And in the ancient world, the reason for this was that this very small rectangle--;it's about 150 miles long and 70 miles wide, about the size of Rhode Island--this very small rectangle lies on the way to anywhere worth going in the Ancient Near East.

在古代，战争的原因是,这小块矩形，长150公里，宽70公里，与罗德岛大小相当，这小块矩形处于要道,这条路通向古代近东的任何地区。

耶鲁公开课 - 旧约导论课程节选

And that's just a way of reminding you that we want to think carefully, but what are the things we're trying to measure when we talk about complexity here? It's both the size of the thing and how often are we going to use it? And there are some trade offs, but I still haven't said how I'm going to get an n log n sorting algorithm, and that's what I want to do today.

这只是在提醒你们我们要仔细的思考问题,但是当我们在讨论复杂性的时候,我们到底要衡量哪些东西？,是列表的大小和对其进行查找的频率吗？,这里面临一些取舍,但是我还没有说明,怎样得到一个n，log，n复杂度的排序算法,并且这是我今天想要讲的内容。

麻省理工公开课 - 计算机科学及编程导论课程节选