Diameter Quotes

“She's Prim's size in diameter.”

“Phrases are pebbles that the writer tosses into the reader’s soul.The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the pond.”

“The Ludolphian number is fixed in eternity— not a digit out of place, all characters in their proper order, an endless sentence written to the end of the world by the division of the circle’s diameter into its circumference.”

“But it is the bane of psychology to suppose that where results are similar, processes must be the same. Psychologists are too apt to reason as geometers would, if the latter were to say that the diameter of a circle is the same thing as its semi-circumference, because, forsooth, they terminate in the same two points.”

“It appears, according to the reported facts, that the electric conflict is not restricted to the conducting wire, but that it has a rather extended sphere of activity around it .. the nature of the circular action is such that movements that it produces take place in directions precisely contrary to the two extremities of a given diameter. Furthermore, it seems that the circular movement, combined with the progressive movement in the direction of the length of the conjunctive wire, should form a mode of action which is exerted as a helix around this wire as an axis.”

“I agree with Kilgore Trout about realistic novels and their accumulations of nit-picking details. In Trout’s novel, The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank, the hero is on a space ship two hundred miles long and sixty-two miles in diameter. He gets a realistic novel out of the branch library in his neighborhood. He reads about sixty pages of it, and then he takes it back. The librarian asks him why he doesn’t like it, and he says to her, “I already know about human beings.”

“To grasp the reality of life as it has been revealed by molecular biology, we must magnify a cell a thousand million times until it is twenty kilometers in diameter and resembles a giant airship large enough to cover a great city like London or New York. What we would then see would be an object of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design. On the surface of the cell we would see millions of openings, like the port holes of a vast space ship, opening and closing to allow a continual stream of materials to flow in and out. If we were to enter one of these openings we would find ourselves in a world of supreme technology and bewildering complexity.”

“For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls.A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.”

“A physicist, an engineer and a psychologist are called in as consultants to a dairy farm whose production has been below par. Each is given time to inspect the details of the operation before making a report.The first to be called is the engineer, who states: "The size of the stalls for the cattle should be decreased. Efficiency could be improved if the cows were more closely packed, with a net allotment of 275 cubic feet per cow. Also, the diameter of the milking tubes should be increased by 4 percent to allow for a greater average flow rate during the milking periods."The next to report is the psychologist, who proposes:"The inside of the barn should be painted green. This is a more mellow color than brown and should help induce greater milk flow. Also, more trees should be planted in the fields to add diversity to the scenery for the cattle during grazing, to reduce boredom."Finally, the physicist is called upon. He asks for a blackboard and then draws a circle. He begins: "Assume the cow is a sphere....”