Word: absurdities
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...reported that a Japanese madman stabbed eight schoolchildren in a suburb of Osaka [WORLD, June 18]. Some will argue that if knives were illegal in Japan (a country with a long history of swords and such), this awful attack wouldn't have happened. It's pretty absurd to claim that if knives and blades were made illegal now, this sort of killing would not happen in the future, but haven't we heard something like that before? KURT MAUSERT Saratoga Springs...
...Elsewhere, the old ways of thinking about the "national interest" - that guiding light of the Westphalian system - have fewer adherents than they once did. Not long ago, the national interest of, say, the Netherlands could be defined by a necessity to protect Dutch blood and soil. It would be absurd to imagine that the modern Dutch think that way now. For a sensible Dutch government, it makes sense to define the things that really matter in terms of the international opportunities available to its companies, and in the commitment to global environmentalism that its citizens apparently avow...
...donors and informal energy advisers--be seeing their revenues jump 281% in the first quarter? Even a respected free-marketeer like Alfred Kahn, the father of airline deregulation, has had enough. "The notion that caps automatically interfere with the increase of supply in the electric industry is absurd," he says...
Astronomers and physicists are a cautious crew, and they insist that the mind-bending discoveries about dark matter, dark energy and the flatness of space-time must be confirmed before they are accepted without reservation. "We're really living dangerously," says Chicago's Turner. "We've got this absurd, wonderful picture of the universe, and now we've got to test it." There could be surprises to come: an Einstein-style cosmological constant, for example, is the leading candidate for dark energy, but it could in principle be something subtly different--a force that could even change directions someday...
Geocaching is a new sport made possible by a satellite-based technology called GPS (global positioning system), which enables users to pinpoint their exact latitude and longitude on the earth's surface to an absurd number of decimal places. Last year early adopters in the Portland, Ore., area began hiding little stashes of CDs, action figures, Band Aids and other goodies in exotic locations--on a mountaintop, underwater, hanging off a cliff face--and posting the coordinates on the Internet as a challenge to their fellow nerds. The idea is that once you find a cache, you take the prize...