"Decimal" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... inches of mercury. If the elastic force be known, and it is wanted to determine the corresponding temperature, the rule must be modified thus:—From the elastic force, in inches of mercury, subtract the decimal .1, divide the logarithm of the remainder by 5.13, and to the quotient add the logarithm 2.1327940; find the natural number answering to the sum, and subtract therefrom the constant 51.3; the remainder will be the temperature sought. The French Academy, and the Franklin ...
— A Catechism of the Steam Engine • John Bourne
... espacement into distinct paragraphs, and the variation in the size of the characters on the same tablet, according to the relative importance of the text, show a striving after clearness and method such as can by no means be said to be a characteristic of Classical Greek inscriptions.'[*] A decimal system of numbers was in use, the highest single amount referred to being 19,000, and percentages were evidently well understood, as a whole series of tablets is ...
— The Sea-Kings of Crete • James Baikie
... frontier to Bering's Straits, not only in the hands of merchants but in many private houses. It consists of a wooden frame ordinarily a foot long and six inches wide. There are ten metal wires strung across this frame, and ten balls of wood on each wire. The Russian currency is a decimal one, and by means of this machine computations are carried on with wonderful rapidity. I have seen numbers added by a boy and a machine faster than a New York bank teller could make the same reckoning. It requires long practice to become expert in its ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... this morning at thirty- three decimal one. As a consequence it is freezing in the shade, but it is thawing in the sun. There is a certain amount of snow on the ground, but of course not too much. The air is what you would call humid, but not disagreeable to the touch. Where I am standing I find myself practically ...
— Moonbeams From the Larger Lunacy • Stephen Leacock
... The rudimentary facts of exact science are now being learnt by direct intuition, as textures, and tastes, and colours are learnt. Employing the ball-frame for first lessons in arithmetic exemplifies this. It is well illustrated, too, in Professor De Morgan's mode of explaining the decimal notation. M. Marcel, rightly repudiating the old system of tables, teaches weights and measures by referring to the actual yard and foot, pound and ounce, gallon and quart; and lets the discovery of their relationships be experimental. The use of ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer
... give an easy example, can remember the value of the ratio between the circumference and the diameter of the circle beyond four places of decimals, or at most six—3.141592. Here is the value to 108 decimal places: ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... that a character preserves the same attitude throughout means (if it be justified) that it is not a human being at all, but a mere embodiment of two or three characteristics which are fully displayed within the first ten minutes, and then keep on repeating themselves, like a recurrent decimal. Strong theatrical effects can be produced by this method, which is that of the comedy of types, or of "humors." But it is now generally, and rightly, held that a character should be primarily an individual, and only incidentally (if at all) capable of classification ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... however, thinks John M. Vernon, of New-Orleans, who, stimulated by the purest secession sentiments, and urged by the most legitimate secession and 'State rights' logic, has developed a new principle of exclusiveness by devising a new system of decimal currency, which he thus recommends to the ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. VI, June, 1862 - Devoted To Literature and National Policy • Various
... community are so strenuously opposed to innovation, as to raise difficulties rather than remove them. Has not the common sense of the age been long calling for changes in the law of partnership, divorce, &c., and is not some difficulty always arising? Has not the commercial world been crying aloud for decimal coinage and decimal weights and measures, and are not educated men constantly finding some objections, and will they not continue to do so, until some giant mind springs up able to grasp the herculean task, and force ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... tribune and citizen. A number so symmetrical as that really rises out of the region of science into the region of art. It is a pattern, like the egg-and-dart ornament or the Greek key. One might edge a wall-paper or fringe a robe with a recurring decimal. And while the voter luxuriated in this light exactitude of the numbers, a thought crossed his mind and he almost leapt to his feet. "Why, good heavens!" he cried. "I won that election; and it was won by one vote! But for me it would have ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... altogether imperceptible substance by way of vibration which constitutes matter at all; it is the character of the vibrations which constitutes the particular kind of matter. (May we imagine that some vibrations vibrate with a rhythm which has a tendency to recur like the figures in a recurring decimal, and that here we have the ...
— The Note-Books of Samuel Butler • Samuel Butler
... pounds to hundredweight and vice versa. Some fifty ratio numbers have to be memorized or calculated from other memorized numbers to make the common needed reductions. History shows that ancient Babylonia had tables superior to those now in use, and ancient Britain a decimal scale which was crowded ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... Dr. Opimian. He must have lived in odd times. In our days he would not have gone far without falling in with a teetotaller, or a decimal coinage man, or a school-for-all man, or a competitive examination man, who would not allow a drayman to lower a barrel into a cellar unless he could expound the mathematical principles by which ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... faint dividing line between astronomy and mathematics, as between medicine and natural history. John of Seville was a notable mathematician, the compiler of a practical arithmetic, the first to make mention of decimal fractions, which possibly may have been his invention, and in the Zohar, the text-book of mediaeval Jewish mysticism, which appeared centuries before Copernicus's time, the cause of the succession of day and night is stated to be the earth's ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... murtosigators are about one thousand, and are organized on the decimal system, every ten having a leader, and every ten leaders again a superior, as is the case also in the regular army. They receive a regular monthly pay, besides a share in all spoils. In time of comparative peace, while one half of them keep watch over the ...
— Life of Schamyl - And Narrative of the Circassian War of Independence Against Russia • John Milton Mackie
... slightest clue. She knew, indeed, little herself, whatever she may have guessed. As for Hungerford, he was dumb. He refused to consider the matter. But he roundly maintained once or twice, without any apparent relevance, that a woman was like a repeating decimal—you could follow her, but you never could reach her. He usually added to this: "Minus one, Marmion," meaning thus to exclude the girl who preferred him to any one else. When I ventured to suggest that ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... pleasure, for a horse was standing dejectedly before the door. Joy of joys, trade was picking up—a stranger had come to town! Hastening back to the corral, he added a cipher to the posted figure, added a decimal point, and changed the cents sign to that of a dollar. Two dollars and fifty cents was now the price prescribed by law. Returning hastily to the Paradise, he led the animal away, impounded it, and then ...
— Bar-20 Days • Clarence E. Mulford
... and the most accurate chronometric reckoning, old Mr. Beirne timed his proceedings to a decimal. The last line of the slow-read poem died in a deafening uproar without. Every bell in the city, it seemed, every whistle and chime, every firecracker and penny-trumpet and cannon (there was but one), ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... after her departure scratching his chin. He crossed his legs, shook his elevated foot, showed every sign of profound concentration. He was making up his mind to become a decimal point in the Woman Suffrage Movement. It was like making up his mind to be born again, and not ...
— The Co-Citizens • Corra Harris
... summer, left blooming alone," chanted Tom, as he entered the dining-room where the rest of the family were at breakfast. "To-morrow Hugh will be gone,—to-morrow Estella Camilla Wales must pine in vain for her mistress, who will be engrossed in decimal fractions, and to-morrow I must take down from the dusty shelf that dismal old Latin Prose. I wonder who cares for Romulus and ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... be no sum without an addition. You get an endless decimal fraction for quotient when your division does not work out evenly. I ...
— Plays by August Strindberg, Second series • August Strindberg
... Thus, one is avicho; two, raboi. Above two, so many twos, as four is raboi-raboi; and six, raboi-raboi-raboi. Ten is expressed by spreading both hands, and twenty by bringing fingers and toes together. Thus the Caribs. Decimal numeration is found among all the American aborigines, ancient and modern, juxtaposition usually ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton
... working for me, who would catch my questions hot from the bat, and fire back the answers before I could get into position to catch. Was a mighty particular cuss. Always worked everything out to the sixth decimal place. I had just about concluded he ought to have a wider field for his talents, when I asked him one day how the hams of the last week's run had been averaging in weight. Answered like a streak; but it struck me that for hogs which had been running so light they were giving up pretty generously. ...
— Old Gorgon Graham - More Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... different causes and accidental communication still continue to bring to them;" and he adds that "among the Melanesian islands scarcely one was found by us which did not possess, in some cases still imperfectly, the decimal system of numeration in addition to their own, in which they reckon ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... temperament and culture,[777] and appears in the use of the vigesimal system of enumeration in primitive Mexico, Central America, among the Tlingits of the Northwest coast and the Eskimo as also among the Chukches and Ainus of Asia, while in the Atlantic section of North America the decimal system, with one doubtful exception, was ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... of this kind to the best proportions. The workman will need but few drawing instruments, and a drawing-board about 15" by 18" will be quite large enough. The necessary drawing-instruments are a T-square with 15" blade; a scale of inches divided into decimal parts; two pairs dividers with pen and pencil points—one pair of these dividers to be 5" and the other 6"; one ruling pen. Other instruments can be added as the workman finds he needs them. Those enumerated above, however, will be all ...
— Watch and Clock Escapements • Anonymous
... rhythmic forms evidence will be afforded by a comparison of the total durations of the first and second five-groups included in the decimal series. Difference of some kind is of course to be looked for; equivalence between the groups would only be accidental, and inequality, apart from amount and constancy, is insignificant. In the results here presented the differentiation is, in the first place, of considerable value, the ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various
... and the use of fractions were taught daily. The use of the decimal in the American coinage is of great advantage; it is easier and more intelligible to children than the clumsy old system of pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings. It is a system which would no doubt have been long ago adopted by England, if it had not been humiliating ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... Asgard announced that a definite limit of accuracy in measuring the velocity of accelerated subnucleonic particles had been established—16.067543333—times light-speed. That seemed to be typical; the frontiers of science, now, were all decimal points. The Ministry of Education had a little to offer; historical scholarship was still active, at least. He was reading about a new trove of source-material that had come to light on Uller, from the Sixth Century Atomic Era, when the door screen buzzed ...
— Ministry of Disturbance • Henry Beam Piper
... writing and does not know how to read. His "letters" and his "contracts" are material objects in the shape of bolos and other things, sent from one person to another with a verbal message, or strips of rattan with knots. His method of counting is decimal, and comprehends all numbers up to a hundred, though I am inclined to think that this last number ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... as confidently as Pythagoras did when he demonstrated the forty-seventh proposition of the first book of Euclid. I was proportionately annoyed when I afterwards discovered that I had been anticipated in finding out that 'a decimal is a fraction whose denominator is a unit with as many ciphers annexed as the numerator has places,' or rather in finding ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 89, March, 1865 • Various
... he begins to feel at ease in the honorable pillory to which we have called him—puts his hands into his pockets. The gesture supplies us with the first clause of our illustrated lecture. Without his pockets John would be a cipher, and a decimal cipher at that. If some men were not all pocket they would never be Johns, for no Jill would be so demented as to "come tumbling after" them. I have seen a pocket marry off a hump-back, a twisted foot and sixty winters' fall of snow upon the ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... France, who are particularly fond of framing theories and experimenting on them for the edification of other nations, availed themselves of the general upturning of affairs in 1789, to introduce a universal decimal system, to be applied to everything whatever that could be counted, weighed, or measured. They started from the measurement of the globe itself, and took as the basis of their whole system the ten-millionth part of a quadrant of a meridian, equal to ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 437 - Volume 17, New Series, May 15, 1852 • Various
... institutions well organised, and that considerable advance had been made in astronomy, chemistry, medicine, and anatomy. Already the Egyptians had divided the year into 365 days and 12 months, and had invented an elaborate system of weights and measures, based on the decimal notation. ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... II., to a friend, beseeching him to obtain for him manuscripts of the Latin philosophers and poets. He wrote textbooks of astronomy, geometry and medicine, and introduced the Arabic numbers and the decimal system into Europe. In consequence he, too, was accused of magic and intercourse with Arabian pagans. A chronicler relates that he sold his soul to the devil and became pope through the devil's agency; ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... consisting of three figures to be multiplied by two figures. She looked upon it, and quivering her fingers in a manner which I thought very pretty, but of which I knew not whether it was art or play, multiplied the sum regularly in two lines, observing the decimal place; but did not add the two lines together, probably disdaining so easy an operation.' Johnson's Works, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 5 • Boswell
... bees will erect a certain number of what are known as transition cells. These must of necessity be irregular in form; but so unerringly accurate are the dimensions of the second and third types that, at the time when the decimal system was established, and a fixed measure sought in nature to serve as a starting-point and an incontestable standard, it was proposed by Reaumur to select for this purpose the cell ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... Professor Thorndike was the coefficient of correlation, which shows the amount of resemblance or association between any two things that are capable of measurement, and is expressed in the form of a decimal fraction somewhere between 0 and the unit 1. Zero shows that there is no constant resemblance at all between the two things concerned,—that they are wholly independent of each other, while 1 shows that they are completely dependent on each other, a condition that rarely exists, of course.[4] ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... decision to adopt the Dewey Decimal System of Classification, some attempt was made to classify the ...
— Three Centuries of a City Library • George A. Stephen
... Rule-of-Three: multiply your second and third term together, divide the product by the first, and your quotient will be the answer,—which you are but an ass if you cannot come at. The booby has not yet found out, by any trial, that, do what one will, there is ever a cursed fraction, oftenest a decimal repeater, and no net integer quotient so much as ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... with his head on one side. He was rather proud of them, seeing he had utterly forgotten now how to work decimal fractions, and could not have done a quadratic equation to ...
— Seven Little Australians • Ethel Sybil Turner
... actually those just mentioned. The clown that has a 9 on his body is portrayed just at the moment when two balls which he is juggling are in mid-air. The positions of these balls clearly convert his figure into the recurring decimal .[.9]. Now, since the recurring decimal .[.9] is equal to 9/9, and therefore to 1, it is evident that, although the clown who bears the figure 1 is absent, the man who bears the figure 9 by this simple artifice has for the occasion given his figure the value of the number 1. The troupe can ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... in order to get at the additional number of hands necessary to man properly the powder division and the divisions of the Master and Surgeon, which additional number is to be called B, multiply A by the decimal— ...
— Ordnance Instructions for the United States Navy. - 1866. Fourth edition. • Bureau of Ordnance, USN
... so much in fines extra! The overseer has, in general, absolute power over wages; he notes the work done, and can please himself as to what he pays the worker, who is forced to take his word. In some mines, where the pay is according to weight, false decimal scales are used, whose weights are not subject to the inspection of the authorities; in one coal mine there was actually a regulation that any workman who intended to complain of the falseness of the scales must give notice to the overseer three weeks in advance! In many districts, ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... children to count, the decimal system should be kept well in mind, and the teacher should see that thirteen means three-ten, and that the children can touch the three and the ten as they speak the word. Eleven and twelve ought to be called oneteen ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... foundation than his assiduity to merit it.' His 'course' is nevertheless a pretty full one, including English, French, Latin, Greek, writing in a natural and easy style after the best precedents; arithmetic, vulgar and decimal; geography, with use of the globes; geometry, navigation with all the late modern improvements; algebra, and every other useful and ornamental branch of mathematical learning. Some of the other male teachers write in a similar strain ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... vast area involved is not yet well explored; but over it all, so far as it has been fully examined, the same lithological and stratigraphical structures reappear with the persistence of a repeating decimal. And were it not for the exigencies of the theory of Successive Ages, this whole region of some five or six thousand square miles would be considered as only an ordinary example, on a rather large scale, ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... is one of its most striking features. The task was no easy one to bring the lunar year into proper conjunction with the solar year, and there are grounds for believing that prior to the division of the year into twelve parts, there was a year of ten months corresponding to a simpler, perhaps a decimal, system, which appears to have preceded the elaborate ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... and thereafter had scarcely to speak; for at a King's Council only general reports were presented, no discussions took place, no fresh proposals were mooted; and so he sat and heard how this department or that was extending its beneficent operations, how statistics were completing to their last decimal places the prognostications of experts, and how along with these things imports and exports were balancing, trade declining, education advancing, and strikes growing every day more formidable ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... medal College of Fine Arts Drawings, architectural and free hand College of Applied Science Metal work Wood work Model of steam engine Home-made laboratory apparatus University of the State of New York. Grand prize Bulletins Reports Decimal classification Traveling library for the blind Photographs Large pictures Statistical charts Specimens ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... Yod. This is a trinity of letters, and their numerical value is I 10, V 6, D 4, total 20, equivalent to double I; but for reasons given in the "Book of Concealed Mystery" the second I is reproduced by a Hexad and a Tetrad—namely, V and D. I 10, the decimal scale of Sephirotic notation, the key of processional creation; V 6 Tiphereth, and Microprosopus the Son united to D 4, the Cross. Here is the mystery of the crucifixion of the Son on the tree of life; and again the ...
— Hebrew Literature
... observers of moral rules, especially in commercial matters; insomuch that merchants of reputation put up sums of gold cupangs, always in decimal numbers, in silken bags, sealed with their seals; and these bags always pass current for the several sums indicated by the seals, without any one ever examining the contents of the bags for several generations. These cupangs are broad oblong pieces of gold, of about twenty shillings value ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr
... if a man had invented arithmetic, algebra, or the decimal system, he would have obtained no patent; but Bareme would have had a right of property in his Computations. Pascal, for his theory of the weight of the atmosphere, would not have been patented; instead of him, a glazier would have obtained the privilege ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon |
