Word: magical
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...other angles in his book. But rather than just arm wrestling with God's faithful, his book attempts to survey the science underpinning all intuitive beliefs, including religion, that humans stubbornly cling to, in spite of the best efforts of rational enquiry to displace them: credence in the paranormal, magic and superstition; faith in alternative-health therapies; the conviction that sooner or later we're bound to win a lottery jackpot. Our belief engine, Wolpert concludes, works on wholly unscientific principles: "It prefers quick decisions, it is bad with numbers, loves representativeness and sees patterns where there is only randomness...
...find a way of doing things with next to nothing," she says. "Clean, do plumbing - you name it." Lush recalls how, "when I was really little, Mum showed me how you could use rotten (spoiled) milk to get ink out of clothes. I thought it was magic...
...enthusiasm displayed by upperclassmen worked its magic upon freshmen...
...seems increasingly to be between imposing a police state or unleashing a civil war. Given the fractured history of the country and the divided makeup of the population, those two possible outcomes were predictable before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Although the President thought that merely by saying the magic words freedom and democracy he could bring them into being, his simplistic optimism never had a chance against the complex reality. Bush's war has taken a bad but stable situation under Saddam Hussein and made it worse for Iraqis, the region and the world. Robert J. Inlow Charlottesville, Virginia...
...This oxymoronic creation dates back to the fateful moment when a long-suffering Indian chef in Britain grew tired of explaining the basic facts about the tikka to his barbaric customers, mixed Campbell's tomato soup with some spices and gave them the gravy they craved. The result was magic, at least to British palates...