Word: ratting
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Perhaps it is true that any university which values excellence is bound to produce a competitive atmosphere. Here at Harvard, the stakes are higher than the norm, and the competitors know it. However, no one seems to be concerned with the aftermath of our exciting little rat race. The reality of that aftermath is that we live in a place where even a snowball fight turns into a battle for supremacy. Many of our peers conciously sabotage the success of others even when it garners no gain for themselves. Harvard claims to produce the leaders of tomorrow...
DIED. HERB CAEN, 80, classic newspaper columnist; in San Francisco. In the brightly written rat-a-tat of the daily column he produced for 58 years, mostly in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Pulitzer-prizewinning Caen was raconteur, funnyman, tipster, nightclubber, friend of the powerful and tireless chronicler of "Baghdad by the Bay," the city he loved and that loved him back...
...Rat-a-tat-tat. rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. If scientists could eavesdrop on the brain of a human embryo 10, maybe 12 weeks after conception, they would hear an astonishing racket. Inside the womb, long before light first strikes the retina of the eye or the earliest dreamy images flicker through the cortex, nerve cells in the developing brain crackle with purposeful activity. Like teenagers with telephones, cells in one neighborhood of the brain are calling friends in another, and these cells are calling their friends, and they keep calling one another over and over again...
...nervous system and the brain are called--are not transmitting signals in scattershot fashion. That would produce a featureless static, the sort of noise picked up by a radio tuned between stations. On the contrary, evidence is growing that the staccato bursts of electricity that form those distinctive rat-a-tat-tats arise from coordinated waves of neural activity, and that those pulsing waves, like currents shifting sand on the ocean floor, actually change the shape of the brain, carving mental circuits into patterns that over time will enable the newborn infant to perceive a father's voice, a mother...
...Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Just last week, in the U.S. alone, some 77,000 newborns began the miraculous process of wiring their brains for a lifetime of learning. If parents and policymakers don't pay attention to the conditions under which this delicate process takes place, we will all suffer the consequences--starting around the year...