Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This scenario isn't nice. In fact, it sounds cold-blooded. But if someone disregarded the welfare of her family by adopting dangerous or infectious homeless strangers, her commitment to abstract fairness and compassion would require a corresponding callousness to her already existing dependents. We might well call this single-minded idealism cold-blooded-- a selfish sentimentality, if you will...
...itself is not stated anywhere in the piece, and one catches only a few glimpses of it throughout--an occasional dominant seventh chord, or the five-note descending scale that concludes each half of the Beethoven movement. Rather than indulging in much direct quotation, Rzewski's variations preserve certain abstract qualities of the original. Beethoven's registral disjuncture, for example, is taken to extremes, and the thick, closed chords of the theme, which derive much tension from the interval of the second, are the source for the predominance of that interval in Rzewski's cluster accompaniments...
Never mind evil aliens, deadly phasers and the mysterious "wormhole" -- a sort of magic tunnel through which space travelers can zip to distant galaxies. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is one series that isn't afraid of abstract theoretical concepts. In the show's premiere episode, Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) tried to explain the nature of linear time, the idea that the past influences the future. "That is the essence of linear existence," he said. "Each day affects the next...
...support affirmative action in the abstract, but I worry more about its application than I used to. The possibility that those with only tenuous claims to disadvantaged minority status can find their way into "targeted pools" incenses...
...danger of relying too heavily on the card key information, but again, it's a tradeoff for increased security," Cho says. "I don't want to seem like it doesn't disturb me at all because in an abstract sense, it does seem quite Big Brotherish. But in a practical sense, it's just another measure that's taken to protect...