Word: answering
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...this were not a Gail Godwin novel, the reader's answer might be a rapid affirmative. For Margaret does display some narrative traits that seem to demand an ironic double take. She has the habit, for example, of quoting everyone else's fulsome praise of her: "Oh, Margaret, what a great, great story... You say such wise things, Margaret...You're an extraordinary young woman, Margaret." Isn't Margaret a wee bit full of herself? And what to make of this rector's loving inventories of the riches of her church, "the Elsa Van Wyck Memorial Ciborium with...
...still a stuff that people love and hate. Every time a grocery clerk asks, "Paper or plastic?," the great debate between old and new, natural and synthetic, biodegradable and not, silently unfolds in a shopper's breast in the instant it takes to decide on the answer...
...gnawed, and he returned to England in 1929 to declare dramatically that he had got it all wrong the first time. The "later Wittgenstein" spent the next 18 years agonizing in front of a small Cambridge seminar of devoted and transfixed students, who posed curious questions that he then answered--or pointedly did not answer--with wonderfully austere if often enigmatic aphorisms. An obsessive perfectionist, Wittgenstein worked and reworked his notes and left his second masterpiece, Philosophical Investigations, for posthumous publication in 1953. Both books will be required reading as far into the future as any philosopher could claim...
...Alan Turing had done was answer, in the negative, a vexing question in the arcane realm of mathematical logic, few nonspecialists today would have any reason to remember him. But the method Turing used to show that certain propositions in a closed logical system cannot be proved within that system--a corollary to the proof that made Kurt Godel famous--had enormous consequences in the world at large. For what this eccentric young Cambridge don did was to dream up an imaginary machine--a fairly simple typewriter-like contraption capable somehow of scanning, or reading, instructions encoded on a tape...
...predict what lies ahead, we must often rely on guesswork. But the nature of our present ignorance points to problems science cannot avoid. The most obvious of these is the question of what happens in our head when we are thinking. Nobody yet has a compelling answer for that. People surmise, but no surmise can yet meet the tyrannical test that every assertion about the nature of the world must be proved by experiment or observation...