Word: mind
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Your "Politic" commentary in the October 23 issue left several questions in my mind...
...this movie, it is underplayed and underwritten. Noel Black, who once did a curiously perverse little movie called Pretty Poison, is capable of stronger work, and so are these performers. Mere agreeability is just not enough to sustain a movie that has crime as well as comedy on its mind...
...brain contains some 1 trillion cells. But can any imagination get a practical hold on such a quantity? It is easy to picture the symbolic numerals: 1,000,000,000,000. Still, who can comprehend that many individual units of anything at one time? The number teases, dazzles the mind and even dizzies it, but that does not add up to understanding. Biology ought to find out what happens to the brain when it tries to visualize 1 trillion...
Boggling figures of that sort have been popular as curiosities ever since Archimedes tried to calculate how many grains of sand the universe could contain (1051, he said). Today, however, mind-walloping numbers are no longer oddities; they are the stuffing of ordinary news and public discourse. While even the biggest figures no doubt possess meaning, it is impossible not to suspect that many casually circulated numbers might as well be the music of the spheres...
...Still, such efforts to evoke the actuality of a billion are far likelier to give the curious a picture of an extremely tall stack of currency than of the quantity of a billion units. In truth, most mega-numbers (and micro-numbers) that fly by these days paralyze the mind almost as much as a googol...