Cipher Related Quotes

in intelligence as in everything else related to conflict victory is gained not by the side that makes no mistakes, but by the one that makes fewer than the other side. By

I suppose the truth is simply that it was possible for benefits like these to accrue only to a Negro lucky enough to remain in the poor but relatively benign atmosphere of Virginia. For here in this worn-out country with its decrepit little farms there was still an ebb and flow of human sympathy—no matter how strained and imperfect—between slave and master, even an understanding (if sometimes prickly) intimacy; and in this climate a black man had not yet become the cipher he would become in the steaming fastnesses of the far South but could get off in the woods by himself or with a friend, scratch his balls and relax and roast a stolen chicken over an open fire and brood upon women and the joys of the belly or the possibility of getting hold of a jug of brandy, or pleasure himself with thoughts of any of the countless tolerable features of human existence.

Two writings of al-Hassār have survived. The first, entitled Kitāb al-bayān wa t-tadhkār [Book of proof and recall] is a handbook of calculation treating numeration, arithmetical operations on whole numbers and on fractions, extraction of the exact or approximate square root of a whole of fractionary number and summation of progressions of whole numbers (natural, even or odd), and of their squares and cubes. Despite its classical content in relation to the Arab mathematical tradition, this book occupies a certain important place in the history of mathematics in North Africa for three reasons: in the first place, and notwithstanding the development of research, this manual remains the most ancient work of calculation representing simultaneously the tradition of the Maghrib and that of Muslim Spain. In the second place, this book is the first wherein one has found a symbolic writing of fractions, which utilises the horizontal bar and the dust ciphers i.e. the ancestors of the digits that we use today (and which are, for certain among them, almost identical to ours) [Woepcke 1858-59: 264-75; Zoubeidi 1996]. It seems as a matter of fact that the utilisation of the fraction bar was very quickly generalised in the mathematical teaching in the Maghrib, which could explain that Fibonacci (d. after 1240) had used in his Liber Abbaci, without making any particular remark about it [Djebbar 1980 : 97-99; Vogel 1970-80]. Thirdly, this handbook is the only Maghribian work of calculation known to have circulated in the scientific foyers of south Europe, as Moses Ibn Tibbon realised, in 1271, a Hebrew translation. [Mathematics in the Medieval Maghrib: General Survey on Mathematical Activities in North Africa]

Only Christianity, with its teaching of a personal Creator, provides an adequate metaphysical explanation of our irreducible experience of personhood. It alone accounts for the raw material of experience within a comprehensive worldview. In the modern world, with its large, impersonal institutions where people are treated as ciphers in the machine, the Christian message is good news indeed. Ultimate reality is not the machine; it is a personal Being who loves and relates to each individual in a personal manner.

The stakes in the debate between Benjamin and Schmitt on the state of exception can now be defined more clearly. The dispute takes place in a zone of anomie that, on the one hand, must be maintained in relation to the law at all costs, and, on the other, must be just as implacably released and freed from this relation. That is to say, at issue in the anomic zone is the relation between violence and law - in the last analysis, the status of violence as a cipher for human action. While Schmitt attempts every time to reinscribe violence within a juridical context, Benjamin responds to this gesture by seeking every time to assure it - as pure violence - an existence outside of law. For reasons that we must try to clarify, this struggle for anomie seems to be as decisive for Western politics as the gigantomachia peri tes ousias, the 'battle of giants concerning being', that defines Western metaphysics. Here, pure violence as the extreme political object, as the 'thing' of politics, is the counterpart to pure being, to pure existence as the ultimate metaphysical stakes; the strategy of the exception, which must ensure the relation between anomic violence and law, is the counterpart to the onto-theo-logical strategy aimed at capturing pure being the meshes of the logos.

(Therapist:) "It's interesting that you drew yourself with this little golden crown on your head. What does the crown mean to you?" "That's not a crown," she told him. "That's a nimbus of outrage.

The two most extravagantly demonstrated theories in all of science belong to physics: general relativity, and the Standard Model of quantum mechanics. Both are understood and tested to accuracies beyond ten decimal places. The first theory controls everything large, with a force so weak — gravity — that a housefly’s wings can overcome the pull of an entire planet. Its counterpart is infinitesimal, and the forces it describes are so strong that by breaking them apart you can destroy a city. Each perfect opposites, and each missing something: a way to explain the other. I’m

Reading the Epistle of the Seven Ways by Abraham Abulafia (the cabalist, not the psychologist), it jumps to view what is the ascent to the divine vision through the calculated reading of sacred texts. It's also a coding that isn't as diverse as Dante's. I quote from memory: literal, doxal, allegorical-narrative, protocol, intellectual (agent intellect), cabalistic (by acronyms, by ciphered correspondence), anagogical (divine). The prologue to Aethiopica by Heliodorus (VI or V century?), best seller of his time, was analyzed by methods near to the Christian cabala (XIII, XIV century). But the game of absolute and relative (R. Lulio) is quite far from the very rich combinatorial of Jewish cabala (360 degrees games and 80 gradients, etc.). Curious that Abulafia quotes some of the operations of the cabala using Greek names.