Word: goode
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...World Series against the American League Champion Baltimore Orioles brought the Pirates a full measure of good days and bad days, but the last and best day belonged to Willie Stargell. In a dramatic seventh game, Stargell hit the home run that won the world championship for Pittsburgh and with it MVP honors for himself for the second time in as many weeks. At 38, the Pirates' captain batted .400, drove in seven runs and pounded three home runs, adding four doubles to set a World Series record for extra-base hits. Perhaps more crucial, the imposing but soft...
...phenomenon is still a fledgling fad elsewhere. In Boston and Atlanta, many department store buyers have adopted a wait-and-see attitude and are limiting supply. "They're really horrible," says one Boston department store manager, "and normally things that don't look good don't last." Body-conscious Californians have yet to be seduced by the latest fashion invasion. Explains one 40-year-old sylph: "I worked really hard to stay looking good, and I'm not going to cover it up with baggies." The jeans have been well received among Chicago high schoolers...
Most of this numbering is useful, and a good deal of it is indispensable. In any event, the world could hardly have wound up otherwise. Human beings began counting and "falling under the spell of numbers," in H.G. Wells' words, well before they could write. Long ago, the entire species was like some modern aboriginal peoples (the Damara and some Hottentots in Africa, for example) who possess words only for numbers up to three, every larger quantity being simply expressed as "many." A fascination with the multiplicity of things, together with a quenchless scientific yen, pushed the main body...
Indeed, the googol might be a good symbol for a time when the world is under the sway of technology, when it has no choice, as Jacques Ellul says in The Technological Society, but to "don mathematical vestments." The googol is the figure 1 followed by 100 zeros (see above). It was made famous, or infamous, in the 1930s by Mathematician Edward Kasner. He also offered the googolplex, which is 1 followed by a googol of zeros - so many zeros, said Kasner, that no matter how tiny they could not all be written on a piece of paper as wide...
...human craving for numbers tells a good deal about man kind. It is both sign and cause of man's long trek from the days of one, two, three, many. It can be taken as a symptom of exuberant joy in the quantity and multiplicity of things. Still, the dizzy acceptance of those truly incomprehensible figures might also be construed as a vicarious variation of the old Faustian game: the yearning to know the unknowable...