Word: functionalism
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...after overseeing successful nuclear tests in 1998 and riding high on nationalist euphoria over breaching international non-proliferation norms, the right-wing, BJP-led National Democratic Alliance government agreed to an ambitious moon program. Then Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who approved Chandrayaan-I at the Independence Day function on August 15, 2003, said he wanted India's space program to become one of the best in the world. Supporters of the program argued that a lunar mission would provide untold technological spin-offs. Many of those same enthusiasts now say they have been vindicated. Operating a satellite...
...brother is an ambulance-chasing lawyer with a vapid trophy wife, his friend Sal only encourages his rabid fandom, and his mother has long since given up attempting to make him to do anything with his life. While these characters are realistic archetypes, each one performs a single function and never deviates from that purpose. (As Philadelphia Phil, Rapaport spends almost all of his scant eight minutes of screen time chanting and jeering in a sports bar). Though the plot leaves a few loose ends, these work within the film’s internal logic. The Quantrell Bishop storyline...
...much of the book, and brokers Chase’s introduction to the other major players, Oona Laszlo and Richard Abneg.Chase and Tooth shortly develop a fast, if strange friendship defined by Perkus’ love for marijuana, cheeseburgers, coffee, and esoterica. Their daily smoke sessions serve an indoctrinatory function as well: Tooth enmeshes both Chase and the reader in the interconnections between things as seemingly disparate as Marlon Brando, “Gnuppets” (cf. Muppets), and the redemption of New York City at large. The level of associations starts small at first, focusing on relations between obscure...
...every new piece of data our brains collect, so our emotions give us shortcuts, helping us make split-second judgments about that information. The more uncertainty, the more shortcuts we use. This is a good thing. People who have suffered brain damage that removes emotions from their calculations cannot function. They can't make decisions, even simple ones. So we need our emotions to make sense of the world. But our emotions also can lead us astray - particularly when we encounter an exception to a lifetime's worth of rules...
...sort and compartmentalize all the information about swine flu will probably determine whether you take it seriously, ignore it or begin freebasing hand sanitizer to get through the day. As with all viruses, influenza's only function is to replicate itself. It makes you sneeze so it can infect a new host and reproduce. When it encounters resistance, it changes. For the brain, this is maddening: How do we capture a threat that routinely escapes from one box and reappears in another...