📚 Roger's Highlights

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As Rockefeller boasted, Standard Oil was an infallible moneymaker. In the late 1880s, Henry M. Flagler testified it had average earnings of 13 percent a year on net assets, which considerably understated its performance. When Teddy Roosevelt’s Bureau of Corporations later examined the matter, it computed a more handsome 19 percent return from 1882 to 1896. Rockefeller defended these high returns as justified by the fear that the oil might run dry and render the trust’s vast investment worthless. He knew public opinion was inflamed by the exorbitant dividends declared on Standard Oil shares, which sometimes ran as high as 200 percent. These figures were misleading, Rockefeller argued, since Standard Oil’s actual capital was typically ten times its official capitalization. In terms of real capital, the 200 percent dividend declared in January 1885 was more like 20 percent—extremely high but not astronomical. Such a rich but not altogether outrageous return was just what the politic Rockefeller wanted.

Titan

Ron Chernow

It’s vital to make things more complicated for the opponent. There are two ways you can do that to a defense: One is to have a whole bunch of plays. But the trouble there is that your offense has to deal with as much complexity as their defense does. The other way is to have less plays, and run them out of lots of formations. That way you don’t have to teach a player a new assignment every single time, just a new place to stand. Simply put: If you wanna screw with the defense, screw with formations, not plays. We also decided we were going to let our quarterback check to other plays at the line of scrimmage. Play calling is important, but the more control we could give our quarterback at the line of scrimmage, the more flexible we could be. After all, he was the one in the middle of it. We knew that he could see the defense better than we could from where we were standing. He had information from ground zero.

Swing Your Sword

Mike Leach, Bruce Feldman, Michael Lewis, and Peter Berg

In the short term, it's nothing. The most perfect vacuum ever created by humans is not as empty as the emptiness of interstellar space. And there is a great deal of this nothingness until you get to the next bit of something. Our nearest neighbor in the cosmos, Proxima Centauri, which is part of the three-star cluster known as Alpha Centauri, is 4.3 light-years away, a sissy skip in galactic terms, but that is still a hundred million times farther than a trip to the Moon. To reach it by spaceship would take at least twenty-five thousand years, and even if you made the trip you still wouldn't be anywhere except at a lonely clutch of stars in the middle of a vast nowhere. To reach the next landmark of consequence, Sirius, would involve another 4.6 light-years of travel. And so it would go if you tried to star-hop your way across the cosmos. Just reaching the center of our own galaxy would take far longer than we have existed as beings. Space, let me repeat, is enormous. The average distance between stars out there is 20 million million miles. Even at speeds approaching those of light, these are fantastically challenging distances for any traveling individual. Of course, it is possible that alien beings travel billions of miles to amuse themselves by planting crop circles in Wiltshire or frightening the daylights out of some poor guy in a pickup truck on a lonely road in Arizona (they must have teenagers, after all), but it does seem unlikely. Still, statistically the probability that there are other thinking beings out there is good. Nobody knows how many stars there are in the Milky Way—estimates range from 100 billion or so to perhaps 400 billion—and the Milky Way is just one of 140 billion or so other galaxies, many of them even larger than ours.

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Bill Bryson

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