Word: notes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more time scientists spend designing computers, the more they marvel at the human brain. Tasks that stump the most advanced supercomputer -- recognizing a face, reading a handwritten note -- are child's play for the 3-lb. organ. Most important, unlike any conventional computer, the brain can learn from its mistakes. Researchers have tried for years to program computers to mimic the brain's abilities, but without success. Now a growing number of designers believe they have the answer: if a computer is to function more like a person and less like an overgrown calculator, it must be built more like...
Someday an enterprising cartographer will publish a map of the world, annotated with the operating locales of fictional detectives. Until this year, not much of note would have appeared next to the name Jerusalem. But it is there that Roger L. Simon's Moses Wine traverses the labyrinths of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in Raising the Dead (Villard; 228 pages; $15.95). Wine, an American Jew who combines pratfall vulnerability with foolhardy vigor, finds himself hired by Arabs to penetrate an organization much like the militant Jewish Defense League...
...father went up on Old Brammer Ridge to search for a buck with antlers big enough to be legal. "We got to where we's goin'," David remembers. "We couldn't find no deer." There were more deer when he was a boy, Larry told his son. The note of elegy, of an age gone and irrecoverable, lingered in the autumn...
...that, in Libra, is precisely what Don DeLillo has done. In a note at the end, he admits that some may find a novel on this subject "one more gloom in a chronicle of unknowing." But, he continues, "because this book makes no claim to literal truth, because it is only itself, apart and complete, readers may find refuge here -- a way of thinking about the assassination without being constrained by half-facts or overwhelmed by possibilities, by the tide of speculation that widens with the years." Unfortunately, this argument wants things both ways; a book can hardly be "only...
...famous American author temporarily staying in Paris wrote a note to the local correspondent for the Times of London: "Cher ami -- Can you arrange, some day next week -- before Wednesday -- to bring, or send, me such fragments of correspondence as still exist?" The writer continues, "In one sense, as I told you, I am indifferent to the fate of this literature. In another sense, my love of order makes me resent the way in which inanimate things survive their uses!" Edith Wharton, then 47, was referring to her love letters in the possession of Morton Fullerton, a charming rotter...