Together, a symposium made up of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin and Iris Murdoch would surely have plenty to add about a fictional artefact that seeks coherence at the intersection of an arbitrary date, the passage of calendar time and the unfolding of individual biography.
Philosophically there is no more arbitrary milestone than the passage of time, each year we celebrate the passing of another year, see what I mean?
But, as Youngner points out, the five-minute waiting period (it ranges from two minutes in some protocols to ten minutes in others) is really just a decent interval, a more or less arbitrary marker of the passage from life to death, whose significance is far more symbolic than scientific.
In order to do justice to the claim of objectivity that all "I"s are equivalent, he suggests that only such numerical relations are to be declared of interest as remain unchanged under passage from an "absolute" to an arbitrary coordinate system, that is, those which are invariant under arbitrary linear coordinate transformations.
Her suggestion helped greatly, lending more chance to the chance passages, making the music sound more interestingly arbitrary.
Returning to his seat in the Lords, he helped obtain passage of the Petition of Right, which condemned arbitrary imprisonment and taxation by the king.
At times he combined music from incompatible sources, made arbitrary decisions about tempo markings and, in at least two instances, recomposed brief passages.
Sometimes her interpretations of the poet's drafts and doodles feel arbitrary, or else overdetermined, as when she sees his handwriting, in a passage about weeping, as "digging and jerking as if in paroxysms of tears".
We propose and analyze a feasible scheme for achieving arbitrary geometric Berry phases based on the efficient technique of fractional stimulated Raman adiabatic passage (f-STIRAP).
The book's passages are meant to be ridiculous – this is satire, after all – but to a contemporary audience they also feel arbitrary.
