More Vocab!

These are the sentences in which the selected words appeared in our summer reading:

from Nicholas Carr's The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains

We all know how distracting this cacophony of stimuli can be. (96/260)

That fact, almost "a tautology," helps explain how our dependence on digital computers grew steadily and seemingly inexorably after the machines were invented at the end of World War II. (201/260)

Neurons have central cores, or somas which carry out the functions common to all cells, but they also have two kinds of tentacle-like appendages - axons and dendrites- that transmit and receive electric pulses. (29/260)

As the idea of the unchangeable adult brain hardened into dogma it turned into a kinds of "neurological nihilism," according to the research psychiatrist Norman Doidge. (33/260)

Weizenbaum named his program ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle, the cockney flower girl, who learns to speak English under the tutelage of the haughty phonetic professor Henry Higgins." (197/260)


from Clive Thompson's Smarter Than You Think:

In 1934, Otlet wrote an essay envisioning a great compendium of electronic documents that could be accessed via a computer in your household: a reseau, or "web."

When you give everyday people the ability to communicate, you release not just brilliant bons mots and incisive conversations, but also ad hominem attacks, fury, and trolls." (77/341)

Texting offered a style of conversation that was more convenient than voice calls (and cheaper, in developing countries), and the asynchronicity created pauses useful for gathering your thoughts (76/341)...

(By the way, I don't like any of the online dictionary definitions I have found of this word.  Maybe I'm wrong.  After all, I'm sitting here, just after midnight, thinking that I am right and the online dictionary is wrong.  Maybe this is a sign of craziness. Or exhaustion.)