Word: equilibrium
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...last spring, the uneasy equilibrium among the four forces was beginning to break down. "Moderates" in the Taliban--those who tried to keep lines open to intermediaries in the U.N. and the U.S.--were losing ground. In 2000, Mullah Mohammed Rabbani, thought to be the second most powerful member of the Taliban, had reached out clandestinely to Massoud. "He understood that our country had been sold out to al-Qaeda and Pakistan," says Ahmad Jamsheed, Massoud's secretary. But in April 2001, Rabbani died of liver cancer. By that month, says the U.N.'s Vendrell, "it was al-Qaeda that...
Finding Toumai Man, the oldest hominid, in Chad [PALEONTOLOGY, July 22] fits in well with the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed by paleontologists Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould. [The theory explains why new species, rather than evolving gradually over millions of years, seem to suddenly appear in the fossil record, punctuating long periods of species stability, or equilibrium.] The Toumai fossil could have been a member of a peripherally isolated community that evolved into our oldest ancestors. You reported that several modern-looking hominids coexisted, and this also jibes with the introduction of members of an isolated community into...
They were all dancers. James Cagney propelled himself through space like a bullet or a bull terrier, his torso a few seconds ahead of his legs; anyone without a dancer's equilibrium would have fallen on his face. Henry Fonda was just the opposite: a triumph of convex geometry, his thin body a question mark that ambled at Stepin Fetchit pace toward a girl or a cause. Katharine Hepburn seemed always on the ascendant, scaling the invisible ramp of her own confidence. But of all the Golden Age Hollywood stars it was Fred Astaire who defined screen movement...
Every executive who wants to take over a company and reshape it knows that it's lonely at the top. But few realize that leading real change can also be dangerous. "People push back when you disturb the personal and institutional equilibrium they know," write Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky, authors of Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive through the Dangers of Leading (Harvard Business School). "People resist in all kinds of creative and unexpected ways that can get you taken out of the game: pushed aside, undermined, or eliminated." The authors should know: the book draws on their combined...
Gould’s greatest contribution to evolutionary science was his theory of “punctuated equilibrium,” but his brilliance was amplified by his contributions to the public discourse. He was extremely prolific, almost single-handedly saving the scientific essay, a dying breed of writing, in short articles where he combined apparently unrelated ideas into a cohesive scientific position. From his 300 consecutive monthly columns in Natural History magazine to his books on various aspects of evolutionary history, Gould remained committed throughout his career to translating science into terms the public could understand?...