Word: modern
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Some modern calculators "remember" by means of electrical impulses circulating for long periods around closed circuits. One kind of human memory is believed to depend on a similar system: groups of neurons connected in rings. The memory impulses go round & round and are called upon when needed. Some calculators use "scanning" as in television. So does the brain. In place of the beam of electrons which scans a television tube, many physiologists believe, the brain has "alpha waves": electrical surges, ten per second, which question the circulating memories...
...cures administered to psychotic calculators are weirdly like the modern cures for insanity. One method is to overload the calculator with an extra strong electrical impulse in hope that the shock will stop the machine's oscillations. This is rather like the shock treatment given to human psychotics. Another cure is to isolate part of the calculator's mechanism, hoping to cut off the source of trouble. This is "like the lobotomies which brain surgeons perform. Lobotomies sometimes work (for both machine and brain) but are apt to reduce, in both cases, the subject's judgment...
...awareness of the atomic bomb," he says, "it had occurred to me that we were here in the presence of another social potentiality of unheard-of importance for good and for evil . . . The first industrial revolution . . . was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery . . . The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain at least in its simpler and routine decisions . . . The human being of mediocre attainments or less [will have] nothing to sell that is worth anyone's money...
...Boston studio, Cartoonist Capp, a sort of Rabelais in modern dress, pretended that these enormous implications were lost on him. "My first sensation," he said, "was just the joy of having made the shmoo. Then came a feeling of annoyance. I've been subjected to all the shmoo jokes in the world, like 'there's good shmoos tonight,' and I mustn't say go-to-hell to anybody. Now I'm delighted again, having read that the shmoo has all sorts of economic meanings...
When he opened his eyes, the sick and half-drowned flyer saw an old woman handing him a gourd of soothing liquid. As he recovered he came to admire the natives' simple, tight-webbed community which, unlike modern civilization, gave each of its members a secure place; yet he also had to admit that this simplified life would soon make him restless. So he left the natives and went to live with Andrew Andersen, a white planter who had remained on the island even after the Japs had set up a garrison on its other side...