Datum Quotes

The supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a simple datum of experience.

Knowing is not simply a material act, since the object that is known always conceals something beyond the empirical datum. All our knowledge, even the most simple, is always a minor miracle, since it can never be fully explained by the material instruments that we apply to it. In every truth there is something more than we would have expected, in the love that we receive there is always an element that surprises us.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree : you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say 'this we know'.

History is not an objective empirical datum, it is a myth.

Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery.

The real point of the matter is that what we call a 'wrong datum' is one which is inconsistent with all other known data. It is our only criterion for right and wrong.

Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic, rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or “normal” man to whom the scientific statements refer.

Het leven moet nu en dan krankzinnig idioot zijn, soms moet je er een trap tegen geven zodat alles een ogenblik scheef komt te staan, anders is het een doffe aaneenschakeling van betekenisloze datums, waar je je ten slotte niets van herinnert [...].

What a datum! I couldn't help thinking over and over.

I am a single, useless snail-loathing datum.

The individual, however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal ideal or normal man to whom the scientific statements refer.

Human nature presents human minds with a puzzle which they have not yet solved and may never succeed in solving, for all that we can tell. The dichotomy of a human being into 'soul' and 'body' is not a datum of experience. No one has ever been, or ever met, a living human soul without a body... Someone who accepts—as I myself do, taking it on trust—the present-day scientific account of the Universe may find it impossible to believe that a living creature, once dead, can come to life again; but, if he did entertain this belief, he would be thinking more 'scientifically' if he thought in the Christian terms of a psychosomatic resurrection than if he thought in the shamanistic terms of a disembodied spirit.

Meanwhile, someplace in the world, somebody is making love and another a poem. Elsewhere in the universe, a star manyfold the mass of our third-rate sun is living out its final moments in a wild spin before collapsing into a black hole, its exhale bending spacetime itself into a well of nothingness that can swallow every atom that ever touched us and every datum we ever produced, every poem and statue and symphony we’ve ever known—an entropic spectacle insentient to questions of blame and mercy, devoid of why. “In four billion years, our own star will follow its fate, collapsing into a white dwarf. We exist only by chance, after all. The Voyager will still be sailing into the interstellar shorelessness on the wings of the “heavenly breezes” Kepler had once imagined, carrying Beethoven on a golden disc crafted by a symphonic civilization that long ago made love and war and mathematics on a distant blue dot. But until that day comes, nothing once created ever fully leaves us. Seeds are planted and come abloom generations, centuries, civilizations later, migrating across coteries and countries and continents. Meanwhile, people live and people die—in peace as war rages on, in poverty and disrepute as latent fame awaits, with much that never meets its more, in shipwrecked love. I will die. You will die. The atoms that huddled for a cosmic blink around the shadow of a self will return to the seas that made us. What will survive of us are shoreless seeds and stardust.

It is self-evident that the tabula rasa of modernization favors the optimum use of earth-moving equipment inasmuch as a totally flat datum is regarded as the most economic matrix upon which to predicate the rationalization of construction.

Datum: At least one-third of ancient rulers’ seers and magicians were in fact fired or killed early in their tenure because it emerged that the bulk of what they foresaw or intuited was irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant, pointless.

The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. Nothing could be more unhistorical than to pick out selected sayings of Christ from the gospels and to regard those as the datum and the rest of the New Testament as a construction upon it. The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. If they had died without making anyone else believe this ‘gospel’ no gospels would ever have been written.

-Inde datum molitur iter.  Iamque arva tenebant ultima, quae bello clari secreta frequentant. Hic illi occurrit Tydeus, hic inclutus armis Parthenopaeus et Adrasti pallentis imago; hic multum fleti ad superos belloque caduci Dardanidae, quos ille omnes longo ordine cernens ingemuit,

The hedonistic conception of man is that of a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area but leave him intact... He is an isolated, definitive human datum, in stable equilibrium except for the buffets of the impinging forces that displace him in one direction or another. Self-poised in elemental space, he spins symmetrically about his own spiritual axis until the parallelogram of forces bears down on him, whereupon he follows he line of the resultant

Godine 2000, aprila 43.; Martobra 86. Između dana i noći; Datum nikoji Dan je bio bez datuma; Datuma se ne sećam. Meseca takođe nije bilo. Bilo je vrag bi ga znao šta.; Datum 1.; Madrid Februarij trideseti; Januar iste te godine, koji je nastupio posle februara; 25. datum; Datum 34 godine Februar 349.

Uvijek me fascinirao taj fenomen sa slikama. Stoje na zidu godinama, a onda, bez ikakvog povoda, ama baš ikakvog padnu, tras, padnu dole. Vise okačene o ekser, niko ih i ne pipne, ali one u jednom trenutku, tras, padnu dole, kao kamen. U savršenoj tišini, dok je sve oko njih nepomično, ni muha da proleti, a one, tras. Ne postoji nikakav razlog.Zašto baš u tom momentu? Niko ne zna. Tras. Šta se to dogodilo jednom ekseru te on zaključi da mu je svega dosta? Ima li i on dušu, jadnik? Donosi li odluke? Dugo je razgovarao sa slikom, nisu mogli da se dogovore šta da rade, pričali su o tome svake večeri, godinama, a onda su odredili datum, sat, minutu, tren, upravo sada, tras. Ili su za to znali već od samog početka, njih dvoje, sve je već bilo ugovoreno, znaš ja ću da popustim za sedam godina, što se mene tiče nema problema, ok., onda smo se dogovorili za 13. maj, ok., oko šest, neka bude petnaest do šest, važi, onda laku noć, ‘ku noć. Sedam godina kasnije, 13. maj, petnaest do šest: tras. Nikom nije jasno. To je jedna od onih stvari o kojima je bolje ne misliti, u protivnom možeš da poludiš. Kada padne slika. Kada se probudiš, jednog jutra, i više je ne voliš. Kad otvoriš novine i vidiš da je počeo rat. Kad vidiš neki voz i pomisliš ja moram da odem odavde. Kad se pogledaš u ogledalo i shvatiš da si ostario...

JOURNAL INTIME: Wenn ich einmal darin lese, zum Beispiel weil ich ein Datum brauche für unser Gespräch, so bin ich bestürzt: daß ich vor zwei oder fünf Jahren genu zu derselben Einsicht gekommen bin – nur habe ich sie dann wieder vergessen, weil es mir nicht gelungen ist, nach meiner Einsicht zu leben; ich habe das Gegenteil gelebt mit zäher Energie.

While he swims with the stream in the circular flow which is familiar to him, he swim against the stream if he wishes to change its channel. What was formerly a help becomes a hindrance. What was a familiar datum becomes an unknown. Where the boundaries of routine stop, many people can go no further, and the rest can only do so in a highly variable manner.

Now we have travelled a hundred million steps from the Datum, we are finding life systems entirely unlike our own - and yet we still find war. Must it always be so?

Aber das ist das Problem mit dem Alter: Man hat ein Gefühl, aber kein Datum. Und wenn man das Datum ausgräbt, verliert man das Gefühl.

One thus arrives at a curious conception of thought. Thought has no real, concrete existence, accessible to immediate consciousness, since the datum of introspection is the image. It has no universality in act, because, if it were so, one should be able to grasp it directly. But it is a potential universality that one derives from the fact that a word can be accompanied by very different images.

It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.

In so far as your metaphysical beliefs are implicit, you vaguely interpret the past on the lines of the present. But when it comes to the primary metaphysical data, the world of which you are immediately conscious is the whole datum.

I also get a perverse pleasure from correcting students who refer to an important piece of data or write that this data is important. (Data is the plural of datum, I tell them, so one ought to say, The datum is important; The data are important.) Yet

The esse in anima, then, is a psychological fact, and the only thing that needs ascertaining is whether it occurs but once, often, or universally in human psychology. The datum which is called “God” and is formulated as the “highest good” signifies, as the term itself shows, the supreme psychic value. In other words it is a concept upon which is conferred, or is actually endowed with, the highest and most general significance in determining our thoughts and actions. In the language of analytical psychology, the God-concept coincides with the particular ideational complex which, in accordance with the foregoing definition, concentrates in itself the maximum amount of libido, or psychic energy. Accordingly, the actual God-concept is, psychologically, completely different in different people, as experience testifies. Even as an idea God is not a single, constant being, and still less so in reality. For, as we know, the highest value operative in a human soul is variously located. There are men “whose God is the belly” (Phil. 3 : 19), and others for whom God is money, science, power, sex, etc. The whole psychology of the individual, at least in its essential aspects, varies according to the localization of the highest good, so that a psychological theory based exclusively on one fundamental instinct, such as power or sex, can explain no more than secondary features when applied to an individual with a different orientation.

Meestal luistert hij voor hij naar bed gaat nog even naar muziek, maar vandaag heeft hij daar geen zin in. Hij bladert in het in wasdoek ingebonden schrift, leest willekeurige notities uit het verleden. De dagen rijgen zich aaneen, de tijd vliedt, week na week, op zondagen is de datum in rood gemarkeerd. Hij is ijverig geweest, bijna dagelijks staat genoteerd dat hij een paar regels heeft geschreven. Helaas ook vaak, veel te vaak, dat het werk hem zwaar valt, dat hij geen zin heeft, dat hij maar moeilijk opschiet. Na het korte bericht over het werk elke morgen volgen de gebeurtenissen van de dag. Bezoekers, uitstapjes, maaltijden met Katja en de kinderen, wandelingen, theaterbezoek, lectuur en correspondentie. Zijn stemmingen, zijn lijden. Zijn lichaam reageert gespannen op de verplichtingen van het leven, met pijnen en verteringsproblemen. Het leven is nu eenmaal vaak moeilijk te verteren. Waarom schrijft hij dat allemaal op? Voor het nageslacht? Onwaarschijnlijk, de notities hebben geen enkele literaire waarde. Niemand heeft de schriften ooit gelezen, ook Katja en de kinderen niet. De dagboeken uit zijn jeugd heeft hij jaren geleden al verbrand, en ook wat zich sindsdien heeft opgehoopt zal hij op een dag in het vuur gooien. Niettemin zit hij avond aan avond aan zijn bureau om de vervliegende dag vast te houden. Rekenschap afleggen tegenover zichzelf, dat is het waarschijnljk, verplichte zelfobservatie. En een steun in moeilijke tijden, ook dat.

Lenz on the way home finds himself under huge hydrolystic compulsion to have Green right there by his side—or basically anyone who can’t get away or won’t go away—right there with him, and to share with Green or any compliant ear pretty much every experience and thought he’s ever had, to give each datum of the case of R. Lenz shape and visible breath as his whole life (and then some) tear-asses across his mind’s arctic horizon, trailing phosphenes. He

The more dutifully scholars acknowledge that the concept of race belongs in the same category as geocentrism or witchcraft, the more blithely they invoke it as though it were both a coherent analytical category and a valid empirical datum. In place of Jefferson’s moment of impassioned truth-telling, his successors fall back on italics or quotation marks, typographical abbreviations for the trite formula, ‘race is a social construction.’ The formula is meant to spare those who invoke race in historical explanation the raised eyebrows that would greet someone who, studying a crop failure, proposed witchcraft as an independent variable. But identifying race as a social construction does nothing to solidify the intellectual ground on which it totters. The London Underground and the United States of America are social constructions; so are the evil eye and the calling of spirits from the vasty deep; and so are murder and genocide. All derive from the thoughts, plans, and actions of human beings living in human societies. Scholars who intone ‘social construction’ as a spell for the purification of race do not make clear—perhaps because they do not themselves realize—that race and racism belong to different families of social construction, and that neither belongs to the same family as the United States of America or the London Underground. Race belongs to the same family as the evil eye. Racism belongs to the same family as murder and genocide. Which is to say that racism, unlike race, is not a fiction, an illusion, a superstition, or a hoax. It is a crime against humanity.

Sherri Solvig had had cancer, lymphatic cancer, but due to valiant efforts by her doctors she had gone into remission. However, encoded in the memory-tapes of her brain was the datum that patients with lymphoma who go into remission usually eventually lose their remission. They aren’t cured; the ailment has somehow mysteriously passed from a palpable state into a sort of metaphysical state, a limbo. It is there but it is not there. So despite her current good health, Sherri (her mind told her) contained a ticking clock, and when the clock chimed she would die. Nothing could be done about it, except the frantic promotion of a second remission. But even if a second remission were obtained, that remission, too, by the same logic, the same inexorable process, would end. Time had Sherri in its absolute power. Time contained one outcome for her: terminal cancer. This is how her mind had factored the situation out; it had come to this conclusion, and no matter how good she felt or what she had going for her in her life, this fact remained a constant. A cancer patient in remission, then, represents a stepped-up case of the status of all humans; eventually you are going to die.

Modern architects and engineers are still trying to understand how the ancient Greeks were able to build the Parthenon in ten years when the restoration of the monument has continued for more than three decades and is still not complete. What they have learned and shared along this arduous path of rediscovery is that the Greeks were highly skilled at building visual compensations into their structures. Columns were crafted and positioned to compensate for how the eye interprets what it sees at a distance. Subtle variances in the surface of platforms, columns, and colonnades provide the appearance of geometric proportion, whereas if they had worked from the perspective of a flat datum surface, the brain would interpret the results as being slightly skewed.

This prosperity was widely shared among the population. Although in the 1770s the top 20 percent of the population owned about two-thirds of the wealth, while the bottom 20 percent owned only 1 percent, that raw datum gives a distorted picture because it does not take time into account. (Modern statistics do exactly the same thing, now usually for tendentious, political reasons.) The population of British North America was a very young one, and children usually do not possess significant wealth. As people get older they tend to get richer, and that was certainly true in the thirteen colonies. One economic historian has calculated that of the colonial population in their forties, only about 8 percent would have been considered poor by the standards of the day, and even fewer in their fifties.

The principle of conscious life is: 'Nihil est in intellectu, quod non prius fuerit in sensu.' But the principle of the unconscious is the autonomy of the psyche itself, reflecting in the play of its images not the world but itself, even though it utilizes the illustrative possibilities offered by the sensible world in order to make its images clear. The sensory datum, however, is not the causa efficiens of this; rather, it is autonomously selected and exploited by the psyche, with the result that the rationality of the cosmos is constantly being violated in the most distressing manner. But the sensible world has an equally devastating effect on the deeper psychic processes when it breaks into them as a causa efficiens. If reason is not to be outraged on the one hand and the creative play of images not violently suppressed on the other, a circumspect and farsighted synthetic procedure is required in order to accomplish the paradoxical union of irreconcilables.

The method of critical doubt, though Descartes himself applied it only half-heartedly, was of great philosophic importance. It is clear, as a matter of logic, that it can only yield positive results if scepticism is to stop somewhere. If there is to be both logical and empirical knowledge, there must be two kinds of stopping points: indubitable facts, and indubitable principles of inference. Descartes's indubitable facts are his own thoughts—using 'thought' in the widest possible sense. 'I think' is his ultimate premiss. Here the word 'I' is really illegitimate; he ought to state his ultimate premiss in the form 'there are thoughts'. The word 'I' is grammatically convenient, but does not describe a datum. When he goes on to say 'I am a thing which thinks', he is already using uncritically the apparatus of categories handed down by scholasticism. He nowhere proves that thoughts need a thinker, nor is there reason to believe this except in a grammatical sense. The decision, however, to regard thoughts rather than external objects as the prime empirical certainties was very important, and had a profound effect on all subsequent philosophy.

Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans, with the result that the state cannot control the use made of its machinery and that the individual knows precisely how far he will be protected against interference from others, or whether the state is in a position to frustrate individual efforts. The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observes liberal principles and in the second that it does not. Similarly with respect to most of the general and permanent rules which the state may establish with regard to production, such as building regulations or factory laws: these may be wise or unwise in the particular instance, but they do not conflict with liberal principles so long as they are intended to be permanent and are not used to favor or harm particular people.

Of course, every state must act and every action of the state interferes with something or other. But that is not the point. The important question is whether the individual can foresee the action of the state and make use of this knowledge as a datum in forming his own plans, with the result that the state cannot control the use made of its machinery and that the individual knows precisely how far he will be protected against interference from others, or whether the state is in a position to frustrate individual efforts. The state controlling weights and measures (or preventing fraud and deception in any other way) is certainly acting, while the state permitting the use of violence, for example, by strike pickets, is inactive. Yet it is in the first case that the state observes liberal principles and in the second that it does not. Similarly with respect to most of the general and permanent rules which the state may establish with regard to production, such as building regulations or factory laws: these may be wise or unwise in the particular instance, but they do not conflict with liberal principles so long as they are intended to be permanent and are not used to favor or harm particular people. It is true that in these instances there will, apart from the long-run effects which cannot be predicted, also be short-run effects on particular people which may be clearly known. But with this kind of laws the short-run effects are in general not (or at least ought not to be) the guiding consideration. As these immediate and predictable effects become more important compared with the long-run effects, we approach the border line where the distinction, however clear in principle, becomes blurred in practice.

One can even alter, confuse, or interfere with particular conscious states by intruding upon the activities of the brain, chemically, surgically, traumatically, or otherwise; but one can never enter into, let alone measure, the persistent and irreducibly private perspective of the subject in whom these states inhere. This should be obvious, even to the most committed believer in empirical method, but its implications often prove strangely difficult to grasp (perhaps they are altogether too obvious): there is an absolute qualitative abyss between the objective facts of neurophysiology and the subjective experience of being a conscious self, and so a method capable of providing a model of only the former can never produce an adequate causal narrative of the latter. While one may choose to believe that the brain’s objectively observable electrochemical processes and the mind’s subjective, impenetrably private experiences are simply two sides of a single, wholly physical phenomenon, there is still no empirical way in which the two sides can be collapsed into a single observable datum, or even connected to one another in a clear causal sequence. The purely physical nature of those experiences remains, therefore, only a conjecture, and one that lacks even the support of a plausible analogy to some other physical process, as there is no other “mechanism” in nature remotely similar to consciousness. The difference in kind between the material structure of the brain and the subjective structure of consciousness remains fixed and inviolable, and so the precise relation between them cannot be defined, or even isolated as an object of scientific scrutiny. And this is an epistemological limit that it seems reasonable to think may never be erased, no matter how sophisticated our knowledge of the complex activities of the brain may become;

can be horribly fallible, and is over-rated in courts of law. Psychological experiments have given us some stunning demonstrations, which should worry any jurist inclined to give superior weight to ‘eye-witness’ evidence. A famous example was prepared by Professor Daniel J. Simons at the University of Illinois. Half a dozen young people standing in a circle were filmed for 25 seconds tossing a pair of basketballs to each other, and we, the experimental subjects, watch the film. The players weave in and out of the circle and change places as they pass and bounce the balls, so the scene is quite actively complicated. Before being shown the film, we are told that we have a task to perform, to test our powers of observation. We have to count the total number of times balls are passed from person to person. At the end of the test, the counts are duly written down, but – little does the audience know – this is not the real test! After showing the film and collecting the counts, the experimenter drops his bombshell. ‘And how many of you saw the gorilla?’ The majority of the audience looks baffled: blank. The experimenter then replays the film, but this time tells the audience to watch in a relaxed fashion without trying to count anything. Amazingly, nine seconds into the film, a man in a gorilla suit strolls nonchalantly to the centre of the circle of players, pauses to face the camera, thumps his chest as if in belligerent contempt for eye-witness evidence, and then strolls off with the same insouciance as before (see colour page 8). He is there in full view for nine whole seconds – more than one-third of the film – and yet the majority of the witnesses never see him. They would swear an oath in a court of law that no man in a gorilla suit was present, and they would swear that they had been watching with more than usually acute concentration for the whole 25 seconds, precisely because they were counting ball-passes. Many experiments along these lines have been performed, with similar results, and with similar reactions of stupefied disbelief when the audience is finally shown the truth. Eye-witness testimony, ‘actual observation’, ‘a datum of experience’ – all are, or at least can be, hopelessly unreliable. It is, of course, exactly this unreliability among observers that stage conjurors exploit with their techniques of deliberate distraction.

Slothrop is just settling down next to a girl in a prewar Worth frock and with a face like Tenniel’s Alice, same forehead, nose, hair, when from outside comes this most godawful clanking, snarling, crunching of wood, girls come running terrified out of the eucalyptus trees and into the house and right behind them what comes crashing now into the pallid lights of the garden but—why the Sherman Tank itself! headlights burning like the eyes of King Kong, treads spewing grass and pieces of flagstone as it manoeuvres around and comes to a halt. Its 75 mm cannon swivels until it’s pointing through the French windows right down into the room. “Antoine!” a young lady focusing in on the gigantic muzzle, “for heaven’s sake, not now. . . .” A hatch flies open and Tamara—Slothrop guesses: wasn’t Italo supposed to have the tank?—uh—emerges shrieking to denounce Raoul, Waxwing, Italo, Theophile, and the middleman on the opium deal. “But now,” she screams, “I have you all! One coup de foudre!” The hatch drops—oh, Jesus—there’s the sound of a 3-inch shell being loaded into its breech. Girls start to scream and make for the exits. Dopers are looking around, blinking, smiling, saying yes in a number of ways. Raoul tries to mount his horse and make his escape, but misses the saddle and slides all the way over, falling into a tub of black-market Jell-o, raspberry flavor, with whipped cream on top. “Aw, no . . .” Slothrop having about decided to make a flanking run for the tank when YYYBLAAANNNGGG! the cannon lets loose an enormous roar, flame shooting three feet into the room, shock wave driving eardrums in to middle of brain, blowing everybody against the far walls. A drape has caught fire. Slothrop, tripping over partygoers, can’t hear anything, knows his head hurts, keeps running through the smoke at the tank—leaps on, goes to undog the hatch and is nearly knocked off by Tamara popping up to holler at everybody again. After a struggle which shouldn’t be without its erotic moments, for Tamara is a swell enough looking twist with some fine moves, Slothrop manages to get her in a come-along and drag her down off of the tank. But loud noise and all, look—he doesn’t seem to have an erection. Hmm. This is a datum London never got, because nobody was looking. Turns out the projectile, a dud, has only torn holes in several walls, and demolished a large allegorical painting of Virtue and Vice in an unnatural act. Virtue had one of those dim faraway smiles. Vice was scratching his shaggy head, a little bewildered. The burning drape’s been put out with champagne. Raoul is in tears, thankful for his life, wringing Slothrop’s hands and kissing his cheeks, leaving trails of Jell-o wherever he touches. Tamara is escorted away by Raoul’s bodyguards. Slothrop has just disengaged himself and is wiping the Jell-o off of his suit when there is a heavy touch on his shoulder. “You were right. You are the man.” “That’s nothing.” Errol Flynn frisks his mustache. “I saved a dame from an octopus not so long ago, how about that?” “With one difference,” sez Blodgett Waxwing. “This really happened tonight. But that octopus didn’t.

the problem is then to develop a theory of invariance with respect to arbitrary linear transformations, in which, however, in contra-distinction to the case of affine geometry, we have a definite invariant quadratic form, viz. the metrical groundform once and for all as an absolute datum.

The anatomy of the human mind is reportedly responsible for how our conscious and unconscious mind is organized. The physiological contours of the human mind are responsible for interpreting and comprehending the physical world that surrounds us employing our five basic senses as its datum antennas. The gears of the human mind work to classify our perceptions into five basic orders: animals, plants, tools, natural objects, and people. How a person’s brain perceives the tangible world and interprets ongoing interactions with its functional apparatus becomes the operating representation of each person’s physical reality. People rely upon their physical reality to make life-altering decisions.

Freedom of the will is a metaphysical question outside the scope of this book; but considered as a subjective datum of experience, 'free will' is the awareness of alternative choices.

So, you start to ponder. What actually is information, and what does it do? Your response is simple and direct. Information answers questions. Years of research by mathematicians, physicists, and computer scientists have made this precise. Their investigations have established that the most useful measure of information content is the number of distinct yes-no questions the information can answer. The coins' information answers 1,000 such questions: Is the first dollar heads? Yes. Is the second dollar heads? Yes. Is the third dollar heads? No. Is the fourth dollar heads? No. And so on. A datum that can answer a single yes-no question is called a bit-a familiar computer-age term that is short for binary digit, meaning a 0 or a 1, which you can think of as a numerical representation of yes or no. The heads-tails arrangement of the 1,000 coins thus contains 1,000 bits' worth of information. Equivalently, if you take Oscar's macroscopic perspective and focus only on the coins' overall haphazard appearance while eschewing the "microscopic" details of the heads-tails arrangement, the coins' "hidden" information is 1,000 bits.

„Je to zvláštní - každý rok prožíváme datum své smrti, a přitom o tom ani nevíme. Pokud si ho ovšem nevybereme sami.

Certainly, what Kant calls the transcendental reference, experience and object of experience are in a sense present in both opposed views of the nature of the subjective *a-priori*. In both cases the object must 'order itself' according to the rules of the knowing mind or its functions, irrespective of whether the specific function of cognition is based on a systematic construction, synthetization, formation of the object from 'given' sensational material or on a methodical selection-process (suppression, abstraction, disregard) imposed on a self-constituting object. For if the order of selection in which the fulness of the world, as it is in ipseity, reaches man (or a particular kind of man, e.g., a type of racial or cultural unity) is so governed that an object of essence *B* is only given when an object of essence *A* has already been given (if, that is to say, *A* has datum-priority over *B* in order of time―not necessarily in direct succession), then if an object *X* is simultaneously of essence *A* and *B*, everything which is true of *A* must necessarily be true of *X*―not vice versa. For example, if spatiality and extensity have strict perceptual priority over all essential properties of matter and corporeality, geometry must be strictly valid for all possible bodies. But the same principle, the applicability of geometry to all bodies without exception, would still hold good if Kant's doctrine were true―though it denies the very reality of extension and space, and explains the spatial form as merely a subjective aspect of the datum. Thus in both cases the transcendental validity of the so-called *a-priori*, even for the objects of experience, would persist, so that in itself it offers us *no* criterion of choice between one or other *hypothesis*―that which supposes a synthetic addition of the form on the part of the spontaneous mind, or the other, which postulates an ordered selection in conformity with foreknown essences." ―from_On the Eternal in Man_. The Nature of Philosophy, with a new introduction by Graham McAleer

empirical life is rooted in an a priori datum which does not come slowly into existence by mechanical development, but is a gift of God's grace, and a fruit and result of his revelation.

Een mooi voorbeeld is de gang van zaken rond de verzekering van de Noord/Zuidlijn. De gemeenteraad had in het openbaar besloten dat B&W voor een bepaalde datum de verzekering geregeld moest hebben. De verzekeraars lazen dat in de krant en dachten: hoera. Ze vroegen absurde prijzen. De gemeente deed vervolgens het enig juiste: ze besloot niet te verzekeren en het risico zelf te dragen. Ze onthaastte zichzelf daarmee effectief. Op enig moment in de toekomst konden de dán resterende risico’s desgewenst alsnog worden verzekerd, als de verzekeraars weer een beetje normaal zouden zijn gaan doen. Dat is twee jaar later inderdaad gebeurd

One-pointedness of mind explains the fact that in any act of consciousness there is a central point of focus, towards which the entire objective datum points from its outer peripheries to its inner nucleus.

We agree with former Northwestern University professor Alice Dreger, who urges activist students and professors to “Carpe datum” (“Seize the data”).5 In her book Galileo’s Middle Finger, she contends that good scholarship must “put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.

Diu æstuanti commodum succurrebat, quod olim ab erudito apud nostrates viro audiveram, T e u t o n i c o s h o m i n e s i n s a t i a b i l e s c r i b e n d i c a c oe t h es t e n e r e : verum paucissimis datum aliquid producere , quod inventionis acumine , aut genii lepore politi applausum seculi possit provocare. Ne tamen perituræ parcatur chartæ, pleramque turbam petitas passim particulas in unam compingere massam , vix uspiam adspersa judicii mica. Nec plagii apud ipsos habere crimen , aliorum opera paucis interpolata locis pro novis venditare. Aliquos denique sibi locum inter autores deberi credere, quod diffusius aliquod scriptum in compendium, aut, si Diis placet , in tabellas, memoriæ , an stupiditati juvandæ ? redegerint.

El papa Inocencio II reconoció la Orden del Temple en 1139, por la bula Omne datum optimum. Ésta es la verdadera confirmación de la congregación templaria, renovada por los sucesivos pontífices hasta la supresión de la Orden.

Mathematically: moment = weight 180 lb × arm 85 in. = 15,300 lb-in, or 153 mom/100. Nontabulated Weights For nontabulated weights, it will be necessary to interpolate when using the tabular data. For example, find the mom/100 for a passenger weighing 177 pounds in the rear seat. There are several ways of interpolating, as follows: for a difference of 10 pounds between 170 pounds and 180 pounds, there is a mom/100 difference of 12. A moment/100 difference of 12 for 10 pounds = 1.2 per pound—therefore, for 7 pounds = 7 × 1.2 = 8.4 mom/100, plus the 206 gives 214 mom/100; or for a difference of 7 pounds between 170 pounds and 177 pounds, there will be a mom/100 difference of 7/10 of 12 = 8.4 (say 8), and for a weight of 177 pounds, the mom/100 = 206 + 8 = 214. Note. For nontabulated weights, or for weights outside the table, it is easier to use the mathematical method to find the moment index. Weight-Shift Calculations If, after calculating the weight and balance, you find that the CG is outside the limits of the CG range, it will be necessary to shift some weight to bring the CG position back within limits. Note. The tabulated method shown here does not require the use of a formula. Some instructors prefer to use a formula for weight-shift and weight-change problems. We discuss the formula method at the end of this chapter in the section for commercial pilots. Example 11-5 You have calculated the total weight to be 4,000 pounds with the CG located at 100 inches aft of datum. What is the new CG position if you shift 50 pounds of baggage from the rear baggage area at station 200 to the forward baggage area at station 50?

Non-clinical factors make a significant contribution to an individual’s health and providing this data to clinicians could inform context, counseling, and treatments. Data stewardship will be essential to protect confidential health information while still yielding the benefits of an integrated health system. 6.1 Introduction The definition of “clinical” data is expanding, as a datum becomes clinical once it has a relation to a disease process. For example: the accessibility

As a historian, I am struck by a certain consistency among otherwise independent witnesses in placing Mary Magdalene both at the cross and at the tomb on the third day. If this is not a historical datum but something that a Christian storyteller just made up and then passed along to others, how is it that this specific bit of information has found its way into accounts that otherwise did not make use of one another? Mary’s presence at the cross is found in Mark (and in Luke and Matthew, which used Mark) and also in John, which is independent of Mark. More significant still, all of our early Gospels—not just John and Mark (with Matthew and Luke as well) but also the Gospel of Peter, which appears to be independent of all of them—indicate that it was Mary Magdalene who discovered Jesus’ empty tomb. How did all of these independent accounts happen to name exactly the same person in this role? It seems hard to believe that this just happened by a way of a fluke of storytelling. It seems much more likely that, at least with the traditions involving the empty tomb, we are dealing with something actually rooted in history.

I said, “I did not know that.” This datum basically passed through my brain as a neutrino does through the earth, interacting with nothing.

All Protestants are Crypto-Papists,’ wrote the Russian theologian Alexis Khomiakov to an English friend in the year 1846. ‘ . . . To use the concise language of algebra, all the West knows but one datum a; whether it be preceded by the positive sign +, as with the Romanists, or with the negative − as with the Protestants, the a remains the same. Now a passage to Orthodoxy seems indeed like an apostasy from the past, from its science, creed, and life. It is rushing into a new and unknown world.’ Khomiakov, when he spoke of the datum a, had in mind the fact that western Christians, whether Free Churchmen, Anglicans, or Roman Catholics, have a common background in the past. All alike (although they may not always care to admit it) have been profoundly influenced by the same events: by the Papal centralization and the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance, by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and by the Enlightenment. But behind members of the Orthodox Church — Greeks, Russians, and the rest — there lies a very different background. They have known no Middle Ages (in the western sense) and have undergone no Reformations or Counter-Reformations; they have only been affected in an oblique way by the cultural and religious upheaval which transformed western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Christians in the west, both Roman and Reformed, generally start by asking the same questions, although they may disagree about the answers. In Orthodoxy, however, it is not merely the answers that are different — the questions themselves are not the same as in the west. (p.1–2)

De datum van het Koningshuis is niet aanwezig.

Anyone may now and then have the sense of occupying only a point and a moment; to have such a sense day and night, hour by hour, is less frequent, and it is from this experience, this datum, that one turns toward nirvana or sarcasm--or toward both at once.

The “real world” in which we find ourselves, then—the very world our sciences strive to fathom—is not a sheer “object,” not a fixed and finished “datum” from which all subjects and subjective qualities could be pared away, but is rather an intertwined matrix of sensations and perceptions, a collective field of experience lived through from many different angles. The mutual inscription of others in my experience, and (as I must assume) of myself in their experiences, effects the interweaving of our individual phenomenal fields into a single, ever-shifting fabric, a single phenomenal world or “reality.