Word: blankings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Then there was California. In mid-August, Joe Dimas, a controller at the Oakland Air Route Traffic Control Center in Fremont, watched his radar screen go blank. Then the backup failed. And his radio died. "This was the scariest thing I've ever seen," says Dimas, who with his colleagues was guiding 295 planes. A 20-year-old generator and its replacement had blown. During the 35-min. blackout, a United Airlines Boeing 757 nearly collided with an Alaska Airlines MD-80. Hundreds of flights were grounded...
Realistically, by the time kids can operate the television, they will notice that their viewing privileges are being monitored. They'll see advertisements for an action movie throughout the day, and will be suspicious when they sit down to watch it that night and see a blank screen. At the same time, these daytime teaser ads will undoubtedly become more common, as networks find that they are losing a good portion of their viewing audience to the little black box behind the television...
...says. Franks also fears that broadcasters will be barraged by groups with their own definition of objectionable content; one right-to-life group, he says, has already suggested that CBS encode programs dealing with abortion. Cable executives are divided: not all are as supportive as Turner. Says Matthew Blank, president of Showtime Networks: "We have some serious societal issues here. The V chip seems like an overly simple solution to a very complicated problem...
...California at San Diego; it craves information, and when it can't come by the data honestly, it does the best it can with what it has. One of his patients, for instance, a physical-therapy professor from San Antonio, Texas, suffered a brain hemorrhage that left a huge blank spot in her otherwise normal field of vision-or, rather, it would be blank if her brain allowed it. First, she saw a drawing of a cat, presumably supplied by her visual memory. "Then," says M.J. Blaschak, "I started to see flowers." Soon cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse began...
Prompted with "Denver," Boswell unfailingly responds, "Colorado." Asked to name a city in Colorado, however, he goes blank. Similarly, Boswell recognizes the category "horse" but cannot supply the example "Appaloosa." He knows "U.S. President" but not Harry Truman or Richard Nixon. Somewhere in his brain, the data may still exist, but he can no longer get at them. The reason, argue the Damasios, is that he has lost essential "convergence zones," mental switching stations that provide access to the information and relate it to other relevant data...