Word: acidic
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...says Bob Simonds, 28, a producer from Los Angeles who filmed a movie there. "I saw it as a big Disney production. It seemed like a fraud, a city on overload. Now I love this place. It's like Norman Rockwell's America or Dennis the Menace on acid...
...mist can be as deadly as it is ugly. It coats the leaves of palm trees, starving them for sunlight, and so they shrivel. It falls on the surface of the Persian Gulf, already assaulted by oil spills and acid rain, posing a further threat to the phytoplankton that is the base food supply for the region's abundant fisheries. And it enters the air passages and lungs of all breathing creatures. Kuwaitis who have seen the blackened lungs of slaughtered animals and watched livestock and wildlife sicken and die can only wonder what effect the ubiquitous mist is having...
This was the ideal, anyway. But Big Science costs big bucks and breeds a more mundane and calculating kind of outlook. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run a modern biological laboratory, with its electron microscopes, ultracentrifuges, amino-acid analyzers, Ph.D.s and technicians. The big bucks tend to go to big shots, like Baltimore, whose machines and underlings must grind out "results" in massive volume. In the past two decades, as federal funding for basic research has ebbed, the pressure to produce has risen to dangerous levels. At the same time, the worldly rewards of success...
...Instead, they tend to be noisy, chaotic places where computers are used not so much to deliver instruction as to do the computational spadework for students engaged in practical, concrete tasks. The computer-friendly classes are busy publishing miniature newspapers, designing model cities, writing operas or gathering data on acid rain. Once the tasks have been set by the teacher, students are generally free to pursue them as they see fit. In these settings, knowledge tends to travel across the room like a rumor, as students, hearing of a new discovery or computer application, drop whatever they are doing...
...There's more to life than becoming a member of the Establishment," he said, explaining that he came to this "understanding" while dropping acid with former Harvard lecturer and drug guru Timothy Leary. Leary left his post in the early 1960s, amidst charges of distributing hallucinogens...