Word: drawbacks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Joyless Omens. As the biographer describes Joyce's literary struggles, the book's only drawback appears: Ellmann is so busy correlating Joyce's life and work that he attempts no critical revaluation. He does not ask if Finnegans Wake is a masterpiece, or a monstrous jungle of word play. Nor does he ask whether Joyce's famed "interior monologue" really reveals anything, or whether T. S. Eliot was correct when he suggested that "it doesn't tell as much as some casual glance from outside often tells...
Storm Trouble. The most sensitive way to detect distant earthquakes-or underground atomic explosions-is by measuring the long waves that travel along the earth's surface instead of striking deep into its interior. Drawback to this method is that even such minor disturbances as a storm at sea set up shorter surface waves (microseisms) that obscure or blot out the record. The Lamont improvement is an ingenious filtering device that separates earthquake waves from local confusion...
Japan's success is based mainly upon low wages and high skills. The typical Japanese transistor worker is a deft-fingered, teen-aged girl, accumulating a dowry and delighted to work for $23.34 a month and dormitory space. Furthermore, the Japanese have successfully overcome their greatest drawback, the tendency to export poor-quality goods. The government refuses to license substandard products. Individual Japanese companies are even more exacting. Hitachi, Ltd. of Tokyo, one of the leading makers, recalled an entire U.S. shipment because one plastic case color ran slightly...
...asset not lost on Asahi Shimbun, the Tokyo daily of 4,000,000 circulation, which also publishes Asahi Science Magazine. The three Tokyo printing companies already equipped to print recording on paper expect mass production to reduce the present 4½?-per-page cost to 2? or less. Main drawback: the stay-at-home subscriber must pay $417 for equipment that will buy him the dubious privilege of hearing his magazine or newspaper roar like a waterfall or merely go bongbong...
...tolerate their pain, even though its actual intensity may not be reduced. Greatest danger: an overall dulling of the personality. More radical but also more logical is an attack through the thalamus, part of the central nervous system which relays many pain impulses to the higher perception centers. Biggest drawback: the thalamus, tucked away in the middle of the skull, is hard to get at, and early operations on it often missed the target by a fraction of an inch...