"Zero" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... with its snow and zero weather, and Pocahontas heard of great hunger and many privations among the colonists. She held a long secret conversation with the Indian warrior who knew of her interest in the pale-faced Caucarouse, ...
— Ten American Girls From History • Kate Dickinson Sweetser
... absolute desert as far as detail was concerned. Topographical knowledge was practically at zero judging by the almost blank portion of paper representing the ground between the subaltern and the twin spurs of the Karewenda Hills against which Colonel Quarrier proposed making their actual frontal attack. It was Wilmshurst's task to cross this unknown ground, finding out the ...
— Wilmshurst of the Frontier Force • Percy F. Westerman
... (Peresianus 10), the eagle (Tro-Cortesianus 107c), and the serpent (Tro-Cortesianus 106c) seem to appear but once. It might also be well to mention in this place the glyphs for various molluscs which are used not to represent the shell but to give the value of zero to the numerical calculations. ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... circumstances of its production. Indeed, as this brilliant phenomenon occurred in the midst of the very clouds which I was traversing, it was easy for me to ascertain that these clouds were not formed of frozen particles. The thermometer marked 2 deg. above zero. The hygrometer marked a maximum of humidity experienced, namely, seventy-seven at three thousand seven hundred and seventy feet, and the balloon was then at four thousand six hundred feet, where the humidity was only seventy-three. It is therefore certain that ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... down in mines to find were considerably nearer the surface. At present, were it not for the sun, the heat of the earth where we stand would hardly be appreciably above the temperature of infinite space—perhaps some 200 or 300 degrees below zero. But there must have been a time when there was sufficient internal heat to maintain the exterior at a warm and indeed at a very hot temperature. Nor is there any bound to our retrospect arising from the operation or intervention of any other agent, so far as we know; ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball
... slopes, in the face of every kind of winter threat, merely to make scientific observations. In March, 1906, Professor Johnson and Dr. Rudolph spent the night at timber-line in a pit dug in the snow to obtain protection from a gale, at the temperature of 5 deg. Fahr. below zero, and fought their way to the summit. But so withering was the gale at that altitude even at mid-day, that a precipitate retreat was made to avoid freezing. The faces of the climbers showed plainly the punishment received. Three days later Dr. Church attempted to rescue the record just as ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... good plan, and helped as well as he could with the work. They still stayed outdoors as much as possible, but the cold became intense, the temperature going almost to forty degrees below zero, the surface of the snow freezing and the boughs of the big trees about the valley becoming so brittle that they broke with sharp crashes beneath the weight of accumulated snow. Then they paused long enough in the work on the snowshoes to make themselves gloves of buckskin, which were a wonderful ...
— The Masters of the Peaks - A Story of the Great North Woods • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is a very strictly limited agency in the universe. The chief planes of its enclosing solid are, of course, organization, education, condition. Organization may reduce the power of the will to nothing, as in some idiots; and from this zero the scale mounts upwards by slight gradations. Education is only second to nature. Imagine all the infants born this year in Boston and Timbuctoo to change places! Condition does less, but "Give me neither poverty nor riches" was the prayer of Agur, and with good reason. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... down to zero in the hut, had recovered themselves marvellously in the fresh open air. ...
— The Girl Aviators' Motor Butterfly • Margaret Burnham
... you are raving about is four degrees below zero. If you can't tell me what's the matter I'm going back to bed ...
— Where There's A Will • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... Denmark lies between latitude fifty-five and fifty-eight; but, though the thermometer sometimes falls to twenty-two degrees below zero in winter, the average temperature is mild. The climate does not materially differ from the eastern coast of Massachusetts. The air is so humid that the grass and trees have a livelier green than the countries farther south, and droughts are almost unknown. When ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... part of its vast territory together, and give to an interminable continent the compactness of a small island. The facilities of communication, too, place at the command of the people of one part of the country the climate of every other. When the thermometer is below zero at New York, a journey of three days will bring the traveller to Savannah, where a genial temperature of 60 degrees, clear skies, and verdant nature, await him. And when a scorching sun is filling New Orleans with fever, the cool weather of the North, and upon the great lakes, is healthy and delightful. ...
— Canada and the States • Edward William Watkin
... 'Let me.' But she pushed me away. 'Mustn't waste time.' She gave her orders as business-like as an officer. 'Do your own saddle while I attend to this. Zero can run right away from anything they're riding—from anything at all. Can't you, Zero?' and she gave the horse a quick pat in between unbuckling. He was a powerful, rangy bay, and not winded by his run and his swim. 'He's my father's,' she went on. 'He'll carry you through to General ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... grounded or connected to an earth-plate, q. v., or to the water or gas-pipes, and the current is assumed to go through the earth on its return. It really amounts to a discharging at one end, and charging at the other end of the line. The resistance of the earth is zero, but the resistance of the grounding or connection with the earth may ...
— The Standard Electrical Dictionary - A Popular Dictionary of Words and Terms Used in the Practice - of Electrical Engineering • T. O'Conor Slone
... But even in the cabin, with two immense fires and warm clothing, it was difficult to keep warm. The water in the drinking pail, four feet from the stove, was one mass of ice. Outside, that terrible night, the thermometer in Montreal, I heard afterwards, fell to 23 degrees below zero. With us there was no thermometer to mark the temperature, but it must have ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston
... probability that any one of the above speculative answers is correct—correct for this one case. If you try this type of speculation on hundreds of sightings with "unknown" answers, the probability that the speculative answers are correct rapidly approaches zero. ...
— The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects • Edward Ruppelt
... and had been unusually inclement even for that region, where the thermometer sometimes changes fifty degrees in thirty-six hours; and at the time of his release from his room there was a period of successive changes of temperature from thawing to zero and below, a characteristic of the winter climate of Homeville and its vicinity. Dr. Hayes exhibited the inevitable quinine, iron, and all the tonics in his pharmacopoeia, with cough mixtures and sundry, but in vain. Aunt Polly pressed bottles of sovereign decoctions and infusions upon him—which ...
— David Harum - A Story of American Life • Edward Noyes Westcott
... eager to try this new medicine as a boy is to fire off a new gun. He loaded the Cometique with provisions and the medicine-chest with capsules, harnessed his team, and started up the river. Thermometer thirty degrees below zero; air like crystal; snow six feet deep ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... only have kept our great hall-doors closed, but have likewise protected them with a "hurricane-house." But the Florida frontier was not a climate in which our Southern bachelors could have acquired the knowledge available when the thermometer was twenty-five degrees below zero—a point at which brandy ...
— Wau-bun - The Early Day in the Northwest • Juliette Augusta Magill Kinzie
... one of the biggest bubbles in history, and left Russia in a profoundly humiliating situation. Her navy was practically destroyed, her armies soundly beaten, her offensive power temporarily reduced to zero, her treasury exhausted, her pride laid in the dust. If the greatness of a nation consisted in the number and size of its battleships, in the capacity of its fighting men, or in its financial prosperity, Russia would ...
— Essays on Russian Novelists • William Lyon Phelps
... will inform us that such an operation is impossible. If he sells his shares and his lands, their purchaser will continue all those activities which oppress the poor. If all the rich men take the advice simultaneously the shares will fall to zero and the lands be unsaleable. If one man sells out and throws the money into the slums, the only result will be to add himself and his dependents to the list of the poor, and to do no good to the poor beyond giving a chance few of them a drunken spree. We must therefore bear in mind that whereas, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... influences." I profess no indifference to the movements of that capricious old gentleman known as the clerk of the weather. I cannot conceal my interest in the behavior of that patriarchal bird whose wooden similitude gyrates on the church spire. Winter proper is well enough. Let the thermometer go to zero if it will; so much the better, if thereby the very winds are frozen and unable to flap their stiff wings. Sounds of bells in the keen air, clear, musical, heart-inspiring; quick tripping of fair moccasined feet on glittering ice pavements; bright ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... over the snow and ice, me without snowshoes and it thirty below zero. Yes, sir!" went on Walky, beginning to stuff the tobacco into his own pipe from Mr. Day's proffered sack. "That was some job! Miz Bob Kittridge, the old lady's darter-in-law, give me the dollar and the job; ...
— How Janice Day Won • Helen Beecher Long
... It is a good book to pick up and while away a leisure hour, perhaps, but it is not a work that could rivet your interest till midnight, while the fire went out and the thermometer stepped down to 47 deg. below zero. You do not hurry through the pages to see whether Reginald married the girl or not. Mr. Webster did not seem to care how the affair ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... the molecules of a substance were brought to a standstill, that substance would be at the absolute zero of temperature. There could be nothing colder. The temperature at which all molecular motions would cease is known: it is -273 deg. C. No body could possibly attain a lower temperature than this: ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... days the snow fell without ceasing. Then the weather cleared and the sun shone forth, and the temperature, which had risen while the ghostly snow filled the air, dropped with a rush many degrees below zero. ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum
... thing. I did not want so much to alter the place and use of things as to weight them with a new dimension; to deepen them by going down to the potential nothing; to lift them to infinity by measuring from zero. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... is indeed more frequent—the reader's fainting spirits are repaired not by the excellence of the manuscript before him, but by its absolute literary nonentity, a kind of intellectual Absolute Zero. Lack of merit may be so complete, so grotesque, that the composition affords to the sophistic eye a high order of comedy. A lady submits a poem in many ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... that which is not true, supposing it to be true, he makes a misstatement, but he does not lie; or, again, if he speaks an untruth playfully where no deception is wrought or intended, as by saying, when the mercury is below zero, that it is "good summer weather," there is no lie in ...
— A Lie Never Justifiable • H. Clay Trumbull
... highest mark is eight. Four is considered as the average, and a student not receiving this average in all the studies of a term is not allowed to remain as a member of college. At Yale the marks range from zero to four. Two is the average, and a student not receiving this is obliged to leave college, not to return until he can pass an examination in all the branches which his ...
— A Collection of College Words and Customs • Benjamin Homer Hall
... base of this material projectile uncomfortably warm, though, should we expose a thermometer in the shade in front, we know it would show a temperature of three hundred to four hundred degrees below zero—were the instrument ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... back to 4 G's, noting that RVS registered about a mile per second away from station, and suddenly became aware that the red light was on for loss of air. The cabin pressure gauge read zero, and his heart throbbed into his throat as he remembered that pinging sound, just as they passed the enemy ship. He told Garrity to see if he could locate the loss, and any other damage, and was shortly startled by a low amazed whistle in ...
— Slingshot • Irving W. Lande
... and our coats off on the back porch and left them to the tender mercies of the zero weather which ...
— Flash-lights from the Seven Seas • William L. Stidger
... than 25 seconds. This fuze was in the nose of the shell and consisted essentially of a plunger, primer, and rings grooved to hold a 9-inch train of compressed black powder. To set the fuze, the fuze man merely turned a movable ring to the proper time mark. Turning the zero mark toward the channel leading to the shell's bursting charge shortened the burning distance of the train, while turning zero away from the channel, of course, did the opposite. When the projectile ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... if multiplied By angle of rotation, Will give the distance it must glide In motion of translation. Infinite pitch means pure translation, And zero pitch means pure rotation. ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... no footman or imposing personage made his appearance; nor did any one seem to be on the look-out for my insignificant self. My spirits began to sink almost to zero, which point they reached anon in the descending scale, when, as soon as everybody else who had come by the train had bustled out of the station, an old and broken-down looking porter, in a shabby velveteen jacket, standing on the other side of the line, shouted ...
— On Board the Esmeralda - Martin Leigh's Log - A Sea Story • John Conroy Hutcheson
... well, but, by the way, uncle, if you could give me a little wood, it wouldn't hurt me. It is a little Siberia here. I am so cold, that I make a thermometer go down below zero ...
— Bohemians of the Latin Quarter • Henry Murger
... is the Senator recently seated, of whom mention has been made, and, if a lesser quantity than zero be conceivable, with a worse title to the office than he had to that of Governor of Louisiana. So far as known, he is a commonplace rogue; but his party has always rallied to his support, as the "Tenth Legion" to its ...
— Destruction and Reconstruction: - Personal Experiences of the Late War • Richard Taylor
... were roughly shattered at the sight of these buildings. He had reckoned on their resembling in some respect the prison in Glasgow, and at the sight of these formidable fortresses with their lofty walls and flanking towers, their moats and vigilant sentries, his hopes fell to zero. It would, he saw at once, be absolutely impossible to open communication with a prisoner of whose whereabouts he was wholly ignorant and of whose very existence he was doubtful. The narrow slits which lighted the cell in which he was confined might look into an inner court, ...
— Bonnie Prince Charlie - A Tale of Fontenoy and Culloden • G. A. Henty
... had by any aboard that night, and bright and early in the morning the boys, together with most of the crew, were on deck and peering over the bow. The day was a glorious one with the temperature at two below zero. The sun sparkled and flashed on the great ice-reef on which they had grounded, and which in places raised crested heads above the greenish surface of ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... most delightful voyage so far. Quite like summer. One can scarcely believe that we left America in the depth of winter, with snow everywhere and the thermometer ever so far below zero. Have you mended your deck-chair yet, sufficiently well to trust ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... indefinitely, they would hardly repay the pains of collection, so egregiously false is the doctrine they teach. Our little supposed feeling, whatever it may be, from the cognitive point of view, whether a bit of knowledge or a dream, is certainly no psychical zero. It is a most positively and definitely qualified inner fact, with a complexion all its own. Of course there are many mental facts which it is NOT. It knows Q, if Q be a reality, with a very minimum of knowledge. ...
— The Meaning of Truth • William James
... fire go out," it kept on sturdily burning, without attention or fuel, for a day and a half; whereas if he had, earlier in the season, neglected it even for a few hours, all would have been cold and silent. He remembers, for instance, the tragic evening with the mercury around zero, when, having (after supper) arranged everything at full blast and all radiators comfortably sizzling, he lay down on his couch to read Leonard Merrick, intending to give all hands a warm house for the night. Very well; but when he woke ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... You were an opera bird, too. I'll see her dead first before I let her make a zero mark out of her life as her ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... sheep smell. It was the liveliest possible spectacle of organized confusion, and the accompanying noise was calculated to split the ears of the groundlings. As the number unshorn of the installment of sheep in the pen dwindled toward zero, little groups of unoccupied shearers gathered round the posts near the low tables, lit fresh cigarettes, whipped out cards, and started a little game of monte for the checks they had in their pockets, continuing till ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... observe that the oscillations set up by the positive part of the current are not of constant amplitude but start at zero the instant the positive part begins to energize the plate and they keep on increasing in amplitude as the current rises in voltage until the latter reaches its maximum; then as it gradually drops again to zero the oscillations decrease proportionately ...
— The Radio Amateur's Hand Book • A. Frederick Collins
... case," said the skipper, with his calmness well at zero; "in that case—you, Dan! introduce yourself to ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... points. The consequence was, that the boat, as she was borne down by the tide against them, shipped a sea every moment, which the wind threw against the carcass of the corporal, who was now quite exhausted with more than four hours' exposure to a wintry night, the temperature being nearly down to zero. All the corporal's stoicism was gone; he talked wildly, crouched and gibbered in his fear, when he was suddenly roused by a heavy shock. He raised his head, which had sunk upon his chest, and beheld something close to him, and to the gunnel ...
— Snarleyyow • Captain Frederick Marryat
... the-thing-you-move-up-and-down back to the zero position, and exchanged the half-stone weight for a stone one. Excited but a trifle cold, for it was a fresh morning, and the upper part of the window was wide open, I went up from nine stone ounce ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... unprotected by shelter, and by the mere force of latitude alone? Where, for instance, does its northern limit cross the Adriatic? I learn, that the olive tree resists cold to eight degrees of Reaumur below the freezing-point, which corresponds to fourteen above zero of Fahrenheit: and that the orange resists to four degrees below freezing of Reaumur, which is twenty-three degrees ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... little Poosk was a decided waif for he had gone very much astray indeed in the North American backwoods. It was a serious matter for an Indian child of six years of age to become a waif in the dead of winter, with four feet of snow covering the entire wilderness, and the thermometer far below zero. ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... done in lead pencil and hurriedly, six is often made to look like four and a part of eight may become blurred till it looks like a zero. That would account for 1848 being transcribed as 1860. There would be nothing unusual, however, in a Sarah Jane and a Jane. I neglected to cover that point in ...
— Slave Narratives: A Folk History of Slavery in the United States - Volume II. Arkansas Narratives. Part I • Work Projects Administration
... sank to zero again, for there was the oblong of the inclosed bath occupying the left of the long, narrow place, and only just leaving room for anyone ...
— Witness to the Deed • George Manville Fenn
... console. Johnny sat raptly. A slow smile of satisfaction began to spread over his face. His gaze flicked to dials and gauges; he nodded very slightly, and brought both hands down like an organist playing a mighty chord. He watched the gauges. The needles were still, lying on their zero pins, and where lights should have flickered and flashed there was nothing. Paresi glanced at Anderson and met a worried look. Hoskins had his head cocked to one side, listening, puzzled. Ives rose from the couch and came forward to ...
— Breaking Point • James E. Gunn
... prisoners the captain and two officers of the Bulldog en route for England, where they were to be tried by court-martial for the loss of their ship. After a seven days' voyage we arrived in Halifax a few days before Christmas and found the temperature below zero, after leaving one 95 degrees above. However, we had smiling faces to meet us, and the band was down to welcome us back to our old quarters again. No casualties occurred while we were absent except ...
— A Soldier's Life - Being the Personal Reminiscences of Edwin G. Rundle • Edwin G. Rundle
... recent extension of the range of temperature at his command. When Fahrenheit stuck the bulb of his thermometer into a mixture of snow and salt he thought he had reached the nadir of temperature, so he scratched a mark on the tube where the mercury stood and called it zero. But we know that absolute zero, the total absence of heat, is 459 of Fahrenheit's degrees lower than his zero point. The modern scientist can get close to that lowest limit by making use of the cooling by the expansion principle. He first liquefies air ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... should probably observe that the most convenient would be found in the fact that an addition of heat produces a change in temperature in a body that has passed its melting point. Place a thermometer in melting snow, it marks zero until the snow is really melted, ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... be so only if the average spatial density of the matter in universal space, concentrated in the stars, vanishes, i.e. if the ratio of the total mass of the stars to the magnitude of the space through which they are scattered approximates indefinitely to the value zero when the spaces taken into consideration ...
— Sidelights on Relativity • Albert Einstein
... Stephen would have been comparatively cheerful in waiting; they would have felt that they were somewhere on the road to Cupid's garden. But, with a possibility of a shorter probation, they had not as yet any prospect of the beginning; the zero of hope had yet to be reached. Mr. Swancourt would have to revoke his formidable words before the waiting for marriage could even set in. And ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... about the plants and the holes in trees and buildings. Several having been exposed to the air in a vessel filled with snow, lived there till the 26th October; although, in that interval, the thermometer had fallen to eight degrees below zero. Some others which had been frozen continued alive equally long; for they were not found exactly encrusted with the ice, but they had formed round their bodies a space similar to the hollow of a tree. When they were plunged into water they swam about as if ...
— The Rain Cloud - or, An Account of the Nature, Properties, Dangers and Uses of Rain • Anonymous
... enough of active energy. The moon was in her second quarter, slightly filmed with very high thin clouds, that disappeared as night advanced, leaving the sky and stars in all their lustre. A sharp frost, sinking to three degrees above zero Fahrenheit, with a fine pure wind, such wind as here they call 'the mountain breath.' We drove to Wolfgang in a two-horse sledge, four of us inside, and our two Christians on the box. Up there, where ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... then, to imagine some of the difficulties that confronted the Turkish command. From Erzerum to the nearest railhead is something like 200 miles. A blinding snowstorm was raging and the temperature was hovering around 25 degrees below zero. Few roads, and those almost impassable at that season of the year, must supply all the needs of scores of thousands of men and thousands of animals, carts, trucks, ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... this technically described bad year wasn't so bad one way, because the sheepmen would sure get a tasty wallop, sheep being mighty informal about dying with the weather below zero and scant feed. When cattle wasn't hardly feeling annoyed sheep would lie down and quit intruding on honest cattle raisers for all time. Just a little attention from a party with a skinning knife was all they needed ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... but we were used to that. We kept our eyes open and our mouths shut. That's our job, and we give value for money received. So we were alert and ready. But it wasn't the attack that nearly got us this time. It was the cold of the dead planet lost in absolute zero ...
— Dead World • Jack Douglas
... for some days, and it was of importance to make preparations for the winter. However, the temperature was not as yet much lower, and a centigrade thermometer, transported to Lincoln Island, would still have marked an average of ten to twelve degrees above zero. This was not surprising, since Lincoln Island, probably situated between the thirty-fifth and fortieth parallel, would be subject, in the Southern Hemisphere, to the same climate as Sicily or Greece in the Northern Hemisphere. But as Greece and Sicily have severe cold, producing snow and ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... coal-heated brooder house, fed according to experiment-station directions, and reared in poultry houses built from experiment-station designs. From the first they have been practically free from lice and disease. She gets winter eggs. Even in zero weather and at times when feed is most costly, her spring pullets more than pay ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... and savage fights occurred in March, while the mercury was still thirty degrees below zero, and then the government decided on a great summer campaign. Generals Terry and Gibbon were to hem the Indians from the north along the Yellowstone, while at the same time General Crook was to march up and ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... under financial constraints. Iraq's seizure of Kuwait in August 1990, subsequent international economic embargoes, and military actions by an international coalition beginning in January 1991 drastically changed the economic picture. Oil exports were cut to near zero, and industrial and transportation facilities ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... been questioned in one or two details. He says that the party experienced such cold weather as was almost without precedent in Arctic travel, the temperature falling to seventy-one degrees below zero. He says that the party killed more than five hundred reindeer, besides musk-oxen, bears, walrus, and seal, in regions where Rae and McClintock could scarcely find game at all, and where the crews of the 'Erebus' and 'Terror' ...
— Schwatka's Search • William H. Gilder
... will not affect, or will affect only very slightly, the appearances from places close to the object. If the appearances from sufficiently neighbouring places are either wholly un changed, or changed to a diminishing extent which has zero for its limit, it is usually found that the changes can be accounted for by changes in objects which are between the object in question and the places from which its appearance has changed appreciably. Thus physics is able to reduce the laws ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... for the owners. I envied the owners (we've all got a touch of that in our system), because they were rich and were making profits. I knew what their profits averaged. By calling fussy little strikes often enough I could have kept the profits close to the zero mark. Thus the men would be making wages out of the business and the owners would be making nothing. But I declined to let my actions be governed by envy. The Ten Commandments forbid covetousness. The ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... found, however, was the superb autumn weather, the bright, strong, electric days, lasting well into November, and the general mildness of the entire winter. Though the mercury occasionally sinks to zero, yet the earth is never so seared and blighted by the cold but that in some sheltered nook or corner signs of vegetable life still remain, which on a little encouragement even asserts itself. I have found wild flowers here every month of the year; violets ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... disposed, without relaxation of duty. But he, as well as the turnkey, named Grant, seemed to take delight in tormenting the Americans. This man would often keep the prisoners out for many hours, in the severest weather, when the mercury was ten and fifteen degrees below zero, under a pretext that the prison had been washed, and was not sufficiently dry for their reception: when in fact every drop of water used was in a moment ice. People in the southern states, and the inhabitants of England and Ireland, can form no adequate idea of the ...
— A Journal of a Young Man of Massachusetts, 2nd ed. • Benjamin Waterhouse
... that Andrew Hedger enjoyed prime bacon. Bacon frizzling, fat rashers of real homefed on the fire-none of your foreign-suggested a genial refreshment and resistance to antagonistic elements. Nor was it, granting health, granting a sharp night—the temperature at least fifteen below zero—an excessive boast for a man to say he could go on eating ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... your Benevolence, here you accurately have it. O my surprising friends! Nowhere so as here can you be certain that a given quantity of wise teaching bestowed, of benevolent trouble taken, will yield zero, or the net Minimum of return. It is sowing of your wheat upon Irish quagmires; laboriously harrowing it in upon the sand of the seashore. ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... thinks Mr. Phillips? I saw one set; dreadfully ugly Books, errors in every page;—and to this hour I have never heard of any other! The amount remains zero net; and it would appear there was simply one copy "printed," the ugly one sent to myself, which I instantly despatched again somewhither! On second thought perhaps you had better not tell Mr. Phillips this ...
— The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834-1872, Vol II. • Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson
... the severest weather, one section being placed when the thermometer was 5 deg. above zero. When the thermometer was below the freezing point both sand and stone were heated by wood fires in large pipes under the supply piles; the temperature of the mix was taken frequently, and was kept above 40 degrees. Numerous tests made while ...
— Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers, vol. LXVIII, Sept. 1910 - The Site of the Terminal Station. Paper No. 1157 • George C. Clarke
... charming, but which would soon become misery and torture if he did not make haste to abandon it for labor. In this original idleness, the product of Prometheus being nothing, his well-being is the same as that of the brute, and may be represented by zero. ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... much as I expected—not at night, for instance. Then the existence of an olive disease anywhere near is naturally very degoutant (as they say here). And the Casino at Monte Carlo is simply an organised swindle. It ought to be put down! After staking ten times in succession on "Zero," and doubling my stake each time, I was absolutely cleared out! Only just enough money to take me home. Shall follow your example, and try Torquay for ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 103, December 24, 1892 • Various
... symbolising and teaching the most marvellous facts in religion, sociology, and astronomy. It is not a tomb, nor granary, nor temple, but a pillar and witness unto the Lord of hosts. Think of a few facts. 1. Its location, the centre of the land surface of the whole earth. Hence the best zero point on earth for meridianal and latitudinal calculations. Central to clime—here is no rust, moss, nor frosts to destroy, nor earthquake—a well-chosen spot for such a pillar. 2. Its form and size—symbolising the earth quantity ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... certain stage the gas becomes a liquid. The exact point at which this transformation occurs, however, differs enormously for different substances. In the case of water, for example, it is a temperature more than four hundred degrees above zero, centigrade; while for atmospheric air it is one hundred and ninety-four degrees centigrade below zero, or more than a hundred and fifty degrees below the point at ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... realized that night how desperate his need had been. He lay in his berth on board a train for the city—while back at his "open-camp" a wild blizzard was raging, and the thermometer stood at forty degrees below zero. But Thyrsis was warm and comfortable; and also he was brown and rugged, once more full of health and eagerness for life. All night he listened to the pounding of the flying train; and fast as the music ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... regions in which the plant thrives without the aid of man. A few varieties of native grapes fare badly in the winter's cold of northern grape regions, and the tender Vinifera vine is at the mercy of the winter wherever the mercury goes below zero. In cold climates, therefore, care must be exercised in selecting hardy varieties and in following careful cultural methods with the tender sorts. If other climatic conditions are favorable, however, winter-killing ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... much for him: He certainly is hard to kill. He can stay out all night in those clothes, with the thermometer below zero, and at dawn still be able to chirp the only word that is left in his vocabulary. He can't last forever though. There has to be a finish to this lamentable fiasco ...
— A Plea for Old Cap Collier • Irvin S. Cobb
... walnuts to this climate. The severe winter of 1917-18 with its sudden and extreme changes of temperature killed scores of my peach trees, while the established walnuts came through practically uninjured by a temperature of twenty-three below zero. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... benefit. These excursions are real fetes of manly labour. On the banks of Lake Leman part of the work required to keep up the terraces of the vineyards is still done in common; and in the spring, when the thermometer threatens to fall below zero before sunrise, the watchman wakes up all householders, who light fires of straw and dung and protect their vine-trees from the frost by an artificial cloud. In nearly all cantons the village communities possess so-called. Burgernutzen—that is, they hold in common a number ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... shall prologuize, how we shall perorate, 265 Utter fit things upon art and history, Feel truth at blood-heat and falsehood at zero rate, Make of the want of the age no mystery; Contrast the fructuous and sterile eras, Show—monarchy ever its uncouth cub licks 270 Out of the bear's shape into Chimaera's, While Pure Art's birth is ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... zero a slight increase in the calories consumed or even in the excess of alcohol over the normal two per cent of spruce beer leaves little trace on hardy folk; and when on the third morning, McCrea and his bride fared forth behind their splendid dog-team, every guest was gathered at the starting-point ...
— Labrador Days - Tales of the Sea Toilers • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... but with unbroken spirit, this sixteen-year-old veteran drilled and marched and braved picket duty in zero weather, often without a scrap of meat to brace his ration for a week on end; but he survived with no worse damage than sundry frost-bites. In early spring he was assigned to duty as a sentinel of the company which guarded the path that led up the hill to the headquarters ...
— The Junior Classics • Various
... heart; I do not see how it should concern me. If I am to pay the money, it matters very little to me whether he invests it in a Greek husband or the Double Zero—speculations, I take it, pretty much alike. Have you ...
— Lord Kilgobbin • Charles Lever
... as a point of fact, the operators on that night were almost exclusively Italians. The sailor, take him in the bulk, is a tolerable fool all the world over; but the northerner has some grains of sense though he is a sportsman, and roulette with twenty-six numbers and a zero is a trifle too strong an ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... 2, n 3, etc. males, the sum of m n remaining constant, but one of the sexes being partly permuted into the other. The ultimate conclusion even cannot be disregarded: we must admit a set of eggs represented by m - m, or zero, females and of n m males, one of the sexes being completely replaced by the other. Conversely, it must be possible for the feminine series to be augmented from the masculine series to the extent of ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... or buoys, the sextant is held by the handle No. 6 in a horizontal position. The vernier arrow in the sliding limb is set on zero. Now, suppose you wish to get the angular distance between two lighthouses as seen from the bridge of your ship. ...
— Lectures in Navigation • Ernest Gallaudet Draper
... possession of power. So long as he claims any shred of initiative his English subjects continue in a perpetual chafe and grumble of disloyalty; as soon as the Crown has been rasped and sand-papered down to a decorative zero their loyalty ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle
... with his back to a snowbank, which afforded a slight shelter. He imagined from his sensations that the temperature must be about fifty degrees below zero. The frost bit through him, stiffening his muscles until he felt that if vigorous movement were demanded of him he would be incapable of it. His brain was dulled; he could not reason clearly, though he had things to consider; and he looked about with ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... wilderness. She was a heavy burden on the scanty resources of poor Keefe, but he made her cordially welcome like the hearty soldier that he was. She was the only unmarried white woman within a hundred miles, and the mercury ranged from zero to -20 degrees all winter. In the spring, she and Farnham were married; he seemed to have lost the sense of there being any other women in the world, and he took her, as one instinctively takes to dinner the last lady remaining in a drawing-room, without special ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... were devoted, and he looked forward to the moment when he might avow what he had done, and justify it by doubling the capital withdrawn. But to his inconceivable horror, the bill of the Canal Company was rejected in the Lords; the shares bought at a premium went down to zero; and to add to his perplexity, the speculator abruptly disappeared from the town. In this crisis he was summoned ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... already remarked that, at the present rate of decrease, the birth-rate will be reduced to zero within a century. If the birth-rates in England, Germany, and France should continue to decrease as they have since 1880, there would be no children born, one hundred years hence, in these countries. While we do not assert, and probably none of us believes that either or ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... until you'd think something must burst—the world or the universe: either might split from end to end. The dust and smoke are gradually making everything invisible. Crumps come whistling and heaving up great clouds of heavy blackness. We look at our watches. Zero hour in five minutes. The aeroplanes buzzing aloft, and the sausages sitting among the low clouds, inert and so vulnerable-looking. Can there be anything left? Can ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... given on the note sheet, Fig. 2, the operation consists of a series of elements. In such a case, the letters designating each elementary unit are entered under the columns "Op.," the stop watch is thrown to zero, and started as the man commences to work. As each new division of the operation (that is, as each elementary unit or unit time) is begun, the time is recorded. During any special delay the watch may be stopped, and started again from the same point, although, as a rule, ...
— Shop Management • Frederick Winslow Taylor
... Dr. MacTavish bluntly. "I won't go out in a blizzard like this for anyone. It's fifteen degrees below zero and a terrific wind blowing, and the night as black as ink. I won't go, that's ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... utter failure that I am, that at least I have been so far. I get to analyzing myself; I can't help it, and the result isn't pleasant. I've been doing so lately. I don't overestimate myself in the least, Elice girl. Practically, commercially, I'm a zero. I'm simply not built that way. If I'm ever of any use in the world, ever amount to anything whatever, it will be in an impractical, artistic way. Whether I'll ever win out so—oh, for light, for light!... Frankly, the new novel is ...
— The Dominant Dollar • Will Lillibridge
... There was no constraint on her part, and no familiarity. She talked fluently and naturally, just as one first-class lady traveller might do to a fellow-passenger. Yet, if not here in contact with the zero of peasant property, we are considering its ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... far as comfort would permit—it had now fallen to 4 deg. C.—as near as possible to that of the inner surface of the walls and windows. A careful use of the thermometer indicated that the metallic surface of the former was now nearly zero C., or 32 deg. F. The inner surface of the windows was somewhat colder, showing that the crystal was more pervious to heat than the walls, with their greater thickness, their outer and inner lining of metal, and massive interior of concrete. ...
— Across the Zodiac • Percy Greg
... of doors; the mercury has fixed itself at the second degree below zero. This tells me that it is freezing cold. My fingers have told me so already; but exactly to what extent they could not say. Just now in the room, the mercury was at the 15th degree above zero, thanks to the stove in which we have a good fire. In summer-time it rises to 25, 26, or 28 degrees. I once saw it climb as high as 33 degrees: in the shade of course, you understand; in the sun it would have been quite another ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... out for a week's sledging on March 16, but the temperatures were now becoming too low to be pleasant and touching 40 degrees or so below zero. What tried us more than anything else was thick weather and the fearfully bad light on days when no landmarks were visible to guide us to the depot. Our sleeping-bags also were frozen and uncomfortable, thick rime collecting on the insides of ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... waiting followed—a sort of zero hour effect—until finally the word was received from some source, unknown to Tom and Jack, to proceed. The night was black, and there was a mist over everything which did not augur for clear ...
— Air Service Boys in the Big Battle • Charles Amory Beach
... opportunities enjoyed by the lowest of the favored race. They were denied equality in the public school. The principle of popular education had no application to a class which was not of the people, a class which the common sentiment of a Christian nation had placed at the zero point of political values, and meant to keep forever at that point. Entrance to the trades were barred to the blacks. What did they want with such things where there was no white trash so forgetful of his ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... for "the House of the Sun." It is a noble dwelling, situated on the Island of Maui; but so few tourists have ever peeped into it, much less entered it, that their number may be practically reckoned as zero. Yet I venture to state that for natural beauty and wonder the nature-lover may see dissimilar things as great as Haleakala, but no greater, while he will never see elsewhere anything more beautiful or wonderful. Honolulu is six days' steaming from San Francisco; Maui ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London
... only the dog's heavy breathing, the snap of the fire, or the crack of a timber in the deadly frost broke the silence. Inside it was warm and bright and homelike; outside it was twenty degrees below zero, and like some vast tomb where life itself was congealed, and only the white stars, low, twinkling, and quizzical, lived—a life of sharp corrosion, not ...
— Northern Lights • Gilbert Parker
... have been driven across the prairies in June when they were like a mammoth flower-bed, and in January when they seemed one huge snow-covered grave—my grave, I thought, at times. Once during a thirty-mile drive, when the thermometer was twenty degrees below zero, I suddenly realized that my face was freezing. I opened my satchel, took out the tissue-paper that protected my best gown, and put the paper over my face as a veil, tucking it inside of my bonnet. ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... supposed to be the highest spot in Europe inhabited by human beings. The climate is necessarily rigorous, the thermometer in winter being often twenty-nine degrees below zero, whilst sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit is about the highest range ever attained in summer. From the extreme difficulty of respiration, few of the monks ever survive the period of their vow, which is fifteen years, commencing ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... vile smell of candle smoke there is here!' Alfred cried. 'And the room must be five or six degrees below zero. Let's go to ...
— Demos • George Gissing
... in December that year, frequently ten degrees below zero, and there were many high winds. Consequently, the ice on the lake thickened early to twelve inches, and bade fair to go to two feet. For use in a water-creamery, ice is most conveniently cut and handled ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens
... place to light westerly breezes on the 6th. The pack seemed to be more solid than ever. It stretched almost unbroken to the horizon in every direction, and the situation was made worse by very low temperatures in succeeding days. The temperature was down to zero on the night of the 7th and was two degrees below zero on the 8th. This cold spell in midsummer was most unfortunate from our point of view, since it cemented the pack and tightened the grip of the ice upon the ship. The slow drift to the south-west continued, ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... vibration at its center, and approaches infinity as the angle theta approaches the limit of Pi divided by two. Therefore, by shifting the axis of rotation or the plane of vibration thus making theta vary between the limits of zero and ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... marriage," said Cousin Betty in the girl's ear, without seeming at all offended at the way in which the Baroness had dismissed them, counting her almost as zero. ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... business for the road. They're tightening up on us all the time. A couple of years ago, you remember, it didn't make any difference what we did with the acceleration as long as we checked in somewhere near zero time—we used to spin 'em dizzy when we reversed at the half-way station—but that kind of stuff doesn't go any more. We've got to hold the acceleration constant and close to normal, got to hold our schedule on zero, plus or minus ten seconds, and yet we've got to make ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... by thirty turns of the machine, and discharged through the galvanometer, a thick wet string, about ten inches long, being included in the circuit. The needle was immediately deflected five divisions and a half, on the one side of the zero, and in vibrating passed as nearly as possible through five divisions and a half on the ...
— Experimental Researches in Electricity, Volume 1 • Michael Faraday
... One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask, does the 'S' stand for 'do not Skip' rather than for 'Skip'? Ah, here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction if the result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if the result was Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped if the result was Not 0; AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always; and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to skip, ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... in various volumes regarding the time of the year, the influence of the seasons, etc., as determining the proper time to set for the wedding day. Circumstances must govern these things. To be sure, it is best to avoid extremes of heat and cold. Very hot weather is debilitating, and below zero is uncomfortable. ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols
... expression which no magistrate ought to have misunderstood; but as soon as a man has fallen into the hands of justice, he is no more than a moral entity, a matter of law or of fact, just as to statists he has become a zero. ...
— Colonel Chabert • Honore de Balzac |
