Word: commandant
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...early days of the digital computer, this was extremely difficult. The machine reduces all the information it receives, whether it arrives as letters, numbers or graphic symbols, into the simplest possible electronic statements: either a yes or a no, represented by pulses of high or low voltage. To command the machine in its own internal language meant writing out endless strings of ones or zeros, called bits and bytes, symbolizing those yes or no statements. But scientists soon began creating alternate languages for communicating with the machines that vaguely resemble everyday speech...
...being overtaken seems both more urgent and more complex. Science-fiction writers from Capek to Asimov have built much of their genre around robots, androids, computers and their kin-each fairly boring and predictable as characters, but all presenting the same basic paradox: that they will eventually take command of the world, and that a man can beat them every time...
...parts of thought. So are the acts of pondering, rationalizing, worrying, brooding, theorizing, contemplating, criticizing. One thinks when one imagines, hopes, loves, doubts, fantasizes, vacillates, regrets. To experience greed, pride, joy, spite, amusement, shame, suspicion, envy, grief-all these require thought; as do the decisions to take command, or umbrage; to feel loyalty or inhibitions; to ponder ethics, self-sacrifice, cowardice, ambition. So vast is the mind's business that even as one makes such a list, its inadequacy is self-evident-the recognition of inadequacy being but another part of an enormous and varied instrument...
...does not consist of traditional Reformation groups, such as the Lutherans, but the Pentecostalists-at 51 million strong, a leading strain of the worldwide Evangelical movement. In addition, 11 million members of more traditional denominations follow Pentecostal practices. Barrett's astounding conclusion: the Evangelicals, taken all together, today command a healthy majority of Protestants in the world (157 million) as well as in the U.S. (59 million...
...Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow at $150, and invest intelligently at the remainder table. After all, many of the novels published in the '60s became important emotional furniture to a generation now competitively collecting books. Authors like Kurt Vonnegut, Walker Percy and Joyce Carol Gates now command rare-volume respect...