Word: logical
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Equally good as satires of scientific logic are an essay that postulates the existence of the Infinite Zipper and another that proves heaven is actually hotter than hell. The reasoning goes like this: heaven, which the Bible says receives 49 times as much radiation from the sun as the earth does (Isaiah 30:26), would therefore have a temperature of 525° C. Hell, where the main topographical feature is a lake of molten brimstone (Revelation 21:8), could have a temperature of no more, no less, than 444.6° C. Above that temperature, the brimstone would vaporize; much below...
...Illyria, the lovely songs, the immortal lines, the great bard himself, dissolve and leave but the plot behind. Now girl-in-boy's-clothing palls, now which-twin-is-which proves yawningly wearisome. Many of the jokes are far past saving and a good bit of the chop logic word play is tedious word work. In Director William's conception of the comedy, the prankishness and the poetry are divorced instead of being mated...
...Beginning Was the End (Praeger; $7.95), the enthusiasm of Author Oscar Kiss Maerth spills over in red ink. The book, subtitled Man came into being through cannibalism-intelligence can be eaten, bears all the markings of pristine eccentricity: a big theme, a closed system of self-perpetuating logic, a disdain for accepted thought, no specific scientific references, no index and no bibliography. Kiss Maerth, who is described as a man born in Yugoslavia who spent many years in a Chinese Buddhist monastery and now lives at Lake Como, seems never to have heard of Lamarckian biology, T.D. Lysenko...
...slavery critics like Fanny Kemble were the main source of early stories about widespread cruelty and sexual abuse, and the assertion that slavery was an economic disaster that retarded the growth of the South. The inefficiency of plantations and black labor came as a natural corollary, both in logic and because many abolitionists, ironically, were racists who assumed black inferiority as a matter of course. Olmsted, a New Yorker, traveled in the South but stoutly asserted that slaves did a third to a half as much work as "the commonest, stupidest Irish domestic drudges at the North." Opined Cassius Clay...
Nixon's strategy of stonewalling all subpoenas carried at least one clear inference, based on both longstanding legal precepts and simple logic. By publicly releasing the edited transcripts of 46 Watergate conversations, Nixon had presented his own best evidentiary case against impeachment; damning as those documents may prove, the material he is now withholding must be even worse. Nixon is apparently gambling that his refusal to deliver such evidence will be seen in the end as a somewhat technical procedural matter carrying less danger of impeachment and conviction than would the contents of the material itself if yielded...