Word: braine
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Computing machines have grown so efficient that the worst drag on their performance is the fallible human brain. Last week Engineering Consultant Stuart Luman Seaton told a Manhattan convention of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers that computing machines probably make less than one mistake in transferring 10²° (100 billion billion) digits. Humans make one mistake in transferring only 200 digits. So the machine's accurate figuring often goes for nothing because it must depend for care and feeding on error-prone humans...
...Says he: "The presence of humans, in a system containing high-speed electronic computers and highspeed, accurate communications, is quite inhibiting. Every means possible should be employed to eliminate humans in the data-processing chain." But Engineer Seaton feels that humans, however fallible, still have their uses. "The human brain," he concedes, "is a most unusual instrument of elegant and as yet unknown capacity." He favors "reserving to humans the unusual problems of judgment, moral and philosophical balances...
...France every Thursday night some 2,500,000 people forgo their Sagan, their cinema and other well-known Gallic pastimes to watch a new-style quiz show called Tetes et Jambes, literally "Heads and Legs" but loosely translated "Brains and Brawn." On Brains, the glint of gold is only incidental to the visual gimmicks and the sheer fun of watching the nation's top musclemen come to the aid of the IBMinded. To take home his cut of a $5,600 jackpot, Brain must correctly answer a series of questions spread over four weeks. If he misses, the scene...
...crack 400-meter relay team, waited on a track nearby. When Doher failed to identify the French priest (Abbe Henriot) who in 1815 became a close friend and horseback-riding crony of Napoleon, the scene shifted to Brawn. The team matched its former record of 45 seconds flat, giving Brain another go at Napoleon, but Doher missed again, and by this time the relay boys were tired. Twice the baton was dropped as it changed hands, and the battle was lost. As a consolation prize, Doher won a framed letter signed by Napoleon, then invited his relay helpers...
Last Lift. Last December a Brain whose specialty was explorers tripped over three successive questions. Sample: Who was the first explorer to reach Timbuktu and live? Answer: Rene Caillie. The Brain's Brawn, an amateur champion weight lifter, did well the first two times around, pleaded for time out before attempting to lift 275 Ibs. from a snatch position and 330 Ibs. "clean and jerk." For fully five minutes, viewers watched Brawn parade in front of the camera, flexing muscle and steeling nerve. Finally, to the relief of several hundred thousand Frenchmen, he raised his weights sufficiently high; Brain...