Example of Lexical Context

A duct-less split can produce the exact amount of energy needed to temper an envelope. When I first read this sentence, my mind started to try to make connections to envelopes and wondered if tempering had something to do with getting or keeping the glue on the flap. If you are an engineer, you probably know that the sentence above refers to equipment and its capability of cooling a room. As with any topic, the more you know about heating and cooling, the easier it is to learn and understa...

 Douglas Engelbart's Idea of Small Changes

I'm reminded of Douglas Engelbart's classic paper "Augmenting Human itellect,"2 on his belief in the power of computers. He wrote this in 1962, way before the PC, and argued that it's better to improve and facilitate the tiny things we do every day than it is to attempt to replace entire human jobs with monolithic machines. A novel-writing machine, if one were invented, just automates the process of writing novels, and it's limited to novels. But making a small improvement to a pencil, for ex...

 The BRAIN Initiative

As humans, we can identify galaxies light years away, we can study particles smaller than an atom. But we still haven’t unlocked the mystery of the three pounds of matter that sits between our ears. (Laughter.) But today, scientists possess the capability to study individual neurons and figure out the main functions of certain areas of the brain. But a human brain contains almost 100 billion neurons making trillions of connections. So Dr. Collins says it’s like listening to the strin...

 The Internet is Empty Calories

But sometimes I think much of what we get on the Internet is empty calories. It’s sugar — short videos, pokes from friends, blog posts, Twitter posts (even blogs seem longwinded now), pop-ups and visualizations…Sugar is so much easier to digest, so enticing…and ultimately, it leaves us hungrier than before. Worse than that, over a long period, many of us are genetically disposed to lose our capability to digest sugar if we consume too much of it. It makes us sick long-term, as well as...