Quotes & Sayings About Operators

Nonviolent non-co-operators can only succeed when they have succeeded in attaining control over the hooligans of India. — Mahatma Gandhi

Things didn't seem promising initially. I arrived like everyone else did, after swearing that I wasn't a spy or guilty of moral turpitude, and that I hadn't got any snails. In the first, bewildering minutes outside JFK, on a Friday night in the rain, I stared out at veering yellow cabs, airport staff screaming abuse at cowboy operators, sleek limos nosing along the bedlam, the whole teetering on the brink of chaos. I thought, as many people do, This is impossible. I won't be able to manage this. But then, we do manage- we manage to get into the city without being murdered, and wake up the next day still alive, and shortly afterwards we are striding down Broadway in the sun. — Deborah Meyler

Non-co-operators will make a serious mistake if they seek to convert people to their creed by violence. — Mahatma Gandhi

The current lack of a national standard for operators of medical imaging and radiation therapy equipment poses a hazard to American patients and jeopardizes quality health care. — Charles W. Pickering

But as we shall see, Roosevelt, through a combination of events and influences, fell deeper and deeper into the toils of various revolutionary operators, not because he was interested in revolution but because he was interested in votes. — John T. Flynn

There are no accomplished golf tour operators in Indonesia, so a golf holiday there is a do-it-yourself operation. But don't let that deter you. — Raymond Bonner

I have a feeling that there is a gap in the food retail market - a niche below some of the current budget operators such as Aldi and Lidl. — Stelios Haji-Ioannou

The general's staff is a handpicked collection of killers, spies, geniuses, patriots, political operators and outright maniacs. There's a former head of British Special Forces, two Navy Seals, an Afghan Special Forces commando, a lawyer, two fighter pilots and at least two dozen combat veterans and counterinsurgency experts. They jokingly refer to themselves as Team America, taking the name from the South Park-esque sendup of military cluelessness, and they pride themselves on their can-do attitude and their disdain for authority. — Michael Hastings

Curiously, while drone operators are perhaps the safest of all combat troops physically, they have among the highest rates of depression and post-traumatic stress in the military and national security services. Sitting at a video console in Colorado or New York City, killing someone six thousand miles away and then collecting the kids at gymnastics or football practice, having dinner and sitting down to watch Dancing with the Stars in your suburban den was disorienting beyond belief. — Jeffery Deaver

A newspaper, as I'm sure you know, is a collection of supposedly true stories written down by writers who either saw them happen or talked to people who did. These writers are called journalists, and like telephone operators, butchers, ballerinas, and people who clean up after horses, journalists can sometimes make mistakes. — Daniel Handler

As far as we were concerned, we were operators, we were administrators. I don't ever recall going to Dean Acheson and asking for any counsel or advice on administration, but I had the greatest respect for him, as I have today. — Paul Hoffman

As a director, you want to be really connected to every part of your set, from your actors all the way to your camera operators. Everybody is a part of the creative process, and if they feel like they're part of a team versus just being a tool, they're going to give you something special. — Eric Balfour

To my way of thinking, there is every bit as much evidence for the
existence of UFOs as there is for the existence of God. Probably far
more. At least in the case of UFOs there have been countless taped
and filmed and, by the way, unexplained sightings from all over the
world, along with documented radar evidence seen by experienced
military and civilian radar operators.>> — George Carlin

Politicians responsible for enacting civil same-sex marriage legislation are morally complicit as co-operators in facilitating this grave sin. — Thomas J. Paprocki

And understand that scarce spectrum is used today for example for cell phone operators, they have to pay for the airwaves they use, for their services. — Robert McChesney

As unwieldy as those early computers were, there was an aura surrounding them. They were perceived as magical; their operators, as wizards of the modern age endowed with extraordinary scientific prowess. — Ross Parry

Around the late 1990s, I'd become convinced that one of the killer applications of robotics came from connecting robots to the Internet. The idea of solving generalized artificial intelligence was still far away, but heck, I could rent brains by hiring operators. iRobot was the name of the company and one of our most ambitious projects, iRobot LE. — Colin Angle

The coming of the printing press must have seemed as if it would turn the world upside down in the way it spread and, above all, democratized knowledge. Provide you could pay and read, what was on the shelves in the new bookshops was yours for the taking. The speed with which printing presses and their operators fanned out across Europe is extraordinary. From the single Mainz press of 1457, it took only twenty-three years to establish presses in 110 towns: 50 in Italy, 30 in Germany, 9 in France, 8 in Spain, 8 in Holland, 4 in England, and so on. — James E. Burke

As the titanic losses were racking up, Fannie Mae's operators, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, disguised the catastrophe by orchestrating a $5 billion accounting fraud - all the while continuing to pressure banks to make absurd, politically correct loans and denouncing Republicans as enemies of the poor. — Ann Coulter

We must raise the salaries of our operators or they will all be taken from us, that is, all that are good for anything. You will recollect that, at the first meeting of the Board of Directors, I took the ground that 'it was our policy to make the office of operator desirable, to pay operators well and make their situation so agreeable that intelligent men and men of character will seek the place and dread to lose it.' I still think so, and, depend upon it, it is the soundest economy to act on this principle. — Samuel Morse

he thought a bit about God, and whether He might be some kind of universal digital computer, subject to the occasional bug or hack. Was it possible that politicians and hedge-fund operators were some kind of garbled cosmic computer code? That the Opponent, instead of having horns and a forked tail, was a fat bearded guy drinking Big Gulps and eating anchovy pizzas and writing viruses down in a hellish basement? That prayers weren't answered because Satan was running denial-of-service attacks? — John Sandford

The question for France and all countries is, 'Do you favour foreign Internet operators that do not pay, or do you favour national operators who pay?' — Xavier Niel

2014 Raid in Northern Syria In an attempt to find kidnapped journalist James Foiley as well as other American hostages, Delta Forces operators were inserted into northern Syria on 04 July 2014. Per information from witnesses, after tearing down anti-aircraft weapons, the Delta Forces operators attacked an ISIS base. The ISIS base was torn down and all ISIS soldiers were killed at the cost of an American who sustained wounds during the operations. The operation was a failure since no hostages were found. — John Winters

It seemed like a hybrid of Spinal Tap, the British The Office, and something entirely original. Scenes would be blocked and rehearsed almost like a play, with entire scenes performed top to bottom many times. Two or three cameras would find the action and just follow the actors as they moved around. Actors often didn't know when they were on camera or where the cameras were. "Spy shots" lent a sense of intimacy to moments. Actors were allowed to look into the camera to show their reactions to things and spoke directly to the camera with "talking heads," used to further the story or display another side of what a character was feeling.15, 16 Camera operators were very close or very far away but a dynamic part of the action. We would shoot eight or nine pages in a twelve-hour day, which is about double what one shoots on a feature film. — Amy Poehler

During my long investigation of these strange objects, I have seen many reports verified by Air Force Intelligence, detailed accounts by Air Force pilots, radar operators, and other trained observers proving the UFOs are high-speed craft superior to anything built on Earth. — Donald Keyhoe

Cruise passengers can be blinded to the very real perils of the sea by ship operators unwilling to interrupt the party for security warnings. And after an incident occurs, a thorough investigation can be profoundly difficult when the crime scene literally floats away, on schedule, to its next port of call. — Chris Shays

The open web is full of spam, shady operators, and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high quality sites, most of the web is chock full of popup ads and other interruptive come-ons. It's nearly impossible to find signal in that noise, and the web is in danger of being overrun by all that crap. — John Battelle

If policymakers are serious about avoiding a society of TV 'haves and have-nots,' they should refrain from policies that favor pay-TV operators over the providers of our nation's only free and local communications system: over-the-air broadcasting. — Gordon Smith

The cable operators are paying to show content. The most important content you have is the broadcast stations. They take the position that over the air is free to people, so it should be free to them. — Bill Vaughan

Syd's strafing run at Florennes had been a feat of strafing skill. His cine-gun footage of the radar van was perfect. It showed radar operators diving out both sides of the brown box on wheels. Instead of congratulations, the Station Commander awarded him a $25 fine and a formal reproof. — R.J. Childerhose

Dr. Heissman laughed and immediately apologized, "I'm sorry, I'm just so used to what I think of as squeezing water from a stone syndrome. SpecWar operators are not big on admitting to what they perceive to be a weakness. Even though awareness of vulnerability ultimately leads to strength. Either from directly dealing with the issue or learning to work around it. — Suzanne Brockmann

It is the duty of a non-co-operator to preach disaffection towards the existing order of things. Non-co-operators are but giving disciplined expression to a nation's outraged feelings. — Mahatma Gandhi

Rock stars get room keys, I get business cards. Wherever I go I meet innovators of wind power equipment, solar energy operators. — Thomas Friedman

During World War II, the British spy agency MI8 secretly recruited a crew of teenage wireless operators (prohibited from discussing their activities even with their families) to intercept coded messages from the Nazis. By forwarding these transmissions to the crack team of code breakers at Bletchley Park led by the computer pioneer Alan Turing, these young hams enabled the Allies to accurately predict the movements of the German and Italian forces. Asperger's prediction that the little professors in his clinic could one day aid in the war effort had been prescient, but it was the Allies who reaped the benefits. — Steve Silberman

In most bull markets there comes a time when the public controls fluctuations and the efforts of the largest operators are insufficient to check the rising tide. — Charles Dow

Paranoia has its downsides as an agency in daily life, or in the political sphere of collective action, which finds itself beset everywhere by the nightmarish influence of conspiracy thinking (they call it theory, but theories exist to be tested, and conspiracy thinking exists never to be tested, and globally ignores the results of tests imposed by others). The suspicion that malign operators are responsible for every one of the injustices and heartbreaks of existence is a consoling view, a balm to bleak glimpses of the void behind our reality. It's brave to pursue truth, and brave to pursue and expose tricky and well-hidden bad guys (Nazi doctors, Pentagon intelligence-distorters, etc.). It's not brave to think tricky, well-hidden bad guys are the whole truth of what's out there. It might even be bravery's opposite. Or maybe it should go under the name religion. — Jonathan Lethem

Yet our world of abundance, with seas of wine and alps of bread, has hardly turned out to be the ebullient place dreamt of by our ancestors in the famine-stricken years of the Middle Ages. The brightest minds spend their working lives simplifying or accelerating functions of unreasonable banality. Engineers write theses on the velocities of scanning machines and consultants devote their careers to implementing minor economies in the movements of shelf-stackers and forklift operators. The alcohol-inspired fights that break out in market towns on Saturday evenings are predictable symptoms of fury at our incarceration. They are a reminder of the price we pay for our daily submission at the altars of prudence and order - and of the rage that silently accumulates beneath a uniquely law-abiding and compliant surface. — Alain De Botton

Many operations involved intercepting and seizing someone traveling in a moving vehicle, often with bodyguards. The task force would surreptitiously attach a tracking beacon to the target's car. Delta was already experimenting with technologies that used an electromagnetic pulse to shut a car's battery down remotely. The unit also used a catapult net system that would ensnare car and driver alike. Once the car had been immobilized, operators would smash the window with a sledgehammer, pull their target through the window, and make off with him, shooting any bodyguards who posed a threat, while an outer security perimeter kept anyone who might interfere at bay. The operators had a name for these snatches: habeas grab-ass. — Sean Naylor

Few companies that installed computers to reduce the employment of clerks have realized their expectations ... They now need more, and more expensive clerks even though they call them 'operators' or 'programmers.' — Peter Drucker

We don't want you convicted for condiment theft. You go to that prison, you'll meet big-time operators. Maple syrup stealers. — Deb Caletti

four different operators in that unit, working on a shift system, each with his own characteristics," says Nigel West, a British military historian. "And invariably, quite apart from the text, there would be the preambles, and the illicit exchanges. How are you today? How's the girlfriend? What's the weather — Malcolm Gladwell

Telephone operators now routinely use '80s-babble, chirping, "Have a nice day," the moral equivalent of the smile button. — Stefan Kanfer

Over a period of time, if you have a successful show, then you have a devoted audience. I feel you owe something to them. That goes for everybody - writers, camera operators, actors, studio executives, etc. Sadly, I've realized it's a responsibility that very few people live up to. — Raymond Burr

Artists, writers and people in creative fields are entrepreneurs by necessity. Nobody gives them a paycheck or picks up their medical insurance. The ones who succeed learn to think and act like 'independent operators.' I think people who are technically 'employees' have to think this way as well. The company is not looking out for you. — Steven Pressfield

She saw the picture of idle fishing boats tied up at Peterhead; further gloom for Scotland and for a way of life that had produced such a strong culture. Fishermen had composed their songs; but what culture would a generation of computer operators leave behind them? — Alexander McCall Smith

Some Internet operators are concerned that video services such as Netflix and YouTube consume lots of the bandwidth on the network. While there is some truth to this, my guess is that the operators wished they could provide the same kind of services with the same success as Netflix and YouTube. — Niklas Zennstrom

The worst day-to-day operators of businesses are bankers. — Studs Terkel

The union miner cannot agree to the acceptance of a wage principle which will permit his annual earnings and his living standards to be determined by the hungriest unfortunates whom the non-union operators can employ. — John L. Lewis

Somebody has to be tireless or the fast buck operators would asphalt the entire coast, fill every bay and slay every living thing incapable of carrying a wallet. — John D. MacDonald

France has a specificity - the market players who provide Internet access are the telecom operators, and all of the players are French. They had a habit of, let's say, getting along with each other, and the prices traditionally were very high. — Xavier Niel

It cannot be an American fight. And I think what the president [Barack Obama] has consistently said - which I agree with - is that we will support those who take the fight to ISIS. That is why we have troops in Iraq that are helping to train and build back up the Iraqi military, why we have special operators in Syria working with the Kurds and Arabs, so that we can be supportive. — Hillary Clinton

The operators divided the world into two categories: shooters and non-shooters. — Mitchell Zuckoff

... what happens to most of these people anyway? They have their fling and then they vanish. They have to take jobs eventually as telephone operators, bartenders, partners in a lamp shop in some little town in the San Fernando mountains ... and others take their places ... but mostly they just vanish, and you forget about them unless you hear, one day, a certain song. — Andrew Holleran

I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In particular, I adopted the matrix algebra used in my thesis work, the systematic use of matrices and higher-dimensional arrays (almost) learned in a course in Tensor Analysis rashly taken in my third year at Queen's, and (eventually) the notion of Operators in the sense introduced by Heaviside in his treatment of Maxwell's equations. — Kenneth E. Iverson

I have always encouraged my restaurant operators and team members to give back to the local community. — S. Truett Cathy

Mankind spends much more on training pilots of aircraft than it does to train the nuclear reactor operators. — Abdus Salam

Being a 911 operator means balancing seemingly contradictory skills. On one hand, operators have to be fanatically precise and well-organized. On the other, they must be able to establish rapport with panicky callers. — Gary Wolf

Companies selling a product play down its vulnerability and emphasize its robustness. But only after technology leaves the dock is it really tested. For human operators in control of a supposedly infallible system, complacency and overconfidence can take over, and caution may be thrown to the wind. — Henry Petroski

Lawyers (are) operators of the toll bridge across which anyone in search of justice has to pass. — Jane Bryant Quinn

I sometimes wish the trade unionists who work in the mass media, those who are writers and broadcasters and secretaries and printers and lift operators of Thomson House would remember that they too are members of our working class movement and have a responsibility to see that what is said about us is true. — Tony Benn

Three Observations 1) The computer may be incompetent in itself - that is, unable to do regularly and accurately the work for which it was designed. This kind of incompetence can never be eliminated, because the Peter Principle applies in the plants where computers are designed and manufactured. 2) Even when competent in itself, the computer vastly magnifies the results of incompetence in its owners or operators. 3) The computer, like a human employee, is subject to the Peter Principle. If it does good work at first, there is a strong tendency to promote it to more responsible tasks, until it reaches its level of incompetence. — Laurence J. Peter

Lowell's cubicle at the office was slightly larger than a toilet stall, but no higher, and although the door said MANAGING EDITOR, Lowell always felt that the words had been printed there in the same spirit that moves service-station operators to paint KING on the door of the men's privy — L.J. Davis

Bookstore operators tell us that the books which head the bestseller list are books on peace and happiness. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

The operators were bound together by what they were running from - poverty in all its forms, despair, hunger, decimated families - as well as what they hoped to gain. Their imaginations were filled with American treasures: — Adriana Trigiani

To be one of the world's top space robotic arm operators is a necessary skill for an astronaut, but it doesn't have much carry-over. — Chris Hadfield

In the past, Google has used teams of humans to 'read' its street address images - in essence, to render images into actionable data. But using neural network technology, the company has trained computers to extract that data automatically - and with a level of accuracy that meets or beats human operators. — John Battelle

There are two sorts of political communications operators in this business. There are people who see the population as they would like them to be, and there are people who see the population, ruthlessly, as they actually are. There is the wishful-thinking element, and there is the winning element. — Tim Shipman

If you had a national grid with one operator, you had twenty or even a hundred operators, if you don't have the ability to compel people to observe high standards of conduct, then you run a greater risk. — Spencer Abraham

The ordinary reality, as I perceive it, is but a huge and intricate virtual screen which operates on multiple levels. Its origins and developments extend far beyond the understanding and scope of the established functioning of the mind. Trapped in the pen of the binary system and the identification with their physical bodies, human beings eat up a fodder made up of sin, guilt and fear, as they watch the soap opera of life being repeated over and over. Yet such a mirage is so insane and unreal that attentive eyes cannot help discovering gaps all over the place. Although the operators at the projector do their best to botch it up, the absurd illusion of this misperception may reveal itself at any moment. It is like a boasting block of ice showing off its solidity as long as the temperature is below zero and yet inevitably starting to thaw and melt away in warmer weather. — Franco Santoro

Small-scale fisheries should not be favoured over large-scale operations ebcause of romantic notions of rugged small operators battling both the elements and anonymous corporations. [They ought to be supported] because of the scientific evidence available to confirm the common-sense inference that local fishers, if given privileged access, will tend to avoid trashing their local stocks, while foreign fishers do not have such motivation. — Daniel Pauly

But they could be frightening, too. "Watching Watergate in Archie Bunker Country," said the cover of the June 18 issue of New York magazine. It began with the author, top-drawer trend journalist Gail Sheehy, recording what happened when the proprietor of Terry's Bar in Astoria, Queens, asked his patrons if he might tune the bar's TV to the hearings. Nine men cried "Forget it!" "The majority called for Popeye cartoons. But Terry couldn't find a channel that wasn't polluted with the 'search for unvarnished truth.' They had no choice. Television was suppressing their freedom not to know." These ironworkers, sandhogs, elevator operators, and beer truck drivers said things like this: that Ted Kennedy "killed a broad" ("Now there was a mountain, and they made a molehill — Rick Perlstein

Network operators need reasonable leeway to manage their networks. — Edward Felten

All the consumer market mojo is with Apple and to a lesser extent BlackBerry. And yet, the real market momentum with operators and the real market momentum with device manufacturers seems to primarily be with Windows Mobile and Android. — Steve Ballmer

At today's prices for medicines, doctors and hospitals-if the latter are available at any price-only millionaires can afford to be hurt or sick and pay for it. Very few people want socialized medicine in the U.S. But pressure for it is going to appear with the same hurricane force as the demand for pollution control if the medicine men and hospital operators don't take soon some Draconian measures ... At the present rate of doctor fees and hospital costs under Medicare and Medicaid plans [taxpayers] are shovelling in billions with nothing but escalation in sight. — Malcolm Forbes

But no opposition grumbling could spoil the moment for the new president-elect. He donned his overcoat, thanked the telegraph operators for their hard work and hospitality, and stuffed the final dispatch from New York into his pocket as a souvenir. It was about time, he announced to one and all, that he "went home and told the news to a tired woman who was sitting up for him. — Harold Holzer

Their task was to film the work of the Allied women. More than 20,000 American women served overseas during the war - 10,000 as nurses in the army and navy and a few thousand under the auspices of the Red Cross, the YMCA, and the Salvation Army. Several hundred women were telephone operators with the Army Signal Corps and still others served as doctors, entertainers, canteen workers, interpreters, dentists, therapists, decoders, and in a myriad of other roles. Most of the one thousand professional entertainers who joined the war effort were connected to either the Overseas Theater League or the YMCA and over half were women. — Cari Beauchamp

Prosperity and penury do not turn on gyno-centric and gay matters. But leftist statists and libertarians of the left place these wedge issues at the forefront of the fight for freedom. [ ... ] Every bit as bad as liberals, "libertarian" political operators are prepared to shed political blood over any imagined sign of bigotry. — Ilana Mercer

What was the point of spelling out the details? And anyway, wasn't a poor soul allowed to have a little genuine lovesickness to cope with on top of everything else? Without further ado, Rolandsen went up to his office, straight to the instrument, and asked one of the operators at the Rosengaard telegraph station to send him half a cask of cognac at the first opportunity. There was no sense in carrying on like this forever. — Knut Hamsun

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts ... A graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding ... — William Gibson

Hellfire missiles, the explosives fired from drones, are not always fired at people. In fact most drone strikes are aimed at phones. The SIM card provides a person's location; when turned on, a phone can become a deadly proxy for the individual being hunted. When a night raid or drone strike successfully neutralizes a target's phone, operators call that a touchdown. — Jeremy Scahill

Because operators are based thousands of miles away from the battlefield, and undertake operations entirely through computer screens and remote audio feed, there is a risk of developing a 'PlayStation' mentality to killing. — Philip Alston

Land surveyors can spend as much time reading legislation, bylaws, and engineering documents as we spend in front of an instrument in the field or calculating coordinates for a subdivision. We are mathematicians, historians, project managers, advocates, engineers, and even chainsaw operators! — Mark Mason

The man in 4B wondered if he could have your autograph. He told me his daughter is a huge fan.
Fan? What the hell? Dylan lifted himself up and looked over the back of his seat. Since when did covert operators have fans? — Tara Janzen

I would let the military commanders give the commander in chief options rather than tell them what you want to hear. Not having gotten those options, I can't tell you if we are going to have boots on the ground but certainly, a more expanded role for the special operators would be essential. And being more effective in strikes as it is relates to the air. — Jeb Bush

Certain countries long ago succeeded where the U.S. has failed in commercializing their air traffic control systems, putting them in the hands of private or quasi-private operators able to raise capital, charge fees, and invest in growth, free of meddling by congressional pork barons. You want a drone-friendly air traffic control system? This is the place to start. Our FAA isn't blindly anti-drone but simply marooned in a system that still needs thousands of eyeballs gazing at radar terminals and out of cockpit windshields. — Holman W. Jenkins Jr.

Resolution Trust Company was set up to liquidate a bunch of assets that the government had inherited because the savings and loans went broke. So the savings and loans went broke, the government stepped in, paid off depositors, and now they're left with this mass of assets to sell. We're not talking about selling here, we're talking about buying intelligently. They were selling what they got handed to them by a bunch of savings and loan operators that had in many cases had done some very dumb thing. But their job was to liquidate it. And they liquidated. — Howard Warren Buffett

I was not a gigantic fan of 'The A-Team' as a kid. I was a huge 'Miami Vice' fan. So for me, not necessarily to say that I put a 'Miami Vice'ish spin on 'The A-Team,' but for me, what I was most intrigued by was this notion of these four guys, these four kind of special operators. — Joe Carnahan

Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption - similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the '70s and '80s. — Douglas Rushkoff

We know that ATT is upgrading their TCI network to provide voice services, but we believe that upgrade will go beyond that, for total interactivity at very reliable rates. Video telephone calls, downloading music videos, television broadcasts, online newspapers - all of this would be in digital mode. I think they certainly intend to be the one-stop shop and once they do that, it will force the other multiple system operators to follow suit. — Robert Rosenberg

Telephone operators have called me 'sir' since I was 6. — Suzanne Pleshette

We need better options for securing the Internet. Instead of looking primarily for top-down government intervention, we can enlist the operators and users themselves. — Jonathan Zittrain

We always look for operators with a combination of guts, passion and genius. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

The much-maligned idle rich have received a bad rap: They have maintained their wealth while many There is scarcely an instance of a man who has made a fortune by speculation and kept it. Andrew Carnegie of the energetic rich, aggressive real estate operators, corporate acquirers, oil drillers, etc. have their fortunes disappear. — Warren Buffett

In the name of speed, Morse and Vail had realized that they could save strokes by reserving the shorter sequences of dots and dashes for the most common letters. But which letters would be used most often? Little was known about the alphabet's statistics. In search of data on the letters' relative frequencies, Vail was inspired to visit the local newspaper office in Morristown, New Jersey, and look over the type cases. He found a stock of twelve thousand E's, nine thousand T's, and only two hundred Z's. He and Morse rearranged the alphabet accordingly. They had originally used dash-dash-dot to represent T, the second most common letter; now they promoted T to a single dash, thus saving telegraph operators uncountable billions of key taps in the world to come. Long afterward, information theorists calculated that they had come within 15 percent of an optimal arrangement for telegraphing English text. — James Gleick