Word: everydayness
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...found too few machines to go around. Says Alpena Elementary School Principal Burt Wright: "I've got high school kids begging to come in after school and use our machine." The truly addicted-known half scornfully, half admiringly as computer nerds-may drop out almost entirely from the everyday world. In Lexington, Mass., one legendary 16-year-old nerd got so deeply immersed in computers that he talked to no one, headed straight to his terminal after school and barely sat down for meals. The only way his father could get him away from the terminal...
...pulses of high or low voltage. To command the machine in its own internal language meant writing out endless strings of ones or zeros, called bits and bytes, symbolizing those yes or no statements. But scientists soon began creating alternate languages for communicating with the machines that vaguely resemble everyday speech...
Translated into everyday language, the first line tells the computer to let N stand successively for 20 through 30. The second instructs the machine to print the first value of N (that is, the number 20), compute its square root (SQR) and print out the result. The third tells the computer to go on to each of the succeeding values, all the way through 30. Finally, the program tells the computer to call it a day, its job having been done. Even the smallest machine can do such calculations in a flash, compared with the hours of work they might...
...limited terms. Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at Berkeley, observes that "all aspects of human thought, including nonformal aspects like moods, sensory-motor skills and long-range self-interpretations, are so interrelated that one cannot substitute an abstractable web of explicit beliefs for the whole cloth of our concrete everyday practice." Marianne Moore saw the web her own way: "The mind is an enchanting thing,/ is an enchanted thing/ like the glaze on a/ katydid-wing/ subdivided by sun/ till the nettings are legion,/ Like Gieseking playing Scarlatti." In short, human intelligence is too intricate to be replicated. When...
...Everyday life, however, was somewhat less spectacular. Our dormitory, inconveniently situated in the southwest corner of the city, housed only foreign students. The cafeteria on the ground floor operated according to the schedule posted on its doors, except when it didn't. Breakfasts had to be rushed or skipped altogether because, although the cafeteria opened early enough to allow us 25 minutes before leaving for classes downtown, much of this time was wasted waiting in line, first for the food and then for the cashier to add up the bill on an abacus (she used the cash register only...