Word: sorting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1950
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...some ways, Dean Harry J, Carman of Columbia College,* Columbia University was a very odd sort of dean. He was a baggily dressed man with a Yankee twang and white hair that always seemed ruffled. He called distinguished visitors "you dear folks," said "peoples" when he meant "people"; and his eminent colleague, Historian Jacques Barzun, he insisted on calling Jake...
...brightest of her breed. Compared to her children and grandchildren (one of whom, Harvard's Mark III -see cover-lives on the floor below in Harvard's Computation Laboratory), she is dim-witted and slow. But Bessie is a progenetrix, a sort of mechanical Eve. By proving what computing machines could do, she started one of the liveliest developments in modern science...
Around the machines drifts a dense fog of mathematics, a sort of intellectual tear gas to discomfort the nonmathematical. The machines speak and understand a special language of numbers. These are not "decimal," as ordinary numbers are, built on a base of ten with digits running from 0 to 9. They are "binary" numbers with a base of two, and have only two digits: 0 and 1. In this style of arithmetic, 0 is 0; 1 is i. But 2 is written...
...arithmetic. Any number, however large, can be expressed in this form. So can elaborate equations like those from the fission problem done for Princeton by the I.B.M. machine. Even languages can be translated in binary numbers. (One way: making different numbers stand for each character, syllable or word.) Any sort of information, once the mathematicians go to work on it, can be broken down into...
...film places the action in a sort of opéra-bouffe Dogpatch in central Europe, in Napoleonic times. Kaye is not the knave of Gogol's play but a good-hearted rube. A half-starved outcast from a medicine show, he is mistaken by the crooked mayor (Gene Lockhart) and his henchmen-relatives for Napoleon's feared inspector general traveling incognito. Then, hardly grown into his splendid Techncolored uniform and the hungry affections of the mayor's wife (Elsa Lanchester), Kaye becomes a cat's-paw and fall guy for the scoundrelly medicine-show boss...