Word: invention
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...problem is, McEwan wasn't the first to invent the technology--if he invented it at all. It was first patented in 1987 by LARRY FULLERTON, founder of Alabama-based Time Domain Corp., and featured at a 1990 Los Alamos meeting attended by McEwan and his Livermore associates. In response to a Time Domain challenge, the U.S. Patent Office has initially rejected Livermore's key patents. Next month the House Science Committee will release a report that, sources tell TIME, will cite more cases of intellectual-property infringement committed by the weapons-making labs as they scrambled to find...
...invent the computer? Novel as it may have been, ABC could not be reprogrammed, did not handle large numbers well and never became fully operational. By contrast, the reprogrammable ENIAC did initial calculations for the H-bomb, kept flashing away for nearly a decade and led to a host of more sophisticated successors. Take your pick...
...wind. Yet that obsessive kind of world-changing belief is a force that drives you to solve a problem, to find the breakthrough--a force that drives you to bet everything on a fragile wing or a new idea. It was a force that led the Wright brothers to invent, single-handedly, each of the technologies they needed to pursue their dream...
Plus--need it be said?--the human sexual impulse, like that of the bonobo, is not as tightly coupled to reproduction as certain pro-family moralists like to think. Even in so-called primitive hunter-gatherer societies, such as that of the Australian Aborigines, women have always managed to invent forms of contraception--herbal drinks, pessaries to block the cervix, oils to bog down the sperm. Then there is homosexuality, a reproductively senseless but nevertheless deeply compelling sexual strategy for millions of both sexes. Not to mention masturbation, celebrated by rapper Foxy Brown's chart-topping song...
...credibility and falters. Codrescu's attempts to integrate supernatural images into the novel are neither fantastic nor interesting, but merely commonplace and uninventive. And while it is clear that he is trying to set a foundation for some interesting interactions between famous historical personas, he is completely unable to invent an interesting conversation between any of them...