Quotes from Douglas E. Richards

You're traveling through another dimension, a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind." —Rod Serling, opening narration, season two (and perhaps the better known version)

We can't react in any meaningful way in this amount of time. But what about computers? For a computer, a half-second is a huge amount of time. So say you programmed a computer to see an uptick in a stock's price, send this information back to itself a half-second earlier, and put in a buy order." "I'm

A man does what he must—in spite of personal consequences, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures—and that is the basis of all human morality." —Winston Churchill

And while humanity is still barbaric in many ways, we've come a long way since Nazi Germany.

There was an old joke that had always struck Delamater as defining of the human species. A man asks a woman if she would sleep with him for ten million dollars. She agrees. He then asks if she would sleep with him for a dollar. She is aghast. "What kind of woman do you take me for?" she asks. To that, the man responds, "We have established what you are, madam. Now we're just haggling over the price.

Humanity was fiercely tribal. And young men, in particular, were wired to seek out adventure, glory, and esteem. ISIS was cool. ISIS was a brotherhood fighting together for a glorious cause. Killing together, raping unbelievers together. What could cement fraternal bonds more completely than this? And in addition to offering adventure, glory, and camaraderie, ISIS offered something even more important: purpose.

If I had to use a term other than UFO, I preferred another new term, UAV, which stood for Unidentified Aerial Vehicle.

In 1996, Eastman Kodak was a hundred-year-old powerhouse with one hundred forty thousand employees and a valuation of twenty-eight billion dollars. Yet a mere sixteen years later, the company was filing for bankruptcy, a T. Rex dinosaur that had failed to fathom the disruptive power and game-changing impact of the digital photography revolution. In

Duplicity (Noun) Deceitfulness in speech or conduct; double-dealing. Synonyms: deceit, deception, fraud, guile, trickery. The state or quality of having two elements or parts; being twofold or double. —Dictionary.com

I would define qualia as subjective experiences, sensations," he replied, "that only conscious entities seem to be able to have. How a thing seems. How it feels. How it affects a consciousness emotionally and spiritually. The pain of a toothache. The beauty of a sunset. The taste of wine.

and ah . . . pop my cork, so to speak.

Politics, noun: [Poly 'many' + tics 'blood-sucking parasites']" ?—Larry Hardiman

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this—you haven't." —Thomas Edison

This Fyfe kept a very low profile. He must have been worth tens of millions, minimum, but there was very little about him online—Altschuler had checked. Occasionally he was written up for donating to this charity or that, but he managed to keep his business interests strictly out of the public eye.

I watched as social media made us more connected than ever—but also more tribal than ever—and saw political parties continue to go at each other's throats like never before. I watched as the anger and hysteria grew, stoked by politicians looking to push their followers to the polls.

Good to know. Because proposing while we're both naked is pretty pathetic. Bad form.

She could stay out all night without feeling the least bit tired, but when she first awoke she felt like a slug. And

Survival of the fittest

vacuuming up countless pages of the genre like a blue whale inhaling krill.

we're not allowed to ruin the now by beating ourselves up over the then.

This led Einstein to postulate that gravity isn't a force at all, but a geometric property, the warping of the fabric of space-time itself.

Horatius at the Bridge?

You don't win a war by dying for your country. You win a war by making the other dumb bastard die for his.

Hard science fiction. Mind-blowing, breathtaking, hard science fiction.