Word: roomed
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...thinking machines. He now proposed the idea that a machine could learn from and thus modify its own instructions. In a famous 1950 article in the British philosophical journal Mind, Turing proposed what he called an "imitation test," later called the "Turing test." Imagine an interrogator in a closed room hooked up in some manner with two subjects, one human and the other a computer. If the questioner cannot determine by the responses to queries posed to them which is the human and which the computer, then the computer can be said to be "thinking" as well as the human...
...Horace Freeland Judson observed in The Eighth Day of Creation, this sort of synergy is, above all, what Rosalind Franklin lacked. Working in a largely male field in an age when women weren't allowed in the faculty coffee room, she had no one to bond with--no supportive critic whose knowledge matched her gaps, whose gaps her knowledge matched...
...double helix--both the book and the molecule--did nothing to slow this century's erosion of innocence. Watson's account, depicting researchers as competitive and spiteful--as human--helped de-deify scientists and bring cynicism to science writing. And DNA, once unveiled, left little room for the ethereal, vitalistic accounts of life that so many people had found comforting. Indeed, Crick, a confirmed agnostic, rather liked deflating vitalism--a mission he pursued with zeal, spearheading decades of work on how exactly DNA builds things before he moved on to do brain research at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies...
Producing energy through nuclear fusion is easy enough to do--provided you have a reactor that can generate temperatures hotter than the sun's. If you could somehow achieve fusion at room temperature, you'd have an unlimited source of power that could retire petroleum, nuclear and solar energy for good...
Time has been less kind to other works of SF, despite hard work and serious intent. Harry Harrison's novel Make Room! Make Room! (source of the movie Soylent Green) predicted a New York City crammed with 35 million people, each allotted a meager four square yards of living space. That novel is set today--in 1999. It was published in 1966. The scenario made sense back then, before the advent of widespread birth control. All you had to do was follow the exponential curves...