Ideal writing day: I get up at 8, 8 15 and check e-mail until 8 45.
Similarly, it was once generally held that all writing systems represent some stage in a progression toward the ideal writing system, the alphabet.
"The elevation of bluntness to a moral ideal," wrote Ian Buruma in his book on the Van Gogh killing, Murder in Amsterdam, "is a common trait in Dutch behaviour".
"France is only itself when in pursuit of an ideal," wrote Dominique de Villepin, a former prime minister, in a deliberate echo of Charles de Gaulle's reference to the country's "exceptional destiny".
"This idea that there is one correct way for female genitals to look is undoubtedly tied into the rise of pornography… If the rise of pornography was really tied up with women's liberation and empowerment, it would not be increasing women's anxiety about fitting into a narrow physical ideal," wrote Walter.
It is plausible to think that Leibniz could nevertheless have completed a work that was an approximation of the ideal, written in Latin and using non-primitive concepts.
That would normally be an extremely labor-intensive process, but the team used a technique called dynamic time warping to map the ideal written score to each performance, in which creative liberties and the innate variability of human execution cause digressions from the original.
Even if the choice is not ideal, write it down anyway.
While the group Students for Free Culture, an international organization working to promote free culture ideals, wrote in an e-mail that it had no official position on the Swartz prosecution, the group said it was no surprise that the topic would interest college students.
He came to abandon those ideals, writing vicious diatribes in his magazine against blacks ("an inferior being…not any more our brother than the apes are"), Jews ("thick-lipped rakes [who] glut their eyes upon handsome Gentile women") and Catholics (he referred to the Pope as "a fat old Dago").
