Word: amundsen
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...went up in the first place for Edmund Hillary's reason: because it is there. For adventure, for romance. And yes, for competition. Like Amundsen and Scott racing for the South Pole, Americans and Soviets wanted to get there first...
...even with all this activity, no one has taken up the pursuit of digital intelligence with as much audacity or ambition as Lenat and Brooks. Their parallel quests to build what may be the world's first convincingly humanlike computer programs have been compared to the dramatic 1911 Amundsen-Scott race to the South Pole; but even that analogy falls short. For the rivalry between the two researchers is not merely personal (Brooks considered naming his robot Psych! just to get Lenat's goat) but deeply philosophical as well, straddling the almost theological schism that runs down the middle...
...Sophie Amundsen, the eponymous heroine of this peculiar book, is an ordinary 14-year-old schoolgirl who lives with her mother in an ordinary Norwegian suburb. (Her dad captains an oil tanker and is away most of the time.) One day Sophie gets an unsigned letter in the mail containing only a three-word question: "Who are you?" Soon she receives another anonymous message, asking, "Where did the world come from...
...facts are these: in 1910 British navy Captain Robert Falcon Scott set out on his second expedition to Antarctica. Studying penguins was important, but there was also the urgency of beating the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen to the South Pole. The British brought motorized sleds and shaggy ponies but not enough dog teams. The sleds and horses soon broke down. On Jan. 18, 1912, Scott and four companions finally dragged themselves to the bottom of the world, where they found a month-old note from Amundsen. On the way back the runners-up had to fight fatigue, blizzards and temperatures...
...peer through some of the dryest, clearest air on earth to help determine whether the original Big Bang was unique or was followed by smaller ones. A few hundred yards away, close to the enormous geodesic dome that covers the thickly insulated buildings of the U.S.'s Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, atmospheric scientists measured traces of pollutants released around the globe. The pole is so remote from civilization that there, better than anywhere else, scientists can accurately assess just how far-reaching are the effects of pollution...