Word: heaps
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Colin, age four, "has a lightness of touch and a dexterity that will certainly put him on top of the heap if he ever takes up safe-cracking." His twin, Johnny, is a victim of the chaos and disorder which exist to be-wilder the precise mind. "Indeed," Mother reports, "if one of the beans on his plate is slightly longer than the others he can scarcely bear to eat it." The youngest child is fortunately only seventeen months old and only gurgles and smiles. His parents nevertheless have great hopes that he will grow up to be as eccentric...
Chief actors on the show are Bil Baird and his marionettes Snarky and Gargle. Under Snarky's eager questioning and Gargle's perpetual doubting, Baird traces the history of mathematics from the days when the caveman could count only "one, two, one, two, and a heap.'' He describes the earliest numerals, explains the origin of the decimal system, shows how ancient merchants used their counting boards, stages a computation race with an abacus expert, tells about the discovery of zero." Now I heard every thing," grumbles Gargle. "Zero- zero means nothin' Baird...
...somewhat the same way that the caveman counted one, two, one, two, and a heap, the electronic computer also starts out on a problem using only two basic values-one for when the circuit is on, another for when it is off. But this primitive off-again-on-again arithmetic, combined with the ability to memorize numbers, to compare them and act on the comparison, goes at such fantastic speed and in such volume that the machine can solve the most complex problems in a matter of minutes or seconds...
What saved the reja from the scrap heap was the omnivorous taste of the late William Randolph Hearst-who once bought a whole monastery in Spain, shipped it stone by stone to the U.S. But even Hearst did not have room to house the cathedral screen. For more than 25 years it remained in packing boxes in a Bronx warehouse. Eventually, Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum, which has in its towering Medieval Sculpture Hall a room made to order for the 60,000-lb. screen, began negotiating to buy it. Earlier this year the Hearst Foundation donated the screen...
...more (reportedly from the U.S. controlled Hudson's Bay Oil & Gas Co. Ltd.). buiit its holdings to 702,000 shares (worth almost $16 million) by the Tennessee purchase. Said a Brown aide: "Never forget that he is going to be on the top of the heap, because he never forgets...