Within the limits of laid-back, however, he and his colleagues are very, very eager to communicate the energy and urgency they are bringing to bear on cracking the code of cool: its mutability and mortality, its fickle and elusive essence -- and above all, the question of how, once lost, cool can be recaptured.
In material science, the Peierls Stress is the maximum force that a material can bear before cracking, which is often used to describe the fragility and vulnerability of the material.
To be fair, managers are under a lot of pressure and exposed to a great deal of public scrutiny, and over time it is easy to imagine this burden becoming hard to bear, and cracks starting to show.
Fracking involves injecting a high-pressure mixture of water, chemicals and sand or gravel into a well bore to crack open rock formations containing oil or gas.
He took photos of the bear, but started cracking up after noticing how much of a resemblance the dozing animal has with lazy humans.
"British aid is doing a huge amount to stabilise African countries - and we can do more - and we are bringing our expertise to bear in terms of cracking down on those criminal gangs that are trafficking people across Africa and into Europe.
In his daughter's bedroom, there's still an embroidered teddy bear on a floor cracking with dried mud.
"I can confirm that there are more shoes for bears in my house than there are for humans". A mom's hilarious rant about Build-A-Bear Workshop has many parents cracking up.
There are scenes in "127 Hours" that are hard to bear — the cracking of a bone, the severing of a nerve, the desperate consumption of a water bag filled with urine — but what these moments communicate is more than worth a jolt of discomfort or a spasm of revulsion.
Then, unable to bear it, he cracked.
