Word: notional
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Theoretical Leap. Many researchers feel that memories are stored and recalled by a combination of macromolecules or large molecules that probably differ considerably from one individual to another. Thus they reject the notion of some science-fiction writers that memory molecules-and thereby memories-may one day be transferred from one brain to another. "The immune response is a learned reaction," says Rockefeller University's Edelman, again citing the parallel between memory and immunology. "There is no Marcel Proust for immunology. I doubt that there's one for the neurosciences...
Allen's subject may be futuristic, but his method of attacking it links him with the grand tradition of silent comedy. Like such masters of that tradition as Chaplin and Keaton, he deplores the notion that things can be improved through scientific and political "progress." Like them, he obviously believes it his unsolemn duty to subvert such nonsense. Sleeper is his definitive assault on it. And his funniest...
...animation is slightly halting, the style derived a little from the late Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher (TIME, April 11, 1972) and owing quite a lot to Edward Gorey. The script is too much in the debt of a lot of standard sci-fi ideas, most prominently the notion that there is a distant planet where humans are kept as pets or treated as wild animals by the native humanoid types. Fantastic Planet is about how the humans win their independence and all creatures come to live in harmony. There are some pretty pictures, but the graphics do not make...
...notion is too appealing to ignore. A generation ago, a crusty radio character named Titus Moody told the world that he refused to own a radio because "I don't hold with furniture that talks." Like many other items of the '40s, that furniture and that talk have assumed the burnished quality of rare and precious antiques...
...find out why pupils in one class had been told to collect 1,000,000 bottle caps. The idea, it turned out, was to give the children some tangible feel for huge numbers. Osgood's interviews with the kids showed that they still had not the slightest notion of what 1,000,000 of anything means. The collection, however, was lumbering on-a paradigm of futility. Not a major story, to be sure, but given the Osgood treatment, a model of its kind that is scarce in both print and electronic journalism...