Word: frightening
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...wasn't bitten by a dog as a kid or raised by cats. It's just that dogs frighten me and kind of gross me out. Last week Mexico City, upon which dogs drop around 120,000 tons of feces a year, appealed to owners to clean up after their dogs because it was causing major health problems. Plus, dogs are the only animals I know of that are sexually interested in breeds 500 times smaller than them. They're worse than frat boys...
When science fiction gets over its trite romance with the parts catalog, it can achieve unnerving power. Aldous Huxley and George Orwell are the classic exemplars of that small, elite class of science-fiction writers who frighten and annoy science-fiction devotees. Huxley's Brave New World (1932) bursts with prescient speculation: "feelie" multimedia, Prozac-like "soma" tranquilizers, test-tube babies. Late in life Huxley became a psychedelics guru, seduced by the potent allure of brain chemistry...
...Yard remind us that there's world outside of Harvard. Beyond the classes and parties and grad-school acceptances, another life awaits. Like the skunk and hawk, we'll have to forage for our food instead of having it handed to us. But this world needn't frighten us so long as we acknowledge its existence...
...Instead of simply passing out a new problem set, Piel decided to use game theory, one of the primary topics studied in ESS, in order to subtly frighten students who might have felt tempted to glance at the lifted answer key. In a biological context, game theory is used to predict the optimal behavior or adaptive strategies of animals in a competitive environment while also having to account for the probability of alternative strategies in the neighboring environment. Piel wrote a creative game theory word problem that would apply to the classroom situation and e-mailed the problem to every...
...rebellion persuaded the Indonesian military to drop Suharto and replace him with President B. J. Habibie. Student protesters pushing for accelerated political reform may find their actions have the opposite effect. Says Dowell: "A new uprising could actually frighten the military into thinking the situation is so unstable that they should be tightening their control rather than opening up to new reforms." And in Indonesia, the military's opinion tends to prevail...