Word: idea
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Rabi, for one, maintains that Edison could no more have stopped himself from inventing than a born punster can refrain from playing word games. Robert Conot, author of a 1979 biography of Edison, A Streak of Luck, observes that Edison's mind "multiplied devices from a single idea like a dividing amoeba and then compartmentalized the creations and endeavors." He was supremely self-confident; if prevailing opinion was that a device could not be invented, that only made Edison more convinced that it could. And Conot depicts a man who was totally open-minded about how to proceed-until...
...produce it, he drew on the ideas of others, as he often did, though he gave them no credit. After experimenting with any number of materials, he hit on carbon. He tried to give the impression that he came up with that idea independently. In fact, says Biographer Conot, his laboratory notebooks prove that he read and underlined reports of the experiments of Joseph Swan in England. Swan had invented an electric bulb that used a fine carbon...
...through differing body parts. Dividing this passage into cross-sectional slices, he found he could calculate the absorption of an X-ray beam by varying densities of tissue in any one of the slices. Cormack published his findings in 1963 but did not pursue a practical application of his idea...
Justice appears to have been intended as a devastating satire of the U.S. legal system-a fine idea in principle. But by inflating their target to ridiculous proportions and then firing at it with cannons, the screenwriters have lost their subject completely. The true and complex inequities of American jurisprudence remain untouched; the white-collar scandals that have actually afflicted contemporary Baltimore are never even mentioned. This film would have us believe that the courts would be first-rate if only a few bad guys (played by John Forsythe and Jack Warden) were removed from the bench. Such simple-minded...
...Arens, the idea of cannibalism is "a crucial boundary marker" between cultures: those who consider themselves civilized always manage to see cannibalism among those they consider uncivilized. "On this issue, despite other accomplishments," he writes, "anthropologists have emerged as little more than erudite purveyors of a pedestrian myth about other times and places...