The word conjecture derives from a root notion of throwing or casting things together, and over the centuries it has referred to prophecies as well as to reasoned judgments, tentative conclusions, whole-cloth inventions, and wild guesses. “Since I have mingled celestial physics with astronomy in this work, no one should be surprised at a certain amount of conjecture,” wrote Johannes Kepler in his Astronomia Nova of 1609. “This is the nature of physics, of medicine, and of all the sciences which make use of other axioms besides the most certain evidence of the eyes.” Here conjecture allows him to press
The question of when the Lone Star State will “turn blue” has become as predictable a feature of the Texas campaign season as flags, bunting, Ted Nugent cameos, and generalized public indifference. It’s treated as a math problem. Political analysts come to us with calculations and charts, quantifying the growth of the Hispanic population and tossing around percentages—of eligible Hispanic voters, actual Hispanic voters, and actual Hispanic voters who will vote for Democrats—to predict just when the state might once again claim a Democratic majority. In Texas as elsewhere, we’ve become preoccupied with the numbers game: Everyone’s a strategist.
It’s counterintuitive to think of the British Museum as a happening spot, but for a long time its reading room served as a premier gathering place for London’s brainy bohemians. In the 1880s, these included radicals like George Bernard Shaw, Henry Havelock Ellis, and Eleanor Marx, Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. They worked there, and they talked during smoke breaks and visits to Bloomsbury tea shops. They moved fluidly between politics and the arts, deploring factory conditions as fervently as they dissected Ibsen’s plays. The reading room was a vital seedbed for such Victorian-era social-reform causes as women’s rights and trade-union
One day in August of 2012, the ground began to tremble in the tiny town of Bayou Corne, Louisiana, the smell of oil filled the air, and the bottom of a nearby bayou tore open. Earth, brush, and trees were sucked under, as though down a drain, while oil oozed to the surface. The sinkhole, which eventually covered thirty-seven acres, was not a spontaneous development: Underground drilling by a company called Texas Brine had pierced the wall of a subterranean cavern, and the cavern had collapsed. The eerie disaster made a ghost town of Bayou Corne, after the state of
The Marcellus Shale is a 575-mile-long stretch of sedimentary rock, most of it deep underground, that settled millions of years ago over the imprint of an ancient sea. It lies beneath much of Appalachia, extending up through western and northern Pennsylvania and a section of western New York. Trapped within the rock are vast stores of natural gas, and because it’s so close to existing gas pipelines and the cities of the East Coast, the Marcellus Shale has long been, for energy companies, an attractive prize—“like discovering an underground deposit of beer directly beneath Yankee Stadium,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben
If you’d asked me, fifteen years ago, to picture a group of activists up in arms about illegal immigration, I might’ve imagined a small gathering of eccentrics at some suburban restaurant, passing around xeroxed pamphlets. At least in Texas, where I live, immigration was a marginal concern. Conservative activists here considered gays and lesbians more of a threat than laborers from Mexico. There were two main channels of Republican politics, pro-business and Christian-right, and to be a hard-core nativist was to subscribe to a fusty extremism not really embraced within either one.
The way this story begins, it could be the setup of a math or physics problem. Two astronomers and their assistants depart England, one pair headed south toward the island of Príncipe, the other southwest, to Brazil. Meanwhile the moon, as it loops around the earth, will soon occupy a position between the earth and the sun. Once the observers reach their tropical outposts, they assemble their equipment and wait for the moon and the sun to line up exactly: a solar eclipse.
As they approached the station, Frank appeared a little nervous about something. The cause of his anxiety was apparent when the carriage stopped. He was the first to get out and the first to mount the platform. Somebody was evidently waiting for him. “To tell him about the life preserver—and maybe to deliver it!” Then he saw it. They began to drop swiftly, coming ever closer to the field. And then they set down, safe and unmolested. It struck even through Landor's pain-blurred brain that it was odd. But the few faculties he could command still were all engaged in keeping himself in the saddle until he could reach his own house, where Ellton and Felipa were waiting to get him to his room. It was failure, flat failure. The officers knew it, and the general knew it. It was the indefinite prolongation of the troubles. It was the ignominious refutation of all his boasts—boasts based not so much upon trust in himself, as on belief in the nature of the Apache, whose stanch champion he had always been. The storm grew every day more violent, and on the 11th of February, 1741, Sandys, who had acquired the name of "the Motion Maker," announced that he intended to make a motion for a direct condemnation of the Minister, and for his removal from office. On the following Friday Sandys made his threatened motion of condemnation. The surprise of the debate occurred when Shippen—"the thorough Shippen," as he was called—said that he would not join in the ruin of the assailed Minister. He declared that he never followed any dictates of self-interest, and cared little who was in or out, unless he could see a prospect of different measures; but that he regarded this movement only as the attempt to turn out one Administration in order to bring another in. He would therefore have no concern in it, and with that he withdrew, followed by thirty-four of his party. All Prince Frederick's servants and party also, except Lyttelton, Pitt, and Granville, left the House; so that, though there were more than five hundred members present at the commencement of the debate, when the question came to be put there were not above four hundred. Nevertheless, the whole army was dead beat and in the most deplorable condition when they entered Carlisle on the morning of the 19th. As the enemy did not appear, they rested that day and the following night, when they set forward again, leaving a fresh garrison. Cumberland was soon up before the walls, and they fired vigorously at him; but he sent off to Whitehaven and brought up six eighteen-pounders, with which, to their dismay, he began to play on their crumbling walls on the 29th. Next morning they hung out a white flag, and offered to capitulate; but Cumberland would hear of no terms except their surrendering on condition that they should not be put to the sword. At three o'clock in the afternoon both town and castle were surrendered, the garrison being shut up in the cathedral, and a guard set upon them. On the 3rd of January the Duke of Cumberland left the command to General Hawley, and hastened back to London, being summoned to defend the southern coast from a menaced landing of the French. A squad of Provost-Guards came up at a double-quick, deployed, surrounded the squad and began bunching the boys together rather roughly, using the butts of their muskets. "Well, from the talk that comes down from headquarters," said Si, "he may need every man. We've never had enough men so far. The rebels have always had more men than we did, and had the advantage of position. We only won by main strength and bull-headedness, and Rosecrans's good management. The rebels are straining every nerve to put up the fight o' their lives, and they say old Jo Johnston's got nearly as many men over there at Buzzard Roost as we have, and works that beat them we hustled Bragg out of around Tullyhomy." She raised her head and looked him full in the face, her eyes like a bright challenge. Her face was quite sober when she spoke. "I'm in Psych, but it's more than morale, Johnny. We're—always thinking up new ways to keep the little Alberts in their place. Put it that way. Though nobody's really come up with an improvement on the original notion." I push buttons and the machine obeys me, The rest of that day Reuben was a little happier. He felt comforted and stimulated, life was not so leaden. In the evening he worked a little in the hop-gardens. They were almost cleared now, and the smoke of the drying furnaces was streaming through the cowls of the oasts, shedding into the dusk a drowsy, malt-sweetened perfume. When the moon hung like a yellow splinter above Iden Wood, the pickers went home, and Reuben[Pg 326] turned in to his supper, which for the first time since Rose's flight he ate with hearty pleasure. "Hasten, master, open the door," answered the servitor. HoME里美尤利娅绝对美少女
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