Word: shaped
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...space shuttle took a new ship shape into...
...first step is to delete the word suddenly from that last sentence. For this giant social brain has been taking shape, and hastening change, for a long, long time. Not just since Emerson's day, when the telegraph--sometimes called the "Victorian Internet"--made long-distance contact instantaneous, but since the very dawn of the human experience. For tens of thousands of years, technology has been drawing humanity toward the epic, culminating convergence we're now witnessing...
Farming, which took shape in the Old World around 8,000 B.C. and in the New World a few millenniums later, is a much misunderstood meme. Anthropologists sometimes call it an "energy technology," since food does, after all, energize us; but farming may have originally mattered more as a kind of information-processing technology. By radically increasing the human population that a given acre could support, farming sped up the synergistic exchange of cultural information, lubricating innovation; it packed lots of neurons together, raising both the size and the efficiency of social brains...
...that intelligent, culture-generating animals were a likely outcome of biological evolution, then you might even say the first great evolutionary process naturally spawned the second, which has since taken over as the great molder of the material world. In this view, the kind of global brain now taking shape has been in the cards not just since the Stone Age but since the primordial ooze; it has been, in some sense, life's destiny...
Edison's tireless work habits took shape during his childhood in Port Huron, Mich. His formal education, according to most accounts, lasted only three months; he quit school after a teacher pronounced him "addled." His mother, herself a former teacher, educated him for a while at home, but the boy's growing fascination with chemistry soon led him into a rigorous course of independent study. To pay for the materials needed for his experiments, Edison at age 12 got a job as a candy and newspaper salesman on the Grand Trunk Railway. By the time...