Word: problem
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Washington insists it is watching not only bin Laden's cells but also dozens of other potentially dangerous groups from its special Counter Terrorism Center in Virginia. Though the best way to track these groups would be to infiltrate them, that poses a nearly insuperable problem. "Terrorist cells are frequently very small groups of people who are all related to each other," says a CIA defender. "You don't just suddenly make yourself a cousin of somebody...
...problem comes, however, when past and future converge on the present moment--which is all we have to work with--and fight it out for supremacy. The old habitually say that everything was better when they were young--let's go back. The young are by nature sure that everything will be better when they come of age--let's go forward. In the former Yugoslavia, in Somalia and the Middle East, America has come in saying, "Make a fresh start!" And those caught in their ancestral rivalries reply, "How can we make a pact with the future until...
...late '70s, when these film geeks become roommates at the University of Southern California after discovering a mutual love for trashy horror flicks like Herschell Gordon Lewis' Blood Feast and 2000 Maniacs. Now jump-cut to 1990, when they sell an original comedy about a bad seed called Problem Child but become dejected by the unfunny film that is made. To cheer themselves up, they write a spec script about the worst auteur in cinema history, Ed Wood. Batman director Tim Burton reads it and signs on, and when the movie garners critical praise, the guys decide to stick with...
...young clerk named Albert Einstein, working in the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, who cut through the ether and solved the speed-of-light problem once and for all. In June 1905 he wrote one of three papers that would establish him as one of the world's leading scientists--and in the process start two conceptual revolutions that changed our understanding of time, space and reality...
Einstein was aware of this difficulty in 1907, while he was still at the patent office in Bern, but didn't begin to think seriously about the problem until he was at the German University in Prague in 1911. He realized that there is a close relationship between acceleration and a gravitational field. Someone in a closed box cannot tell whether he is sitting at rest in the earth's gravitational field or being accelerated by a rocket in free space. (This being before the age of Star Trek, Einstein thought of people in elevators rather than spaceships...