Word: civilizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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This piece betrays a moral apathy and intellectual laziness that has characterized much editorial coverage of civil conflict in this decade. As a piece of journalism, it has little worth: it neither explains the situation to people, nor does it take a well-reasoned moral stand, either for or against the bombing. So what is the point of writing it? To say that the ordinary person isn't in a position to make a moral judgment and shouldn't bother trying? And that the war is entirely in the hands of ordinary people, beyond the influence of leaders...
This piece betrays a moral apathy and intellectual laziness that has characterized much editorial coverage of civil conflict in this decade. As a piece of journalism, it has little worth: it neither explains the situation to people, nor does it take a well-reasoned moral stand, either for or against the bombing. So what is the point of writing it? To say that the ordinary person isn't in a position to make a moral judgment and shouldn't bother trying? And that the war is entirely in the hands of ordinary people, beyond the influence of leaders...
...dark, compact man with mischievous gray-blue eyes, Fermi was the son of a civil servant, an administrator with the Italian national railroad. He discovered physics at 14, when he was left bereft by the death of his cherished older brother Giulio during minor throat surgery. Einstein characterized his own commitment to science as a flight from the I and the we to the it. Physics may have offered Enrico more consolatory certitudes than religion. Browsing through the bookstalls in Rome's Campo dei Fiori, the grieving boy found two antique volumes of elementary physics, carried them home and read...
Alan Mathison Turing was born in London in 1912, the second of his parents' two sons. His father was a member of the British civil service in India, an environment that his mother considered unsuitable for her boys. So John and Alan Turing spent their childhood in foster households in England, separated from their parents except for occasional visits back home. Alan's loneliness during this period may have inspired his lifelong interest in the operations of the human mind, how it can create a world when the world it is given proves barren or unsatisfactory...
...waves can be bounced off almost any object. In 1925 physicists took advantage of this, firing signals at the ionosphere and using the reflection to measure its altitude. By World War II, British scientists had refined the technology, and the government began to dot the coast of England with civil-defense radar stations. As the hardware got simpler, radar found its way into airplanes, boats and air-traffic-control towers, improving navigation and ensuring that even a cow-pasture airport could operate safely. By the end of the century, the same basic technology was being used to steer spacecraft, track...