As a (mostly gentle) shock to the system, the slowdown will give companies more space to prepare for an industrial future quite different from today's.
As soon as the heartbeat returns, perhaps jump-started with the help of a gentle electric shock, and as long as the lungs seem capable of functioning, at least with the help of a ventilator, the patient will be taken off bypass.
We used a motorized treadmill equipped with a gentle intensity shock grid.
(Remember the time she served pickled python and sheep spleen as hors d'oeuvres? How about when she sent her little nephew to that nudist school?) The gentle shock value of such stories has long since worn away, of course, revealing a sugary sentimentality beneath the brittleness.
Scientists hope the process, in which gentle shocks were applied to the surface of the brain in baboons, could be a dramatic improvement over the more extreme and complex surgical treatments that are currently the only recourse for patients with the worst symptoms.
Thirty years on, the manic streak has gone, replaced by a gentle laugh and shock of white hair, but those lyrics serve well as a template for his latest endeavour, Bicycle Diaries: a series of accounts of Byrne's experiences travelling to cities around the world.
The missing particle that glues everything social together". Ironically, having been brought up in the 50s, when parental affection was thought to encourage mawkish children, he is himself sensitive to touch, and feels a gentle stroke "like an electric shock".
In a few seconds the ground shock reaches the control point, where scientists may feel a gentle wave-like rocking of the earth.
Shocked relatives and radio station colleagues speak of a gentle, studious man whose parents died when he was a child and who grew up in an orphanage.
