Word: braine
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...while this electronic brain, as headline writers called it, took the spotlight, ENIAC had a lot of unsung rivals, many of them shrouded in wartime secrecy. At Bletchley Park, Alan Turing built a succession of vacuum-tube machines called Colossus that made mincemeat of Hitler's Enigma codes. At Harvard, large, clattering electromechanical computers in IBM's Mark series also did wartime calculations. Even the Germans made a stab at computing with Konrad Zuse's Z electromechanical computers, the last of which was the first general-purpose computer controlled by a program...
...knowledge develops in children will elucidate the nature of knowledge in general. Whether this has in fact led to deeper understanding remains, like everything about Piaget, controversial. In the past decade Piaget has been vigorously challenged by the current fashion of viewing knowledge as an intrinsic property of the brain. Ingenious experiments have demonstrated that newborn infants already have some of the knowledge that Piaget believed children constructed. But for those, like me, who still see Piaget as the giant in the field of cognitive theory, the difference between what the baby brings and what the adult...
...love, albeit undeclared, with another boy at the school, who suddenly died of bovine tuberculosis. This loss shattered Turing's religious faith and led him into atheism and the conviction that all phenomena must have materialistic explanations. There was no soul in the machine nor any mind behind a brain. But how, then, did thought and consciousness arise...
...unveiled, left little room for the ethereal, vitalistic accounts of life that so many people had found comforting. Indeed, Crick, a confirmed agnostic, rather liked deflating vitalism--a mission he pursued with zeal, spearheading decades of work on how exactly DNA builds things before he moved on to do brain research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif...
...year was 1980. Berners-Lee, doing a six-month stint as a software engineer at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, in Geneva, was noodling around with a way to organize his far-flung notes. He had always been interested in programs that dealt with information in a "brain-like way" but that could improve upon that occasionally memory-constrained organ. So he devised a piece of software that could, as he put it, keep "track of all the random associations one comes across in real life and brains are supposed to be so good at remembering but sometimes...