After examining it, he touches and stops the pendulum, takes away its key, poles the stick into the box and secrets it away as if it were a prize.

[…]which broke whatever final layer of ice needed melting with these two strangers in front of us, their eyebrows pierced and their fingertips stained orange from some triangular chiplike snack they were sharing.

Giorgio did not really like the Colonel very much, or perhaps he was simply from Piemonte and cared for no one truly; which was understandable in cold people from a border province. Borderers are not trusters and the Colonel knew about this and expected nothing from anyone that they did not have to give.

Algebraic statistics is concerned with the development of techniques in algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, and combinatorics, to address problems in statistics and its applications.