Word: pascale
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...about growing "older and more vulgar," but in Burr he seemed young, and strangely erudite. Introducing one of his poems, "A Baroque Wall Fountain in the Villa," he dismissed the question of "transcendance and acceptance" as "sounding too much like a critic," but at other moments talked offhandedly of Pascal ("The spirit doesn't have any business denying things in the realm of fact"), St. Augustine ("The soul is complete in every part of the body"), and Pasternak. It was almost as if the rude irreverence which characterizes books like Paul Carroll's anthology of The New American Poets...
...almost defy criticism and can only be categorically accepted or rejected. An unsystematic thinker who refers to his essays as "fragments," Cioran (pronounced Cho-ran) presents his arguments in ironic, aphoristic prose (see box). It is rather as if Dostoevsky had written Notes from Underground in the style of Pascal's Pensees. Although his gloom has affinities, with existentialism, Cioran is hard to pigeon hole; his eclectic thought contains echoes of all philosophic history, from the pre-Socratics to the mystics of the Eastern church...
...pollsters switched to the more accurate "random sample," which relies on the theory of probability and owes its development to Galileo, Pascal, some expert gamblers and the U.S. Census Bureau. Probability theory says that if a jar contains 1,000,000 beans-half black and half white-and somebody scoops up 100 of them, he will almost always draw half black and half white, within a 3% margin of error. Gallup views the nation as a big bowl of beans. On a strictly random basis, he picks 300 sections of the U.S. and selects five voters in each section. Then...
...major markets. It is the embodiment of 20th century scientism, an emotionally neutral, self-perpetuating system of techniques that can be used for good or evil. Drawn into The Firm's cushy embrace is Inventor Felix Charlock, who sees himself as a "thinking weed," a pun on Pascal's definition of man as a "thinking reed." The Firm wants Charlock for his new recording device, which leads to the development of the ultimate computer, Abel. This electronic memory bank is capable of deducing an individual's past and future...
...eggs are all coming from the drawing board of Pascal Häusermann, 30, a Swiss architect for whom the laying of ovals is not a stunt but just plain sense. For one thing, egg shapes distribute stresses equally, which means that the chicken-wire forms can be covered by a shell of concrete as thin as two inches. For another, the construction is so simple that a Häusermann house can be completed in two months, cost as little as $12,000. Most important, perhaps, is Häusermann's conviction that "the mistake of modern architects...