Most of the brain consists of "wires"; a single unit may have thousands of connections with other units and with itself. That is n...ot the case in a standard computer, where a chip usually has less than six connections. Moreover, neurons are much, much slower than the switching elements of the computer. It seems likely that the brain can accomplish its complex feats of perception and thought by means of millions of connections acting in parallel. The connections as a whole define the information content of the system. In this way a vast amount of knowledge can be brought to bear on a decision all at once. The brain seems to be able to perform as many as two hundred trillion operations in a second; not serially, but simultaneously.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
By the way--about Bolshevism: one has to remember that all that is published in the press is propaganda, that the Bolsheviki are t...he moderate social-revolutionaries, a political party, and the Soviets are a system of government based on the idea of "pure democracy" (Mso called in the textbooks on gov't) that every man shall take direct part in the government of the country--which is arrived at by industrial representation through the heirarchy of soviets, and that much the same system would be in vogue in America--(geographical instead of industrial units) if Hamilton and the rest had taken the New England town-meeting as the unit of government instead of importing Montesquieu's ideas. It's silly to idealize things in Russia, but it is criminal to condemn them unheard.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He could jazz up the map-reading class by having a full-size color photograph of Betty Grable in a bathing suit, with a co- ordina...te grid system laid over it. The instructor could point to different parts of her and say, "Give me the co-ordinates."... The Major could see every unit in the Army using his idea.... Hot dog!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The system was breaking down. The one who had wandered alone past so many happenings and events began to feel, backing up along th...e primal vein that led to his center, the beginning of hiccup that would, if left to gather, explode the center to the extremities of life, the suburbs through which one makes one's way to where the country is.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as a...n adult, in order to deny him consolation.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The educational system in large countries will always be utterly mediocre, for the same reason that the cooking in large kitchens ...is mediocre at best.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just imagine for a moment what life in this country might have been if women had been properly represented in Congress. Would a Co...ngress where women in all their diversity were represented tolerate the countless laws now on the books that discriminate against women in all phases of their lives? Would a Congress with adequate representation of women have allowed this country to reach the 1970s without a national health care system? Would it have permitted this country to rank fourteenth in infant mortality among the developed nations of the world? Would it have allowed the situation we now have in which thousands of kids grow up without decent care because their working mothers have no place to leave them? Would such a Congress condone the continued butchering of young girls and mothers in amateur abortion mills? Would it allow fraudulent packaging and cheating of consumers in supermarkets, department stores and other retail outlets? Would it consent to the perverted sense of priorities that has dominated our government for decades, where billions have been appropriated for war while our human needs as a people have been neglected?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism's... high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Just as the French of the nineteenth century invested their surplus capital in a railway-system in the belief that they would make... money by it in this life, in the thirteenth they trusted their money to the Queen of Heaven because of their belief in her power to repay it with interest in the life to come.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am willing, for a money consideration, to test this physical strength, this nervous force, and muscular power with which I've be...en gifted, to show that they will bear a certain strain. If I break down, if my brain gives way under want of sleep, my heart ceases to respond to the calls made on my circulatory system, or the surcharged veins of my extremities burst--if, in short, I fall helpless, or it may be, dead on the track, then I lose my money.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »