Word: ton
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...humans made entirely of ones and zeros. Take all those MP3s you downloaded or ripped from your CDs, for example. You think you're hearing the music as it was originally intended? You're not. MP3s are built on something called psycho-acoustic algorithms. These little beauties save a ton of file space by making your brain fill in the blanks. They actually work out what frequency they need to transmit to make you think you're hearing overtones that aren't there. I've never been able to listen to digital music the same way since I learned that...
...many times this week had he gone to see the dragon? Five? Six? Ten? Fitz had lost count. But he reckoned he went to the den almost every night and paid Ton, the scraggly opium dealer with a green-and-blue dragon tattooed on his thin upper arm, 50 per pipe to get him off. He lay there, watching the dragon coil and uncoil as Ton flexed his arms, working to heat the night-colored opium, mixing the paste with Mr. Headache powder and then rolling it between his palms into cylinders. He broke off pieces from the roll...
...came south from Yunnan, China, in the last century and brought a taste for the black, inebriating tar with them. Tribes like the Aka and Hmong cultivate the crop in the otherwise arid highland climate, and bring it down to sell to Vietnamese dealers in the main towns. Ton pays about $20 for a wax-paper sheet of opium, 6 mm thick and as wide as his hand. Broken down into the individual pipe loads he prepares for foreigners, that nets him a profit of about $300?minus the 10 pipes a day he needs to feed his own habit...
...Greenhouse damage" per extra ton of carbon we add to the sky. (The figure, from economist David Pearce, is not the cost to clean the air, nor the benefit of cars, nor the toll of rising seas. It's just how much people say they'd pay for cleaner air when asked in surveys, divided by tons of carbon...
...Comparing it to a car accident in which he hit a man who owed him a ton of money - and thus would receive only a reduction in the size of his debt as damages, Wagner asked, "Can a refund be required when overcharges are less than the outstanding bill? The case judge thinks not." Citing the Rashomonic mathematics and closely guarded ledgers in the case, however, Wagner said he would recommend to the FERC that it conduct a full evidentiary hearing and take its own accounting...