every day. It’s easy to imagine SumoMe becoming a $100 million dollar company in a matter of years, and it’s completely bootstrapped. The company has taken zero funding from venture capitalists. That means Noah can run the business exactly how he wants. I’ve known Noah for almost ten years. I met him when my first company was getting off the ground. Several months ago, we were emailing back and forth about promoting my first book. He ended one of the emails with, “Keep the hustle strong.” I smiled when I read that. Noah is, and always will be, a hustler. He’s been hustling for his entire career―for over a decade. And he deserves everything that’s coming his way. Hustle never comes without defeat. It never comes without detours and side-projects. But the best hustlers all know this simple truth: All that matters is that you keep on hustling.
Jesse Tevelow (Hustle: The Life Changing Effects of Constant Motion)
I glance over at Raffe for the hundredth time as I huddle with Pooky Bear beneath a coat that someone gave me. I’m shivering as if it’s zero degrees, and no matter how much I hug myself, I can’t get warm. I
Susan Ee (End of Days (Penryn & the End of Days, #3))
Signal” by Captain Hank Bracker The Magnetic Compass Although there are many different compasses including the gyro compass with its repeaters, the primary compass used in the navigation of small craft is the magnetic compass. Illustrated is one somewhat larger than the average, but smaller that the magnetic compass housed in a binnacle aboard ocean going vessels. Used in traditional navigation it shows the direction relative to the geographic or cardinal points. On its face is found a diagram called a compass rose, which shows at least the primary directions of north, south, east, and west. North corresponds to zero degrees, and the angles then increase clockwise, so that east is 90 degrees, south is 180 degrees, and west is 270 degrees. Some nautical compasses are set up to allow the navigator to use the compass to take azimuths or bearings, of physical objects such as lighthouses or other aids to navigation, When transferred to a nautical charts these bearings help to establish the vessels position and allows for “Dead Reckoning Navigation.
Hank Bracker
Tolkachev was five minutes late to his meeting with the CIA case officer on the night of January 18, 1985. The streets were piled with snow, temperatures plunged to fifteen degrees below zero, and he had trouble finding a place to park. When he arrived, they exchanged verbal paroles, a few pleasantries, and walked back to Tolkachev’s car to stay warm and talk. Tolkachev
David E. Hoffman (The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal)
Table of Contents 1. Meet the Heroes 2. How Hot Was It? 3. I Scream, You Scream 4. U.F.O. Sure-Burt 5. Out-of-This-World Flavors 6. Villainous Vegetables 7. Eat Your Ice Cream 8. The Deep Brain-Freeze 9. Zombies, Zombie Everywhere 10. Spreading the Freeze 11. Robo-Cone Robots 12. Lost in Space 13. No Earthlings Allowed 14. Scoop de Loop 15. Plan Zero Degrees 16. Snow Cone Cannons 17. Zoë’s Antidote 18. Heroes Again Heroes A2Z #2 Special Preview Bowling Over Halloween 1. Meet the Heroes (Again!) 2. Cider Mill Thrills 3.
David Anthony (Heroes A2Z #1: Alien Ice Cream (Heroes A to Z))
Deerfield, Massachusetts February 28, 1704 Temperature 10 degrees below zero She was envious of Sally, who had gotten a perfect husband in Benjamin Burt. Horrified by Eliza, who had married an Indian, even if Andrew was a Praying Indian. Sickened by Abigail, whose choice was a French fur trader twenty years older than she was. How could Abigail marry a Frenchman? The French were the enemy. The English were at war with the French! Besides, Jacques had no teeth. If Mercy had to marry the enemy, she would not pick a toothless one.
Caroline B. Cooney (The Ransom of Mercy Carter)
In its first ten months of operation, the Eighth lost 188 heavy bombers and some 1,900 crewmen; those numbers would skyrocket over the next year and a half. By the end of the conflict, the U.S. air operations in Europe would suffer more fatalities—26,000—than the entire Marine Corps in its protracted bloody campaigns in the Pacific. “To fly in the Eighth Air Force in those days,” recalled Harrison Salisbury, “was to hold a ticket to a funeral. Your own.” The savagery of the air war was not due solely to the ferocity of German defenses. Early in the war, when the Air Force brass in Washington were touting the advantages of high-altitude flying, they failed to realize that the extreme atmospheric conditions experienced by the crews could kill as effectively as a Messerschmitt or Focke-Wulf. “There are apparently little things that one doesn’t think about prior to getting into operations,” commented Dr. Malcolm Grow, the Eighth’s chief medical officer. Little things like oxygen deprivation, which could cause unconsciousness and death in a matter of minutes, or extensive frostbite, caused by several hours of exposure to temperatures of 50 to 60 degrees below zero. Until early 1944, more airmen were hospitalized for frostbite than for combat injuries. As
Lynne Olson (Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood with Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour)
like failures. Plan Zero Degrees had succeeded.
David Anthony (Heroes A2Z #1: Alien Ice Cream (Heroes A to Z))
The Pen Made for the White House Presidents come and go, but one thing remains constant in the West Wing BY DAN LEWIS FROM NOW I KNOW PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM VOORHES The pens read “Skilcraft U.S. Government.” And if you have worked for an American government institution, chances are you’ve used one. About $5 million worth of these pens are sold every year (with 60 percent going to the military), and they have quite the story behind them. To start, they’re assembled by the blind. In 1938, in the midst of the Great Depression, the government stepped in to help blind workers, who were already at a competitive disadvantage. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed into law the Wagner-O’Day Act, which required that the federal government purchase specific goods manufactured by blind Americans. The law soon included pens. The Skilcraft brand came to be a decade or so later, in 1952. Today, the company employs over 5,500 blind workers in 37 states, producing an arsenal of office supplies, with the pens made in factories in Wisconsin and North Carolina. The pens must be built to the specifications outlined in a 16-page document that was first promulgated more than 50 years ago. Among the requirements? The pens must be able to write continuously for no less than 5,000 feet and in temperatures up to 160 degrees and down to 40 degrees below zero. You know, just in case. Copyright © 2011 by Dan Lewis.
Anonymous
I thought you went to college here. Did you party too much and drop out?” “No, I got a philosophy degree.” “Oh.
Bobby Adair (Zero Day / Infected / Destroyer (Slow Burn, #1-3))
Second, what properties distinguish an otherwise empty volume that retains only some black-body radiation at zero temperature-dubbed zero-degree radiation-from truly empty space? We will show that one remarkable feature of zero-degree radiation is shared with empty space: An observer is unable to determine whether he is at rest or moving with constant speed with respect to it.
Henning Genz (Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space)
The parameter we hold responsible for the ability or inability of a particle to move with a velocity other than that of light is its mass. When the mass is zero, such as that of a real photon, the particle has to move with the velocity of light at all times; for finite masses, its velocity can take any value below the velocity of light, and can also be zero. We saw that quantum mechanics treats light as a current of mass-zero particles called photons, which have to move with the greatest possible velocity across space. That space, real space, contains the pervasive Higgs field. The photon is one of the particles-it might even be the only one!-that does not interact with the Higgs field and can therefore move in this field without being slowed down. We might redefine the influence of the Higgs field on the velocities of the particles it interacts with in the following way: The Higgs field imparts effective masses to the particles-which, above the critical temperature of 10^15 degrees, are massless like the photon.
Henning Genz (Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space)
On one hand, the state of being “animated” implies the most general of all affective conditions (that of being “moved” in one way or another), but also a feeling that implies being “moved” by a particular feeling, as when one is said to be animated by happiness or anger. Animatedness thus seems to have both an unintentional and intentional form. In a strange way, it seems at once a zero-degree feeling and a complex meta-feeling, which not only takes other feelings as its object, but takes only other intentional feelings as its object. For we can speak of someone’s being “animated” by a passion like anger, but not by an objectless mood like nostalgia or depression, which tend to have a de-animating effect on those affected by them.
Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings)
Even an ostensibly degree-zero affect like animatedness has a version of this subjective/objective problematic at its core—namely, the question of whether “animation” designates highspiritedness, or a puppet-like state analogous to the assembly-line mechanization of the human body famously dramatized by Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times.
Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings)
We recall that the term inflation stands for the explosive growth of the universe by a factor of 10^50 in the time span between t = 10 ^-36 and t = 10 ^ -33 seconds. This is the time sequence suggested by the original Big Bang model but does not necessarily depend on it. In our present context, it is important to see what triggered the inflationary expansion. The models we mentioned have a vacuum state of our world pass from a symmetric phase into one with reduced symmetries. At the onset of inflation, some 10^-36 or 10^-35 seconds after the Big Bang, the initial era of the universe, when all the forces had the same strength, has long since passed; that ur-state had held only until t = 10^-44 seconds. Tryon's model includes the possibility that no matter at all existed before the onset of inflation; there was only empty space, but all the laws of nature did exist. In the model of Hartle and Hawking, inflation simply follows what they call the Planck time, the time at which quantum mechanical uncertainty also included space and time. It is at that time that the symmetry of the TOE, the theory of everything, collapsed. Now back to the start of inflation at t = 10^-36 seconds: Up to it, and ever since the Planck time, there have been two forces-gravity and the unified forces of the elementary particles. All particles shared mass zero at the onset of inflation; all forces shared range infinity. The universe was, at a temperature of 10^28 degrees- sufficiently cold to permit the crystallization of a preferential direction in the abstract space of particle properties. This is analogous to the emergence of a direction of magnetization, as we discussed above-with the one difference that we have generalized geometric space to an abstract space.
Henning Genz (Nothingness: The Science Of Empty Space)
This 'Planck length' is the only quantity with the dimensions of a length that can be built from the three mist fundamental constants of Nature: the velocity of light c, Planck's constant h, and Newton's gravitational conatant G. It is given by Lp = (Gh/c^3)^1/2 = 4 X 10 ^ -33 cm. This tiny dimension encapsulates the attributes of a world that is at once relativistic (c), quantum mechanical (h), and gravitational (G). It is a standard of length that makes no reference to any artefact of man or even of the chemical and nuclear forces of Nature. Relative to this unit of length, the size of the entire visible universe today extends roughly 10^60 Planck lengths, but the cosmological constant must be less than 10^-118 when referred to these Planck units of length rather than centimetres. To have to consider such a degree of smallness is unprecedented in the entire history of science. Any quantity that is required to be so close to zero by observation must surely in reality be precisely zero. This is what many cosmologists believe. But why?
John D. Barrow (Theories of Everything: The Quest for Ultimate Explanation)