Word: abstracted
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...promise, however, is deceptive. While Souter's thesis is about law, it is so abstract that it never once mentions a single case. And while Souter does stake out a few positions, he pointedly refuses to state his opinion on the largest and most significant question he raises...
...generous to the point of folly; when money came, he threw it away like a cavalryman on a binge. He was acutely conscious of lineage and tradition. The art of the past, one might say, became De Stael's absent father. He began his public career as an abstract painter and backed into figuration, thus annoying a number of Parisian critics who prided themselves on their advanced taste...
...stones have a strange abstract fertility, like dreams breeding. They come teeming up in geometries to make temples, cities. They also have their power in smaller sizes. They come up in the hands of children and fly through , the air, to make a nation, or at least to trouble the dream of Zion...
That discovery came at a time when the Reagan Administration treated the civil rights agenda with indifference, if not outright hostility, and the movement had become fractured over intractable disagreements about increasingly abstract concerns like affirmative action. By comparison, apartheid was an issue as clear-cut and compelling -- and televisable -- as a segregated lunch counter in Birmingham. It offered a focal point for the inchoate resentments many felt of the greed and selfishness spawned during the Reagan years...
...main theory is far more speculative. It holds that consciousness and insight, which he says are beyond the capabilities of computers, are governed by as yet undiscovered laws of physics. The idea that computers are necessarily unconscious and without insight is largely based on his own experience in solving abstract puzzles. And it is true that these mental processes are not explained by existing laws of physics. The answers will come, says Penrose, with the merger of Einstein's theory of relativity, which concerns itself with gravity, and quantum theory, which governs the sub-microscopic world. These two theories...