Word: wildness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...barge, nor that Egyptians should be induced to shout "Aisha Khrushchev," through the streets of Cairo, nor that Pandit Nehru should stage a passive demonstration. But the collective action of these figures would not fail to make a very strong impression upon the belligerents. This plan may seem wild and hallucinatory. But, in this case, it matches the situation...
There are many reasons for indulging one's time and energy in pure, abstract speculation. As Batteau points out, professional scientific papers have no raw, unfinished ideas. They contain no wild flights of imagination, no daring expeditions into the trackless and lush jungles of scientific possibility. There must be outlets for pure speculative activity--and that is the raison d'etre behind the Society. "Bull sessions and science fiction are market places for half-baked ideas," explains Batteau...
...speculator, however wild his imagination may be, must be careful always to criticize his own speculations. That is why the Speculative Society spends as much time criticizing its fanciful ideas as it does creating them. There must be "signals," the speculator's term for actual scientific fact, as well as "noise," the vague and indefinite element of speculation, in order for an idea to have any validity. Ordinary science has a high signal-to-noise ratio; speculation is mostly noise, Batteau admits, but not entirely...
...first of these scenes are quite funny--especially in Lisbon just before the earthquake where junkmen, winesellers, and Arab conjurers litter the stage. A bear frolics--chased by his bearman--and the wild infant Casmira screams, "The earth will quake and the ground will shake," to which the Very, Very Old Inquisitor grunts toward the Very Old Inquisitor, "The danger has passed." Just then the stage begins to rumble. As the play wears on, however, these scenes become repetitions and progressively less funny. Toward the end, Candide wearily remarks, "You cannot live by bed alone...
...lightness-like a fat lady winning a cha-cha contest. As a travelogue, Around the World is at least as spectacular as anything Cinerama has slapped together. The customer is offered an album of house-high snapshots of summer in Paris, corridas in Spain, religious festivals in India, a Wild West show in the hoariest Hollywood tradition; and at one point he is even permitted to witness a sight that the 19th century would cheerfully have given its right sideburn to see: Queen Victoria...