Zero Degrees Quotes

If it’s zero degrees outside today and it’s supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold is it going to be?

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.

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.

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.

empathy is like a universal solvent. Any problem immersed in empathy becomes soluble.

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.

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!

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.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance and the moment when it attempts to die.

A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.

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.

الفن لا شئ سوى الكمال في تقليد الواقع

اللغة بطبيعتها تميل إلى تدمير ذاتها

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

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.)

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.

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.

كل كتابة ثقافية هي أولى طفرات الفكر

اللسان والأسلوب هما قوة عشواء أما الكتابة فهي فعل تضامن تاريخي

الأدب مثل الفوسفور يكون أكثر لمعانا لحظة موته

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.

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. . .

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.

اللسان إذن ما قبل الأدب والأسلوب هو مابعده تقريبا فالصور والإلقاء تولد من جسم الكاتب وماضيه لتغدو شيئا فشيئا آليات فنه ذاتها

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

الرواية موت , وهي تجعل من الحياة قدرا , ومن الذكرى فعلا مفيدا , ومن الديمومة زمنا موجها له دلالة

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.

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

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.

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.

Aussi, le style est-il toujours un secret[...]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

... 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.

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.

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.

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.

At ground zero, directly beneath the airburst, the temperature reached perhaps 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone on the bridge was incinerated, and hundreds of fires were ignited. The blast wave flattened buildings, a firestorm engulfed the city, and a mushroom cloud rose almost ten miles into the sky. From the plane, Hiroshima looked like a roiling, bubbling sea of black smoke and fire. A small amount of fissile material was responsible for the devastation; 98.62 percent of the uranium in Little Boy was blown apart before it could become supercritical. Only 1.38 percent actually fissioned, and most of that uranium was transformed into dozens of lighter elements. About eighty thousand people were killed in Hiroshima and more than two thirds of the buildings were destroyed because 0.7 gram of uranium-235 was turned into pure energy. A dollar bill weighs more than that.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

In fact, before Hawking, all physicists would have claimed that black holes were indeed black bodies, but black bodies at absolute zero. Now, it's not correct to say that black bodies don't give off any light at all. Take a sooty pot and heat it to a few hundred degrees, low, and eventually it will have a bright bluish white appearance. Curiously, according to the physicists' definition, the sun is a black body. How odd, you say; the sun is about as far from being black as anything you can imagine. Indeed, the sun's surface radiates plenty of light, but it reflects none. To a physicist, that makes it a black body.

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

The seventeen Dauntlesses of Lieutenant Wally Short’s Bombing Five, which had circled around to take up a better initial diving position, followed about three minutes later. Plummeting toward the Shokaku at a 70-degree angle, they were harassed by Zeros and their windshields fogged over. Yet they somehow managed to plant two 1,000-pound bombs on the flight deck, one fore and one aft. The second was dropped by Lieutenant John J. Powers, who held his dive to below 1,000 feet before releasing. The low drop guaranteed that he would not survive—the explosion of his own bomb, on the starboard side abaft of the Shokaku’s island, engulfed his aircraft. It was virtually a suicide attack; Powers traded his life (and that of his rear-seat man) to remove the possibility of missing the target. He was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor.

[...] 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.

But as for any effective opposition to a war—I wouldn’t care to put it above zero. It always demands a far greater degree of courage for an individual to oppose an organized movement than to let himself be carried along with the stream—individual courage, that is, a variety of courage that is dying out in these times of progressive organization and mechanization. During the war practically the only courage I came across was mass courage, the courage that comes of being one of a herd, and anyone who examines this phenomenon more closely will find it to be compounded of some very strange elements : a great deal of vanity, a great deal of recklessness and even boredom, but, above all, a great deal of fear—yes, fear of staying behind, fear of being sneered at, fear of independent action, and fear, above all, of taking up a stand against the mass enthusiasm of one’s fellows. It was

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

As a matter of principle, fundamental thought is bottomless. It is, if you wish, an abyss. This means that it is never with itself, that we find it next to or setting out from things thought, that it is an opening out—the other invisible extremity of the axis which connects us to ideas and things. Must we say that this extremity is nothing?...It would be better to speak of "the visible and the invisible," pointing out that they are not contradictory, than to speak of "being and nothingness." One says invisible as one says immobüe—not in reference to something foreign to movement, but to something which stays still. The invisible is the limit or degree zero of visibility, the opening of a dimension of the visible.

Originality is merely a minor, secondary bonus to the pleasure of thought. Individuality, too, is a secondary aspect of the will and desire. The will is never mine; desire is never mine. For them to be will and desire, they have to circulate and be exchanged as symbolic material. For want of this symbolic devolution, we operate a technical transfer of all these functions on to machines — a transference of the human on to the inhuman. Now, if some human being thinks for me, nothing is lost. He is not lost, neither am I. Whereas if a machine thinks in my stead, we are both lost. In fact, this stage of the transference on to the machine is past. Today, it is machines which transfer their functions on to man. Man's fetishization of the machine has been succeeded by the fetishization of man by the machine. Today, it is man who has become the object of the perverse desire of the machine, of its desire to function at all costs. The machine is no longer an excrescence or a protruberance of man – it is man who is now merely the sex organ of the machine (Burroughs). And this is still quite a large claim, for what sex is the machine? Man has, rather, become the inflatable prosthesis of a sexless machine – the phantom limb of a useless function. The infinite degree, the degree zero, degree Xerox of the libido. Among those devices whose virtual libido man stokes up, there is of course the computer, of which man is the unconscious masturbator and his brain a hyper-object of concupiscence, but there is also the spectacularized body of woman, become a bachelor machine, a promotional and pornographic hypostasis, of which man is merely the sexless operator, the slavish voyeur, the auto-decoder.

This Eros as the logic of an incarnated, dialectical life which refers to itself...is an unconsciousness...What is this me which is not me, this weight, this surplus on this side of that of me which appears to me...? It is sensing itself...dispossession, ek-stasis, participation or identification, incorporation or ejection....a blind, nondifferentiated recognition (of the touching and the touched, of me and my image over there), the zero - degree of difference. The sensed=I don't know and I have always known it. We do not need to know what it is since we see it...To see is to think without thinking.

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.

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.

like performing a trick with a degree of difficulty of zero.

Many dragonflies, for instance, lay their eggs in water. For millions of years, their visual systems have guided them to bodies of water appropriate for oviposition. This is an impressive feat and might suggest that their visual systems have evolved to report the truth about water. Experiments reveal instead that they have evolved a quick and cheap perceptual trick. Water slightly polarizes the light that reflects from it, and dragonfly visual systems have evolved to detect this polarization. Unfortunately for the dragonfly, Homo sapiens have recently discovered uses for crude oil and asphalt, and these substances polarize light to an even greater degree than does water. Dragonflies find pools of oil even more attractive than bodies of water, and end up dying in large numbers. They also are attracted to asphalt roads. Pools of oil and asphalt roads are now ecological traps for these dragonflies. Apparently their visual system evolved a quick trick to find water: Find something that polarizes light, the more polarization the better. In the environment in which they evolved, this trick was a useful guide to behavior and allowed them to avoid constructing a complex understanding of the truth.

Literature is like phosphorus: it shines with its maximum brilliance at the moment when it attempts to die. — Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero. (Hill and Wang; Reissue edition April 1, 1977) Originally published 1953,

Yeah I'm one broken mofo. I still care for myself tho. Keep it tidy. Still fit. No one does blip for me. I still eat and mingle with nature. Still recovering. Depression is a bear. It doesn't help that my ever best friend spits bullets. I asked one innocent thing. I begged to drop g's no strings attached. I knew we'd hit it off, maybe for life. I ached for it. Your gift, my trampoline. A hug. Some fun. Some delightful brain food. A happy that would last ages. It's a catch-22 scenario. I begin in the negative to someday find happiness, but I need happiness to get me out of the negative. What am I supposed to do? Take drugs? I teemed for 24 hours anticipating you. That was quite a drug. You call it a conversation? Nah, we be flingin. It's something; a dash of hope. You guesser, judge, jury, executioner. Thinkin I'm some monster by default. Guesser of what I meant. Guessed wrong. It's a choice. You could help pull out the knife or stick it in deeper and twist it around. You do what you enjoy killa. For years I was the only one with a stable income. They told me I was too stupid for school. Instead, I worked to support my family. I worked near 24/7. Then wham, catastrophe. Eugenics at play. Without a support system or tools to defend, you're tossed. I had a lawsuit but I failed to act in time. From zero and stranded in the sticks, I failed lots, threw away lots, I managed to make some money with my skills. Eventually I helped get a house in a decent neighborhood. They let a drug addicted hooker in. I fought the drug fiends. I paid the mortgage debt, several months behind, to save the place, but in the end, I couldn't win. They insisted on moving here. I was the only one with money. I came with to battle the new crisis and to recoup my losses until I figured out what to do next. Couldn't just abandon the kids. Over time the situation improved. Drugs were defeated. I didn't intend to stay. This place got to me. I am ashamed and battered by it all. No, I don't mess with drugs. I found the landscape of my field where most of the jobs are at has changed extensively over the years. I wasn't concentrated on that area. I'm obsolete. Without a degree, you're auto discarded. Still ways in, but I need to be on my A-game. Not going anywhere without exuding confidence. I'm all twisted up inside. Loneliness eating at me. Cold cruel world. My best friend dodgin me. All work, all alone, as it's always been. Can't do it all alone. In the end, what do I get? A hostile mob? Walked in for a chat. What I got was wacked.

What I want, in short, is that my (mobile) image, buffeted among a thousand shifting photographs, altering with situation and age, should always coincide with my (profound) "self"; but it is the contrary that must be said: "myself" never coincides with my image; for it is the image which is heavy, motionless, stubborn (which is why society sustains it) , and "myself" which is light, divided, dispersed; like a bottle-imp, "myself" doesn't hold still, giggling in my jar: if only Photography could give me a neutral, anatomic body, a body which signifies nothing! Alas, I am doomed by (well meaning) Photography always to have an expression: my body never finds its zero degree, no one can give it to me (perhaps only my mother? For it is not indifference which erases the weight of the image-the Photomat always turns you into a criminal type, wanted by the police-but love, extreme love).

On January 14, 1973, the Dolphins arrived at Super Bowl VII with a perfect record. During the 1972 regular season, the Dolphins won every game. They won all their playoff games. They were undefeated. Their 1972 season record was 16–0–0. Sixteen wins, zero losses, zero ties. If they took the Super Bowl, too, they would become the first NFL team to win all their games. Their record would be 17–0–0. Sports history! The Dolphins were playing the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII. The game was played in Los Angeles, California. It was the hottest day in Super Bowl history: 84 degrees. The Dolphins scored two touchdowns during the first half. Garo Yepremian added two points with his extra-point kicks. The Dolphins left the field at halftime leading 14–0. They returned for the second half feeling fine. With a little more than two and a half minutes left in the game, the Redskins still had not scored. The Miami defense was overwhelming. Even Shula was sure the Dolphins were going to win. Fans were hoping

This is how LeMay described flying the Hump. And LeMay never complained about anything. It was a grueling hell…The mountains were a veritable smorgasbord of meteorological treachery—violent downdrafts, high winds and sudden snowstorms—all served up in temperatures 20 degrees below zero. As if they needed any reminding, the crews could frequently glimpse the 29,028-foot peak of Mount Everest thrusting up through the clouds just 150 miles from their flight path.

A key point is that an increased number of attributes relative to training points provides additional degrees of freedom to the optimization problem, as a result of which irrelevant solutions become more likely. Therefore, a natural solution is to add a penalty for using additional features. Specifically we can add a penalty for each parameter w i, which is non-zero. One can express this penalty using the L 0-norm of the vector

Maybe you can explain how you figured out the time of death.” He flips through his report. It’s an act. He can recite verbatim the contents of his reports from twenty years ago. “In both cases, I put the time of death between one and four in the morning.” “I’ve wondered how you figured that out.” Actually, I already know. He knows I know. I still want to hear it from him. It’s a free preview of his testimony. “We look at a number of factors. First, we look at body temperature, which drops by about one and a half degrees per hour after death. Second, we look at lividity. When you die, your blood pressure goes down to zero, and your body begins to discolor. We can calculate the time of death based upon the amount of discoloration. We look at food in the victim’s stomach. We see how far the digestive process has gone. We know Mr. Holmes and Ms. Kennedy ate dinner around ten o’clock. There was undigested food in their stomachs. Mr. Holmes had crab cakes. Ms. Kennedy ate a cheeseburger. We do a number of other tests.” I try to sound like an earnest high-school student. “And from this evidence, you concluded the time of death was between one and four in the morning

Followers of Jesus need to come back to the reality that baptism is their primary pledge of allegiance, 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.

Yes, I know ES-10, the planet called Crious, in the native language. It is ninety-eight light-years from Earth, on a zero azimuth, eighteen degrees forty east course from our present location. Once in clear space, the travel time is approximately six days, four hours, nine minutes. Time estimates will depend on traffic within the designated stellar system and landing protocols.

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.

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.

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

Did you party too much and drop out?” “No, I got a philosophy degree.

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.

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.

It was only after the Second World War that the US-with its industrial supremacy now unchallenged- liberalized its trade and started championing the cause of free trade. But the US has never practised free trade to the same degree as Britain did during its free trade period (1860 to 1932). It has never had a zero-tariff regime like Britain. It has also been much more aggressive in using non-tariff protectionist measures when necessary. Morever, even when it shifted to freer (if not absolutely free) trade, the US government promoted key industries by another means, namely, public funding of R&D. Between the 1950s and the mid-1990s, US federal government funding accounted for 50-70% of the country's total R&D funding, which is far above the figure of around 20%, found in such 'governemen-led' countries as Japan and Korea. Without federal government funding for R&D, the US would not have been able to maintain its technological lead over the rest of the world in key industries like computers, semiconductors, life sciences, the internet and aerospace.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

How many planes there are, we do not know. The levels of nature that science discriminates give us no clue, for these all pertain to size which, being an aspect of space, belongs to our plane only. (We discount as irrelevant for present purposes the peculiar modes of space we experience when dreaming.) The entire size-continuum, from minutest particle to our 26-billion-light-year universe, falls along the horizontal arms we see. The planes that bracket this central one—central from our point of view—may be indefinite in number, but even if they are, something can be said about their antipodes. As the levels of reality array themselves along the vertical axis in descending degrees of reality, reality being (as noted in the preceding chapter) worth's final criterion, the bottom of the arm represents the point—a fraction of a degree above absolute zero as we might say—where being phases out completely; all that could lie beyond this margin is a nothing that is as unthinkable as it is non-existent. The top of the axis represents the opposite of this, that is, everything. Opposites being well acquainted, this everything shares in common with its antithesis the fact that it too cannot be imaged, but unlike complete nothingness it can be conceived. Being we experience, whereas nothing, by itself, we do not. The zenith of being is Being Unlimited, Being relieved of all confines and conditionings. The next chapter will discuss it; for now we simply name it. It is All-Possibility, the Absolute, the In-finite in all the directions that word can possibly point." from_The Forgotten Truth_

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.

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

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.

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.