Word: like
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Kezar Stadium (before 40,000 spectators), Sports Editor Vernon ("Curley") Grieve of Hearst's Examiner got so excited last week that he thought he heard voices. Wrote Grieve: "When Mayor Elmer G. Robinson turned on the floodlights ... a huge gasp escaped from the throng and it rolled upward like escaped steam from a huge boiler. It was then-unanimously-that the crowd mumbled: 'This is grand. This is what we need and want...
...many a scientist the discouraging moment in life conies when his figures begin to run amok. Figures can bristle like barbed-wire barriers between his data and his conclusions. He finds that before he can get on with his work, he must multiply numbers as long as his middle finger, divide them, add them, square them, extract their roots. Sometimes a process involving a complicated equation with many variables must be repeated thousands or hundreds of thousands of times. Often the scientist gives up in despair. Many important lines of research have bogged down in a morass of figures...
Last week 600 scientists-from mathematicians to sociologists-gathered at Harvard to admire the latest of the great machines (large-scale computers) that eat their way through oceans of figures like whales grazing on plankton. At the invitation of Professor Howard H. Aiken, director of Harvard's Computation Laboratory, the scientists arrived full of problems. Said Dr. Aiken: "We've built the machines. Now let's start using them...
Some of the speakers won applause, but the real hero of the conference, holding court in the Computation Laboratory up the street, was a machine: the Mark III Computer, built by Harvard for the Navy at a cost of $500,000. From the front, the Mark III looks like a giant radio panel, with a clean, serene dignity. But behind the panel hides a nightmare of pulsing, twitching, flashing complexity. Thousands of metal parts, big & little, all polished like costume jewelry, compete in frenetic activity. They hum and clack and chirp and roar like a hive of mechanical insects. Among...
Among the exhibits, however, there were still a few pieces to startle conservatives. Charles Eames's canvas-and-plastic chair with ventilated seat looked for all the world like an atomic-age version of a toilet seat. Florence Knoll's immense, pancake-thin air-foam bed, perched on spindly legs, had an insubstantial look that suggested uneasy napping. And too often, for all their inexpensive materials and simplified design, even the most agreable modern furnishings were higher-priced than the overdecorated, overstuffed period pieces most Americans are used...