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When designing the forerunner of the Predator drone, Israeli aerospace engineers studied the form and stream patterns of the frigatebird.
During Operation Cast Lead in late 2008—also
Gaza War,
Gaza Massa...
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drones were used to fire Spike missiles ...
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Even as a child, Abir showed an amazing gift for memorization. She
Abir also showed a penchant for mathematics,
—We’re going to switch her to Hadassah, he said.
Israeli hospital. At Ein Kerem.
Where Smadar was born.
When she was a baby, Smadar became the poster child for the peace movement.
Rami had taken the job, but it was just that: a job.
Already, at one year of age, there was something intense and concerned about her. Like she might have known something in advance.
The poster asked: What will life in Israel be like when Smadar reaches fifteen?
She was two weeks away from fourteen.
Bassam and Rami gradually came to understand that they would use the force of their grief as a weapon.
Rami had heard the story once that, during World War Two, a series of bombs filled with live bats were designed to make Japan burn.
Nurit and Rami were convinced that Smadar would become a doctor:
From the age of eight, Abir wanted to be an engineer.
In the industrial school the only thing that really interested him was graphic design:
ideas of color, of shapes.
Apeirogon: a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.
Countably infinite being the simplest form of infinity.
Beginning from zero, one can use natural numbers to count on and on,
one can still get to any point in the universe in a fini...
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On the clearest of days, from the highest vantage points of Beit Jala, you can see all the way to the Mediterranean in one direction and to the Dead Sea in the other.
Stay here long enough, looking down into the valley, and you will notice the settlements emerging in a pattern around Jerusalem: red tile, red tile, red tile.
perfect ring: the rim of a tightening lung.
It seemed to Bassam that the soldiers reveled in the moment. They wanted confrontation. It justifed them, he thought.
He had learned that the cure for fate was patience.
The prison guard, Hertzl,
They had fought at first, he and Hertzl.
Hertzl was
raised an Orthodox Jew and had studied mathematics as a s...
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It was only in the fourth year of his seven-year sentence—after watching a documentary in his cell—that Bassam’s balance got all knocked to hell.
Memories hit Rami, too, all the time.
During the first of his three wars Rami drove an army truck for a technical medical team.
When he returned from the war he said to Nurit that he wasn’t sure that all of him had come home.
the late nineteenth century, rare falcons could be found for sale in the markets of Bethlehem.
falcons were captured in the desert by Bedouin boys
Sir Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth-century explorer, was a keen falconer.
learned his craft at Oxford in the 1840s,
Burton could pass himself off as a trader, diplomat, dervish or holy wanderer.
Burton traveled the world in pursuit of gnosis: he wanted to discover the very source of meaning and existence.
He considered himself a follower of the tariqa, or the mystic path, which was to lead to heaven.
Amicable numbers are two different numbers related in the sense that when you add all their proper divisors together—not including the original number itself—the sums of their divisors equal each other.
Richard Francis Burton translated Arabian Nights, also
In the early 1990s, eight New York sandhogs were brought to Israel to work on portions of Highway 60, also known as the Tunnels Road.
Croatian, Marko Kovačević,
In the evening Kovačević drove
