I hope we can be assured that our loved ones spent their last half-hour engaged in the purposeful, focused and urgent labor of defeating the murderers aboard -- distracted from the thought that they were living the last moment of their lives".
Each runs a stall presenting their findings and colleagues spend a couple of hours engaged in dialogue and discussion.
It also dulled pain, quelled appetites, blurred time and relaxed muscles, making it equally desirable for coolies, manual labourers who spent long, desperate hours engaged in back-breaking work with minimal food.
Those who regularly painted and repaired their houses or walked briskly enjoyed more protection against premature death than those who washed dishes, even if people spent more overall hours engaged in "mild" activities.
Talk of subtle gradations in Italian food is even something of a sport among obsessive-compulsive travelers, who might spend hours engaged in friendly one-upmanship over exactly where to find exactly which near-perfect dish.
Redefining the rules of engagement does not mean resorting to ignoring each other (not engaging at all), nor is engagement about expecting your fellow tweeters to be available to spend all waking hours engaged in disjointed exchanges that are very often likely not to take us anywhere.
A classmate, Ron Barnette, and I spent hours engaged in late-night mind-altering dialogues in laundromats and parking lots, discussing Wittgenstein, whose investigations disallowed so many types of philosophical discussions that we became convinced that the very discussion we were having was impossible.
"It's one thing to work around the clock on a breaking kidnapping, armored-car robbery, terrorist incident, etc.," she said in her statement, "but it's quite another to have to spend hours engaged in completing the myriad of required 'reports' the F.B.I. bureaucracy has spawned in order (at least in part) to justify its existence".
High school student Winson Yick spent many hours engaged in a very unusual extracurricular activity--analyzing the anticancer properties of inositol hexaphosphate in cell lines at the Ontario Cancer Institute.
Newton, Darwin and Einstein were men accustomed to long hours engaged in solitary thought, the reclusive examination of specimens or the hermitlike working out of long pages of equations.
