Word: beginnings
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...very activity. When I'm in a nonsmoking room in a hotel, all I can think about is smoking. Had I been in a smoking room, I wouldn't have given cigarettes a second thought. Prohibition stimulates desire. Put me in a non-haggis room and I'll immediately begin to crave haggis. Similarly, prohibitive New Year's resolutions can backfire. Vows like "I will stop cluttering up my ski chalet with ridiculous tchotchkes," "I will stop buying long-range North Korean missiles over the Internet" and "I will not humiliate my family by having oral sex with young women...
...begin by noting what our century will be remembered for. Out of the fog of proximity, three great themes emerge...
Einstein was aware of this difficulty in 1907, while he was still at the patent office in Bern, but didn't begin to think seriously about the problem until he was at the German University in Prague in 1911. He realized that there is a close relationship between acceleration and a gravitational field. Someone in a closed box cannot tell whether he is sitting at rest in the earth's gravitational field or being accelerated by a rocket in free space. (This being before the age of Star Trek, Einstein thought of people in elevators rather than spaceships...
...fall, I stand still... I trudge on, I gain a little... I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory...
...Coetzee's Disgrace, there are Michael Crichton's readers, and the twain don't meet. Except, possibly, theoretically in cyberspace. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: "Culture follows money." And the money--perhaps even the creative zeal--is now in the new media. A radically reshaped culture is beginning to be created there. We can already begin to see what the generation born with a TV remote in its hand, hip-hop on the CD player and a computer screen in its face will do to traditional narrative. They'll speed it up, scramble it--and render...