Computers were originally just supposed to be number-crunchers, but now their number-crunching has been harnessed in a thousand im...aginative ways to create new virtual machines, such as video games and word processors, in which the underlying number-crunching is almost invisible, and in which new powers seem quite magical. Our brains, similarly, weren't designed (except for some very recent peripheral organs) for word processing, but now a large portion--perhaps even the lion's share--of the activity that takes place in adult human brains is involved in a sort of word processing: speech production and comprehension, and the serial rehearsal and rearrangement of linguistic items, or better, their neural surrogates. And these activities magnify and transform the underlying hardware powers in ways that seem (from the "outside") quite magical.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My idea is that the world outside--the so-called modern world--can only pervert and degrade the conceptions of the primitive insti...nct of art and feeling, and that our only chance is to accept the limited number of survivors--the one- in-a-thousand of born artists and poets--and to intensify the energy of feeling within that radiant centre.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The] elderly and timid single gentleman in Paris ... never drove down the Champs Elysees without expecting an accident, and commo...nly witnessing one; or found himself in the neighborhood of an official without calculating the chances of a bomb. So long as the rates of progress held good, these bombs would double in force and number every ten years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our Sight is the most perfect and most delightful of all our Senses. It fills the Mind with the largest Variety of Ideas, converse...s with its Objects at the greatest Distance, and continues the longest in Action without being tired or satiated with its proper Enjoyments. The Sense of Feeling can indeed give us a Notion of Extension, Shape, and all other Ideas that enter at the Eye, except Colours; but at the same time it is very much straightened and confined in its Operations, to the Number, Bulk, and Distance of its particular Objects. Our Sight seems designed to supply all these Defects, and may be considered as a more delicate and diffusive kind of Touch, that spreads its self over an infinite Multitude of Bodies, comprehends the largest Figures, and brings into our reach some of the most remote Parts of the Universe.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As Jerome expanded, its chances for the title, "the toughest little town in the West," increased and when it was incorporated in 1...899 the citizens were able to support the claim by pointing to the number of thick stone shutters on the fronts of all saloons, gambling halls, and other places of business for protection against gunfire.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Across Parker Avenue from the fort is the Site of the Old Gallows, where 83 men "stood on nothin', a-lookin' up a rope." The platf...orm had a trap wide enought to "accommodate" 12 men, but half that number was the highest ever reached. On two occasions six miscreants were executed. There were several groups of five, some quartets and trios.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I happen to feel that the degree of a person's intelligence is directly reflected by the number of conflicting attitudes she can b...ring to bear on the same topic.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I feel more charity for a Mormon who has been taught from his birth that it is not only his right but his duty to God to enter int...o plural marriages, and that the man who has the greatest number of wives stands highest in God's favor, than I do for the man who has been taught from his cradle that the unpardonable sin is the desecration of womanhood; whose religious training and the moral code of civilization in which he is reared make it a crime to violate the Seventh Commandment and the established law of monogamy. Yet, judging from the testimony we see all about us--our ... lying-in and foundling hospitals and our fallen womanhood--the married or single man who lives a pure life is rare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Can the knowledge deriving from reason even begin to compare with knowledge perceptible by sense? No doubt the number of people cr...ass enough to reply exclusively on the former and scorn the latter are sufficient in themselves to explain the disfavor into which everything deriving from the senses has gradually fallen. But when the most scholarly of men have taught me that light is a vibration, or offered me any other fruits of their labors of reasoning, they will not have rendered me an account of what is important to me about light, of what my eyes have begun to teach me about it, of what makes me different from a blind man--things which are the stuff of miracles, not subject matter for reasoning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »