Word: backed
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Still, even back then, the social brain, through positive feedback, was maturing. With each advance in subsistence technology, survival grew more secure, hastening population growth; and as population grew, the advances came more quickly. By the Mesolithic Age, around 10,000 B.C., with the neuronal population up to around 4 million, the rate of advance had moved from one major innovation per 20,000 years to a sizzling one per 200--including such gifts to posterity as combs and beer...
...tonalities, using new palettes. You can see it in the way Pulp Fiction or Run Lola Run toys with time, in the down-the-rabbit-hole goofing of Being John Malkovich, in Keanu Reeves' encounter with that manic bullet in The Matrix. It's a kind of back formation from computer language, this narrative revolution manifesting itself in film. But it surely partakes of the new machine's ability to cast us adrift in ungrounded cyberspace, where all the spatial and temporal laws governing the representation of human reality will be revised, maybe repealed. It will extend to the other...
...northern China, would propel countless explorers through serendipitous discoveries in America. (In 1634, for example, the Frenchman Jean Nicolet left Quebec in search of China and discovered Green Bay, Wis.) Meanwhile, Franciscan missionary diplomats sent by the Pope to seek an alliance with the Khan against Islam brought back a black powder to a fellow Franciscan, the Oxford scientist Roger Bacon, the first European to write about gunpowder...
...yourself back to a time before true mirrors. In Europe the art of painting had been lost to the ruthless destruction of barbarians. No Western man could see a real likeness of humankind upon a wall because no artist knew how to draw one. The pictures that adorned medieval churches--there was no secular painting--eschewed reality for decoration or dogma. Gilt-bedizened Madonnas with flat, staring eyes holding outsize infant Christs bespoke not man but the supernatural mystery of the faith...
...time he was back in Mainz in 1448, Gutenberg had ironed out enough of these problems to persuade Johann Fust, a goldsmith and lawyer, to invest heavily in his new printing shop. Exactly what happened behind Gutenberg's closed doors during the next few years remains unknown. But in 1455 visitors to the Frankfurt Trade Fair reported having seen sections of a Latin Bible with two columns of 42 lines each printed--printed--on each page. The completed book appeared about a year later; it did not bear its printer's name, but it eventually became known as the Gutenberg...