Cubic Capacity Quotes

It is a question of cubic capacity," said he; "a man with so large a brain must have something in it.

Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it. “Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible. “Yet consider. “Consider pain. “Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.

It is a question of cubic capacity,” said he; “a man with so large a brain must have something in it.

teams of phrenologists were sent to Indian country. Using the theory and practice of craniometry developed by Samuel George Morton (which determined “scientifically” that Caucasians had the largest brain capacity—1,426 cubic centimeters versus a paltry 1,344 for American Indians and 1,278 for blacks), the phrenologists set about measuring skulls,

Prior to these results, physicists had reasoned that since the Planck length (10^33) centimeters) was apparently the shortest length for which the notion of "distance" continues to have meaning, the smallest meaningful volume would be a tiny cube whose edges were each one Planck length long (a volume of 10^-99) cubic centimeters). A reasonable conjecture, widely believed, was that irrespective of future technological breakthroughs, the smallest possible volume could store no more than the smallest unit of information-one bit. And so the expectation was that a region of space would max out its information storage capacity when the number of bits it contained equaled the number of Planck cubes that could fit inside it. That Hawking's result involved the Planck length was therefore not surprising. The surprise was that the black hole's storehouse of hidden information was determined by the number of Planck-sized squares covering its surface and not by the number of Planck-sized cubes filling its volume. This was the first hint of holography-information storage capacity determined by the area of a bounding surface and not by the volume interior to that surface . Through twists and turns across three subsequent decades, this hint would evolve into a dramatic new way of thinking about the laws of physics.

To compare the rate of progress of the biological evolution of intelligence to that of technological evolution, consider that the most advanced mammals have added about one cubic inch of brain matter every hundred thousand years, whereas we are roughly doubling the computational capacity of computers every year

The New Brain The troop of hominds walks steadily on, untiring, while in the far distance the image of a herd of moving animals ripples in and out of focus through the heat-haze. It is impossible to see exactly what they are. The older man pauses and looks down at a series of regular marks on the ground. They are hoof-prints and, tracing one with his finger, he looks from them to the distant herd, making the connection - they must be giraffes. It may seem a simple act of observation to us, but in that single moment, ergaster reveals the secret of what really marks him out as a different kind of species. It is not the remarkably human-like body, but the thing that resides inside that un-human head. For, at a volume of about 1,000 cubic centimetres (60 cubic inches), ergaster's brain is half as big again as the smartest of his predecessors, and almost within the limits of modern human variation. ... This new brain capacity has brought even greater powers of thought into the everyday life of our ancestor. All animals have some understanding of their environments. A five-month-old swallow is instinctively able to negotiate the 10,000-kilometre (6,000 mile) migration from Britain to southern Africa without ever having done the journey before. An old matriarch elephant can remember where, in her vast territory, to go for water a certain time of year. Earlier hominids such as habilis and rudolfensis had already learned to associate different signs in their environment, such as the wheeling of vultures in the sky as a sign of a kill. But ergaster has taken that further, making complex deductions about apparently unrelated events going on around them. They can look at marks in the sand and, never having seen them before, can tell at once what they are, and what they are likely to relate to. To a dog, a big cat, or even to a baboon, hoofmarks such as these are no more than just that: random marks. Only we, of all the animals on Earth today, can see them for what they are: hoofprints, made by an animal that is likely either to be a meal for us or to make a meal of us. Ergaster is very likely the creature we inherited that skill from.

It was also the last time a liner put to sea without enough lifeboats. The 46,328-ton Titanic sailed under hopelessly outdated safety regulations. An absurd formula determined lifeboat requirements: all British vessels over 10,000 tons must carry 16 lifeboats with a capacity of 5,500 cubic feet, plus enough rafts and floats for 75 percent of the capacity of the lifeboats.

For the Titanic this worked out at 9,625 cubic feet. This meant she had to carry boats for only 962 people. Actually, there were boats for 1,178—the White Star Line complained that nobody appreciated their thoughtfulness. Even so, this took care of only 52 percent of the 2,207 people on board, and only 30 percent of her total capacity. From then on the rules and formulas were simple indeed—lifeboats for everybody.