Word: doomsday
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There is a doomsday feel to such a figure, especially with the millennium approaching. Statisticians are already drooling over all those zeroes, and the frantic calculations that have ensued are a mathematician's dream. Bullet points on all the major news websites show the results of their labor: did you know that it took all of time for the world population to hit one billion in 1804, but only twelve years for it to jump from five billion to six billion? Did you know that one tenth of all the people who have ever lived are alive today...
...Dutifully, and with the media blaring doomsday over their car radios, more than 2 million residents did, clogging the highways and creating their own disaster bulletins ? the traffic kind. Cars packed with families, pets and suitcases crept west at hours per mile, and when Floyd cruised on by, folks were inclined to feel that safe had been exactly the same as sorry. "There was no need to go," Georgia convenience-store owner Subhash Patel told the USA Today after his four-and-a-half-hour, 39-mile trip cost him two days of business. "We got scared unnecessarily...
Money managers call it the doomsday scenario, forseeing an event that could wipe out investor portfolios and wreak havoc on the stock market. The danger stems not from new financial woes erupting abroad but from something happening here. It is the explosive growth in margin debt--loans Americans take out to buy stocks. Margin debt has shot up to $180 billion at midyear, a 25% increase in just six months and by far the most ever recorded. It now accounts for 1.2% of the stock market's total capitalization...
While the early doomsday predictions about Y2K appear to be wildly exaggerated, serious work remains to be done. "It was only one chemical valve being left open that caused the Bhopal disaster," says Joan Mulhern, legislative counsel for Public Citizen. "To the extent that these bills are telling industry not to be prepared, they're sending the wrong message...
...assured destruction," which would shape U.S. strategy for the next two decades. Von Neumann also became an icon of the cold war. Disabled with pancreatic cancer, he stoically continued to attend AEC meetings until his death in 1957. The wheelchair-bound scientist with the Hungarian accent who mathematically analyzed doomsday is said to have been a model for Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove...