Word: hindsight
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Hindsight has proven us wrong," said one of the naysayers, Nevada Senator Chic Hecht, as if the nation were punishing itself today simply for guessing wrong long ago. Bad guesses are not moral failings, but the sweeping suspension of rights for one racial group certainly is. People were interned if they were only one-eighth Japanese by blood. There were no camps for German Americans, despite real support for Germany and Hitler in the German-American Bund. And no camps were set up for Japanese Americans in Hawaii, where there were plenty of ethnic Japanese but no strong tradition...
...Albert Gore announced on the morning after the March 8 Super Tuesday primaries that he planned to take the rest of the month off, there would have been hoots of derision. In hindsight, three weeks at the beach would have been almost as effective, and far less costly, than the campaign Gore waged. After squandering an estimated $320,000 on TV ads in Illinois and Connecticut, Gore remained the king of the single digits by failing to score over 10% in two successive primaries...
Paradoxically, televison's "defining" moment is not usually defined at the time. The moment gains resonance through hindsight. The original memory is adjusted and tinkered with by what comes afterward. Reviewing the Kennedy- Nixon debates reveals that Kennedy was almost as nervous and stilted as Nixon. In the end, the benefit Bush can draw from his tangle with Rather will depend on whether viewers recall it as a moment of justified indignation or as a peevish attempt to avoid coming to terms with the Iran-contra affair. It could go either way, for in fact it was both...
Does that mean, as one critic put it, that models projecting climatic change are "just the opinion of their authors about how the world works"? Not necessarily. That the model eventually proved accurate, if only in hindsight, was a tribute to the powers of computer climate models -- and a demonstration of their shortcomings. The models attempt to reduce the earth's climate to a set of grids and numbers, then manipulate the numbers based on the physical laws of motion and thermodynamics. The sheer number of calculations involved is mind-boggling. A three-dimensional model, for example, requires more than...
...year-old in 1956, she obtained a prescription for diet pills to control her weight. (At 5 ft. 6 in., she then weighed about 130 lbs.; she now weighs 120 lbs.) Years of deceit followed as she began each morning with a small 5-mg dose of amphetamines. In hindsight, she concedes that the drug "contributed to my being hyper" and provided a "false energy level...