Forthekids forwards a meme. I think I did this once upon a time, but it stays interesting.
Grab the nearest book.
Check. The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity by James Lovelock, J. E. Lovelock
Go to page 123.
Check.
Write down the 6th through 8th sentences:
Today it seems their intuitions, the unconscious summing up of the evidence coming into their sense about the world, give a gloomy message. In a similar way, perhaps, the stridency of the sceptics of global heating hides and reveals their fear that they may be wrong.
Fear of the Devil and of hell fire, so common in past centuries, now seems replaced by fear of cancer.
Pass it on to three others.
Rereason's Mike, Evolution's j.d., and Unholy Moses of Thou Shall Not Suck.
Go forth and do likewise.
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"However, with care, experience, and the applicaton of minds created by God to oversee his creation, we should be able to interpret nature as biblical exegetes do Scripture. The rocks and fossils of the Earth form patterns we are to 'read' in this other version of God's creation story.
The following discussion of geology in natural history provides data as a context for evolution."
Essay, "Geological Framework of an Evolving Creation, Jeffrey Greenberg. From "Perspectives on an Evolving Creation," ed. Keith B. Miller (c)2003
You asked for it. Paperweight, by Stephen Fry.
Christoper Lee (the BBC's Defence Correspondent) ruins for me an otherwise excellent (though brief) selection of cricket writing (a great deal of which has been seen before) with irritating and monstrously prejudiced interpolations: 'I discovered that The Game was a bond ... (he insists on calling cricket The Game) ... there was a common cynicism towards the antics and sometimes the motives of the professional game. Many cricket followers are reactionaries, which is no bad thing, except that modern players are not reactionaries.' I shall never listen to Mr Lee analysing Superpower Summits in quite the same way again.
T. H. White, The Once and Future King:
[The young Arthur has been changed by Merlin into the shape of an ant, and visits an ant colony] He found small pathways among the boulders, wandering tracks both aimless and purposeful, which led toward the grain store, and also in various other directions which he could not understand. One of these paths ended at a clod with a natural hollow underneath it. In the hollow -- again with the strange appearance of aimless purpose -- he found two dead ants. They were laid there tidily but yet untidily, as if a very tidy person had taken them to the place, but had forgotten the reason when he got there. They were curled up, and did not seem to be either glad or sorry to be dead. They were there, like a couple of chairs.
"When reality confronts our notion of what reality *should* be, reality always wins. (Drop something while believing gravity *shouldn't* make it fall. It falls anyway.)"
From "Life 101: Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life In School -- But Didn't" by Peter McWilliams - Prelude Press ©1991, 1994
I love you, Josh! Thanks for playing.
The closest English book is "Handbook of industrial electronic control circuits" circa 1955 (vacume tubes, yay)
A simpler control giving a reasonably flat speed-torque characteristic can be obtained by employing thyratrons to regulate the alternating voltage applied to an a-c comutator motor so as to maintain the preset speed under load. Such a system is essentially an ajustable electronic governor. Full voltage is applied to the motor until its speed approaches the preset value.
Okay ... sorry I'm late on this one. I'll be posting tonight. The only issue is what book to choose (I literally have a few hundred within four feet in my little home office).
I'll just blindly grab one and see what happens. Oh, and I'll reject it if it's the 501 Latin Verbs. Don't ask ...