Word: plumbing
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Harris says there is no critique of faith hidden somewhere in his brief paper. But his next neurological enterprise may be another matter. He is planning an fMRI run that will concentrate specifically on religious faith, which Harris thinks he now knows how to plumb more deeply. He also plans to set up two different subject groups - the faithful and non-believers. "That way," among other things, he says, "you can ask, 'Do believers believe that Jesus was born of a virgin the same way that nonbelievers believe that Chevrolet makes cars and trucks?'" It may turn out that...
...Just when they began to wonder how much longer they could keep the project going, a group of local veterans volunteered to groom and replant the memorial in time for Veterans Day. About a dozen men, using plumb lines and measuring sticks, worked four full days last week replanting the flags in perfectly spaced and tidy rows...
...what might be called paper merit. Degrees, test scores, recommendation letters: these are all artificial substitutes for real merit. Sometimes the artificial substitute is unavoidable. When many thousands of top students are applying for a few hundred places at a top school like M.I.T., admissions officers can't plumb the depths of each applicant's soul. So they use test scores. Employers looking to hire young people for their first full-time job can't stop to gather and judge all the information they might want in deciding who is likely to be a disciplined and skillful employee. So they...
...Tymoczko may have changed all that. Borrowing some of the mathematics that string theorists invented to plumb the secrets of the physical universe, he has found a way to represent the universe of all possible musical chords in graphic form. "He's not the first to try," says Yale music theorist Richard Cohn. "But he's the first to come up with a compelling answer...
...lost on both sides, for whom the zeroes in a round number like 3,000 are instead perfect little mirrors to reflect their own hot opinions of the war in Iraq. Anti-war activists loudly mourn the senseless loss of life. Passing 3,000 is a prime opportunity to plumb the depths of their own angers about how the war was planned, sold, and executed. Hawks mourn the fact that America has lost its grit. After all, they point out, 3,000 dead is still less than half the annual toll in the worst years of Vietnam. And amid either...