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It is still a fairly astounding notion to consider that atoms are mostly empty space, and that the solidity we experience all around us is an illusion. When two objects come together in the real world—billiard balls are most often used for illustration—they don't actually strike each other. “Rather,” as Timothy Ferris explains, “the negatively charged fields of the two balls repel each other . . . were it not for their electrical charges they could, like galaxies, pass right through each other unscathed.” When you sit in a chair, you are not actually sitting there, but levitating above it at a height of one angstrom (a hundred millionth of a centimeter),
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Bill Bryson
The absolutely worst day of Phil’s life took place under the exact same conditions as the absolutely best day of Phil’s life. The best day and the worst day were the same day. In fact, a whole universe of experiences proved to be possible on this single day. The only difference was Phil himself, what he noticed, how he interpreted his surroundings, and what he chose to do.
How to Write Groundhog Day
Danny Rubin
But it was clear that more and more companies would develop or acquire these capabilities, and they eventually would become an undifferentiated commodity. That is exactly what happened. Today, building the capability to store and retrieve millions of photos could well be a homework assignment for a college student taking a computer science class. In several of the Working Backwards documents for the early AWS products, the PR/FAQ stated that we wanted the student in a dorm room to have access to the same world-class computing infrastructure as any Amazon software engineer. That powerful metaphor in the PR/FAQ document really helped crystallize the thoughts and ideas of the AWS product development teams. There were a number of factors that influenced Amazon’s decision to start the foray into web services that would ultimately become AWS. We had several proofs of concept in the Amazon Product API and the Amazon Seller API demonstrating that the area was worthy of attention. It was simply a better way to build software than the traditional methods used at that time. There was a relatively clear roadmap on what was needed since the software building blocks were known, but hadn’t yet been offered as web services. We also knew our unique capabilities would not be unique for very long, which provided a sense of urgency. (The first company to offer a robust set of general-purpose web services wouldn’t be guaranteed to win in the long run, but the head start sure would help.) That sense of urgency is codified in Amazon’s Bias for Action leadership principle. It states, “Speed matters in business. Many decisions and actions are reversible and do not need extensive study. We value calculated risk-taking.”
Working Backwards
Colin Bryar and Bill Carr
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