ellauri096.html on line 191: Yes, there are infinitely many. Kurt Gödel’s incompleteness theorem demonstrated that any system that is strong enough to express arithmetic is also strong enough to express a formal counterpart of the self-referential proposition in the surprise test example ‘This statement cannot be proved in this system’. If the system cannot prove its “Gödel sentence”, then this sentence is true. If the system can prove its Gödel sentence, the system is inconsistent. So either the system is incomplete or inconsistent. (See the entry on Kurt Gödel.)
ellauri096.html on line 195: J. R. Lucas (1964) claims that this reveals human beings are not machines. A computer is a concrete instantiation of a formal system. Hence, its “knowledge” is restricted to what it can prove. By Gödel’s theorem, the computer will be either inconsistent or incomplete. However, a human being with a full command of arithmetic can be consistent (even if he is actually inconsistent due to inattention or wishful thinking).
ellauri163.html on line 697: With an 11-year-old hero, Philip Pullman´s new book is a delightful nod to Edmund Spenser´s 'The Faerie Queene'. If Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy was an obvious nod to John Milton’s Paradise Lost, his new Book Of Dust trilogy takes inspiration from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Though thematically different, both fall within the same literary genre—they are epic poems, long narrative pieces recounting heroic deeds, and if the term could loosely be used to describe works of prose, then La Belle Sauvage, the first in the Book Of Dust trilogy, is one such novel. Spenser’s late-16th century poem, though incomplete, follows the adventures of medieval knights. Our knight is 11-year-old Malcolm Polstead, curious, intelligent, good-natured and clueless, when we first meet him, of the trials that await him. La Belle Sauvage, then, is a companion, or "equel" (a new story that stands alongside his previous trilogy), to His Dark Materials trilogy. Better strike while the iron is hot, as J.K. Rowling did.
ellauri194.html on line 314: Sedgwick' died of breast cancer in 2009 aged 58,. She deploys erudite and playful readings of texts by Oscar Wilde, Henry James and Marcel Proust to interrogate assumptions about the stability of sexual identity and how language works to define a homo/heterosexual binary. She writes: "An understanding of virtually any aspect of modern western culture must be not merely incomplete but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition."
ellauri223.html on line 153: New Atlantis is an incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon, published posthumously in 1626. It appeared unheralded and tucked into the back of a longer work of natural history, Sylva sylvarum (forest of materials). In New Atlantis, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the mythical Bensalem. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, Salomon's House (or Shlomo's House), envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure sciences.
ellauri248.html on line 118: I loved this book to pieces, even though I could not shake off the overwhelming feeling of sadness and hollowness after finishing it. I loved it despite (or maybe because?) of the frustrating incompleteness of some plot lines, the frequent lack of resolution, and the unfulfillment of my wishes for the characters and events. [noir romance]
ellauri389.html on line 83: Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" already suggests that Coleridge (the Brit) himself is the next poet-hero and successor to China's genius. As a fragment, however, the poem's famously incomplete glimpse of Chinese brilliance foregrounds the poem's failure to realize its promise. Lamb's essay provides a more contemporary explanation of Coleridge's dream: cheap porcelain was the immanent inspiration of "Kubla Khan."
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 48: Nonrenormalizability itself is no big deal; the Fermi theory of weak interactions was nonrenormalizable, but now we know how to complete it into a quantum theory involving W and Z bosons that is consistent at higher energies. So nonrenormalizability doesn't necessarily point to a contradiction in the theory; it merely means the theory is incomplete.
xxx/ellauri113.html on line 84: Ex nihilo, nihil fit – is one of the propositions to which great significance was attributed in metaphysics. The proposition is either to be viewed as just a barren tautology, nothing is nothing, or, if becoming is supposed to have real meaning in it, then, since only nothing comes from nothing, there is in fact none in it, for the nothing remains nothing in it. Becoming entails that nothing not remain nothing, but that it pass over into its other, being. – Later metaphysics, especially the Christian, rejected the proposition that out of nothing comes nothing, thus asserting a transition from nothing into being; no matter how synthetically or merely imaginatively it took this proposition, there is yet even in the most incomplete unification of being and nothing a point at which they meet, and their distinguishedness vanishes. –
xxx/ellauri166.html on line 77: This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (August 2008).
xxx/ellauri179.html on line 608: Young Hemingway vilified James for his choice of themes and characters, but more importantly, he viciously maligned him for the traumatic but obscure accident that had occurred in his youth. Leon Edel has summarized the known facts of the injury as gathered from James´ writings and other sources. The "obscure hurt" was reported by James to have happened at the "same dark hour" of the onset of the Civil War, in other words, May 1861 (Edel, Years 176-77). But actually the causative factor, the fire at West Stables in Newport, occurred on the night of October 28, 1861 (177). James relates that he had jammed himself into "an acute angle between two fences" trying to make "a rusty, quasi-extemporised old engine work" in order to help put out the stable fire. Injured in this attempt, James later provided only incomplete details and stated that the disaster was "intimate, odious, horrid, catastrophe, obscure, and most entirely personal" (175).
xxx/ellauri199.html on line 1063: A more mixed review of the book in The Economist claimed it "hit on some unfortunate truths", but "shows an incomplete picture of Europe today." Furthermore, it said that "the book would benefit, however, from far more reporting" and claimed Murray often "lets fear trump analysis" and was "prone to exaggeration."
xxx/ellauri229.html on line 134: (1.) The whole Bible will be read through in an orderly manner in the course of a year. – The Old Testament once, the New Testament and Psalms twice. I fear many of you never read the whole Bible; and yet it is all equally Divine (may the Catholics say what they will, it´s all 100% pure new wool, including Leviticus), “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect.” If we pass over some parts of Scripture, we shall be incomplete Christians. "You'll never read it", said Circle Mouth to me when I bought Noam Chomsky´s thesis at a MIT Press book sale. Of course I had to read it from cover to cover, though much of it was pretty dull. (That´s all I remember of it as is.)
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