Word: distractability
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Gore sneered: "Clinton hasn't got a clue." Kerrey, a lighter, funnier, and infinitely more authentic man than Gore - and a war hero, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam - would bring a certain connectedness and humanity to the ticket, and would serve as a foil to distract attention from Gore's Stepford quality. The two could even play it for endearingly comic effect...
Seldom do women get as lucky as Erin Brockovich, the movie law clerk played by Julia Roberts who used low-cut tops to distract important men into giving her confidential records. It's rare that women can reap the benefits of men's objectification of them without suffering some of the drawbacks too. Ms. Brockovich took a lot of risks, and for her, it paid off. But for most women, the eternal paradox of feminism kicks in: In order to be safe from the aggression and oppression of men, we need to lose our femininity and become like them, thus...
...likely to hear a tirade against the Amhara or the Tigreans, Indians or Pakistanis. If all the world's a global village, that means that the ancestral divisions of every place can play out in every other. And the very use of that comforting word village tends to distract us from the fact that much of the world is coming to resemble a global city (with all the gang warfare, fragmentation and generalized estrangement that those centers of affluence promote). When the past century began, 13% of humans lived in cities; by the time it ended, roughly...
...question is called the Needham paradox, after Joseph Needham, the great British scholar who raised it in his multivolume history of Chinese technology. Needham's answer sheds light on China's ultimate condition, allowing us to sort through the buzz of short-term problems that distract attention from the fundamental change now taking place. Yes, the West mastered the technology that China first discovered. Yet much more important, according to Needham, was that China lost its edge in the 15th century by suppressing entrepreneurs whose power posed a threat to the Emperor. The empire was made safe from within...
...says, the U.S. telegraphs its intentions by warning mariners and aviators before every space launch. Using spherical trigonometry, the trackers plot a potential orbit and notify other amateurs worldwide where to look. That's how Eberst and others track the famous 1990 stealth satellite, despite decoys deployed to distract observers. They lost that satellite after it maneuvered unexpectedly a few months later, but even that much tracking has some spooks steamed...