Word: brainstorm
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...little like The Wizard of Oz played backward. British journalist Tony Parker gets caught up in a brainstorm with his editor and is blown from batty Albion into the middle of humdrum Kansas. There, in Dorothy's native land, he finds not a winding yellow brick road but a grid of blacktop highways crossing one another at predictable right angles. Instead of tin men and cowardly lions, there is a pride of stolid citizens unashamed of their placid routines and quick with the thank-yous and have-a-nice-days. Wicked witches? Nope, but there is a local drunk...
...familiar were her trademark facial expressions that after a while scriptwriters simply inserted code words for them. "Puddling up" meant that Lucy's eyes would fill with tears just before she emitted a banshee wail. "Light bulb" signaled the alarming expression that crossed her face when she had a brainstorm. "Credentials" indicated an open-mouthed gape, as if to say, "How dare...
...first ads for TV sets showed elegantly dressed models watching in posh surroundings, and often contained practical advice. ("Should the room in which you are viewing television be darkened to resemble a movie theater? Answer: Definitely not!") But soon the marketers of TV had a brainstorm: promoting the new device as a way of bringing the family together again. "There is great happiness," exulted an ad for DuMont sets, "in the home where the family is held together by this new common bond -- television." Another promotional piece listed the things that "took the family away from home" -- including baseball, vaudeville...
Core War was the brainstorm of three Bell Labs programmers then in their early 20s: H. Douglas McIlroy, Victor Vysottsky and Robert Morris. Like Von Neumann, they recognized that computers were vulnerable to a peculiar kind of self-destruction. The machines employed the same "core" memory to store both the data used by programs and the instructions for running those programs. With subtle changes in its coding, a program designed to consume data could be made instead to consume programs...
...Revenue Enforcement and Protection (REAP) program, a brainstorm of Dukakis's former Commissioner of Revenue Ira A. Jackson '70, was developed in 1983 to alleviate the $300 million deficit the state was facing...