Turning off TV : a Quiet Hour

I would like to propose that for sixty to ninety minutes each evening, right after the early evening news , all television broadcasting in the United States be 【小题1】 by law.

Let us take a serious , reasonable look at what the results be if such a proposal were accepted. Families might use the time for a real family hour .Without the 【小题2】 of TV, they might sit around together after dinner and actually talk to one another .It is well known that many of our problems — everything ,in fact ,from the generation gap to the high divorce rate to some forms of mental illness — are caused at least in part by 【小题3】to communicate. We do not tell each other what is disturbing us. The result is emotional difficulty of one kind or another. By using the quiet family hour to discuss our problems , we might get to know each other better, and to like each other better.

On evenings when such talk is unnecessary, families could rediscover more active pastimes.【小题4】 from TV, forced to find their own activities, they might take a ride together to watch the sunset. Or they might take a walk together (remember feet?) and see the neighborhood with fresh, new eyes.

With free time and no TV , children and adults might rediscover reading . There is more【小题5】 in a good book than in a month of typical TV programming . Educators report that the generation growing up with television can 【小题6】 write an English sentence, even at the college level. Writing is often learned from reading. A more literate new generation could be a【小题7】of the quiet hour.

At first glance, the idea of an hour without TV seems radical. What will parents do without the 【小题8】baby-sitter? How will we spend the time ? But it is not radical at all. It has been only twenty-five years since television came to control American free time. Those of us thirty-five and older can remember childhoods without television, spent 【小题9】with radio — which at least 【小题10】the listener’s imagination — but also with reading, learning, talking, playing games, inventing new activities. It wasn’t that difficult. Honest. The truth is we enjoyed ourselves greatly.

Russell Kirsch is known for being the inventor of the pixel(像素) and, in the process of this, for inventing the world’s first digital image scanner(扫描仪). The computer scientist 【小题1】 a photograph of his infant son Walden in 1957. This was the world’s first digital image to have ever been produced. It was several decades before other early developments in 【小题2】 photography began to take shape.

“My dad was a super 【小题3】 guy, always asking Questions,” Walden Kirsch said. “He was an iconoclast(打破传统者). When people said ‘you can’t go there or you can’t do that’, he did.”

The elder Kirsch was born in New York City in 1929 to Jewish(犹太的)【小题4】 . After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1946, he 【小题5】 college at New York University, Harvard and MIT.

Kirsch made the digital imaging breakthrough(突破) six years into his 50-year career. At that time he was working in Washington, DC for the National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology). He and his colleagues worked on a series of   【小题6】 , which involved artificial intelligence. They used the Standards Electronic Automatic Computer(SEAC), the country’s first fully operational 【小题7】 computer. It 【小题8】 about 3, 000 pounds and was able to process only a tiny part of even the most rudimentary(基) of today’s devices.

A 2-by-2-inch photograph of Kirsch’s son was scanned using a rotating drum. The machine detected 【小题9】 of the photograph and converted them into binary code(二进制代码) to be processed by the computer. The resulting digital greyscale image was only 176 by 176 pixels. While it was tiny by today’s standards, the image clearly 【小题10】 a recognizable reproduction of the original picture.