Word: proving
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...endure the embarrassment of vetoing it while Mandela is still in the U.S. The bill seeks to lessen the effect of several recent Supreme Court decisions that diluted existing federal affirmative-action and antidiscrimination law. In particular, the rulings made it harder for victims of discrimination to prove bias and bring lawsuits for redress in court. Bush has insisted that he will veto the bill if it is not amended to correct provisions that he says could have the effect of requiring employers to adopt racial quotas in hiring...
...loggers or environmentalists have ever seen the elusive spotted owl. They know it as either a costly subject of litigation or a rare distillation of the forest spirit. But on the summit of a steep ravine in Douglas County, a pair of spotted owls assert themselves, as if to prove they are more than a mere abstraction. Nesting in the cavity of a broken-topped fir, they scan for prey and ponder the rare two-legged observer far below. Their gentle mewing ! gives way to a distinctive four-note hoot: "who-who, who-who." The male drops down...
...century house with high ceilings or a grubby room in a tenement block. Since the booking system remains fairly rigid, visitors should be flexible. In East Germany changing from an expensive room overlooking a busy railway station to a cheaper one next to a quiet courtyard can prove to be impossible. Rules are still rules, and a voucher is for what it says...
Mathematician Alan Turing made a related discovery in the 1950s when he used his Turing machine -- an imaginary, simple computer -- to prove that there are some mathematical problems that are solvable but that cannot be solved even in principle by a digital computer. Says Penrose: "The very fact that the mind leads us to truths that are not computable convinces me that a computer can never duplicate the mind" -- this despite the fact that the human brain is often described as a particularly complex computer...
Penrose's answer is that when quantum gravity is finally constructed, it will prove to be time asymmetric -- that is, it will not work in reverse. Why? Because the Big Bang that started the universe must, at its earliest moments, have been governed by quantum gravity. And the Big Bang was surely a time- asymmetric phenomenon that could not happen in reverse. If quantum gravity winds up being the theory governing the mind, that will also explain why time moves forward, not backward...