Word: complexity
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...will be possible to explain in exact mathematical terms-in terms of atomic energy levels and electronspins-what happens when insulin is secreted in the pancreas, when starch is broken down in the digestive system, when an ovum is penetrated and fertilized by a spermatozoon, many & many a complex biological phenomenon...
...early 1920s, before jitterbugs were heard of, U. S. citizens stretched their legs to a suave, complex and relatively deliberate type of jazz. For this jazz Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths tapped out the melodies, lavishly equipped dance bands swelled the refrain. But the highly technical business of writing out the music, making accompaniments and orchestrations was done by men called "arrangers." Though the Irving Berlins and the Vincent Lopezes got the kudos and the bacon, it was their hard-working arrangers who actually butchered...
Much has happened to England since Gibbon wrote, and to Robert Graves the fall of Rome seems a much more complex matter than it did to Gibbon. Nor does he write of it with the majestic smugness that has made Gibbon an unsurpassed soporific for 150 years. The barbarians were really pretty tough. The emperors whom Gibbon dismissed as weaklings were really doing their best; the barbarian generals were smart men-besides, Rome was a hard city to defend. So in Robert Graves's books Rome falls with a sigh rather than with the sonorous crash that Gibbon heard...
Meanwhile Stanford piled up three times their opponents yardage and, by the last period, they had broken down the Dartmouth forward wall and were gaining at will. Easterners had hoped to crack the mythical "bigger and betterness" complex of western gridmen, and now they have got some explaining...
Theory of General Semantics is exceedingly complex (Korzybski calls it a "non-Aristotelian system"), but its method of instruction is simple. Chief instrument of training is the "structural differential." By handling this implement, students (who call it "the semantic rosary") learn graphically that there are different, "nonidentical" orders of meaning connected with each basic phenomenon. Thus, one plate in the implement represents a phenomenon (e.g., an apple), and the holes in it represent its infinite number of scientific characteristics, some perceptible to man, some unknown. Linked to that is a disc representing the physical, perceptible object, and to that...