We know (roughly) how it all turned out, but if we had been living in those years it would have been impossible to sort out the fantastical possibilities from the plausible ones.
Sadly it is practically impossible to sort out the Hungarian artists trained in Bologna, the Bolognese masters active in Hungary, and the Hungarian disciples of the latter, as the medievalist Gyorgyi Torok puts it in the catalogue raisonné.
It can be nearly impossible to sort through the jumble of "measurables" collected by the league and draft experts and emerge with anything but a headache to two decimals places.
Considering the vast array of variables that could have contributed to the increased mortality in the INT arm, it will be difficult and perhaps impossible to sort out the true determinants of this outcome.
Having grumbled last week about a live horse on the Royal Opera House stage, I will go easy on Glyndebourne's furry beasties, even though quite often it was impossible to sort out the hybrid zoology.
In research that does find an association between aggression and the consumption of certain kinds of media, it can be hard or impossible to sort out the effects of television watching or video-game playing from other factors -- living in dangerous neighborhoods or with neglectful families, for example.
Without machine-taught computer vision systems, it would be impossible to sort and classify the firehose of visual data some satellite networks produce.
Psychobiologist Marilyn Carroll of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis says the work is important because it connects the increased drug use of impulsive animals to neurochemistry in the brain, which is impossible to sort out in the complicated world of human drug addicts.
It is almost impossible to sort out why Louis, the founder of the company, did not sign the 1972 lease for the new store or join the newly formed corporation.
But it is virtually impossible to sort out priorities when the president is focused on surviving the last 64 days of his term and the president-elect is in Chicago running a government-in-waiting that wants to avoid specifics until he has the constitutional authority to act.
