Word: needfulness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...year ago and never looked back. "It has changed my life," she says. "Instead of running into a store with a kid under each arm, trying desperately to avoid a meltdown, buying 20 things I didn't want, I've got the time to think about what I need. It's made me a better shopper...
...Subaru won't start. It won't even turn over. In a flash, Esteban is out of the car and pushing. I'm driving, and he's barking orders, which need to be translated instantaneously by T/N. I have no idea what we're doing. We stop. Esteban, sighing loudly, takes my place, and then I'm pushing. Down the road, and before long we're out of the town and into the dark fields. The road is red from the taillights and slippery and I can't get a grip, but then boom, Esteban pops the clutch...
...Trinidad, a colonial town 400 years old, sun bleached and ravishing, we drop off Condela. He shows us his shop, right on the main cobblestone drag. "If you need anything," he says, pointing to a storefront, "I'm right here." Trinidad is much too perfectly aged and brilliantly colored to be free of tourists: Germans, Spanish, Italians, even a few Americans drawling Indiana...
Then came trains and factories, and with them the need to coordinate the schedules of hundreds and even thousands of people. It was the railroad companies that invented time zones, in 1883. Because of the earth's rotation, the sun was highest at different times in New York City and, say, Washington, which lay a bit farther west. The 11-min. difference in local noon could lead to disaster at intersections...
...such a timepiece would be virtually useless today: computers, communications satellites, global-positioning receivers and telephone-switching systems need a precision beyond anything conceivable even 50 years ago. Time technology long since abandoned mechanical devices and even the hum of quartz crystals. For true precision--accuracy to a billionth of a second--you need to travel, virtually at least, to a place like the perfectly circular, well-guarded park that sits in northwest Washington. There, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, a nondescript concrete building houses the nerve center of the U.S. Directorate of Time...