Word: fossils
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Twist any paleontologist's arm and you'll eventually elicit a fantasy about meeting long-extinct animals in the flesh. That's understandable enough, for fossil bones and teeth are frustratingly mute about so many of the things that made them the living organisms they once were. This is never more true than with the fossils of early hominids. But few paleoanthropologists have actually had the nerve to go public with their most imaginative musings, at least partly because they are so conscious of the gulf between what can and cannot reliably be said...
...utilities ushers in a new era of rate-slashing competition. In some states, consumers will soon choose their electric company the way they now choose a long-distance telephone carrier. Companies with nuclear plants are at a disadvantage because nuclear-generated electricity can cost twice as much as fossil-generated power. No new plants have been ordered in 18 years, and a dozen have been mothballed in the past decade...
GEORGE GALATIS WENT TO WORK AT NORTHeast Utilities in June 1982 with a degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and experience with a top manufacturer of nuclear components. At Northeast, he started in the division that oversees the utility's 15 fossil-fuel plants, then moved to the nuclear group, specializing in performance and reliability. Eric DeBarba, Northeast's vice president of technical services, describes him as a solid engineer. "Nobody here ever questioned his honesty or motives," DeBarba says...
This faith in a new world order induced by art collapsed soon enough; today it looks like a fossil from the early Messianic era of modernism. In fact, none of the more exalted claims made for abstract art over the past century have worn well. In the first flush of optimism after the 1917 Revolution, artists like Vladimir Tatlin hoped that abstraction, if made of the common materials used by workers, could lift dialectical materialism to a new plane and so become the basis of a popular art. These dreams ended in indifference and, for some, the Gulag...
...describes it in his speeches: a town where the schools and churches were busy and crowded well into the evenings; where nosy neighbors kept kids out of trouble. Though Alexander constantly invokes "the challenges of the next century"--a riff mainly designed to paint Bob Dole as a fossil--the vision he offers is one of middle-class village life in the 1950s...