Word: scientistic
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ROBERT Wright, now senior editor at The New Republic, appropriately begins his "search for meaning" by taking us on a journey: to the private Caribbean island of multimillionaire computer scientist Edward Fredkin (rumored to be the model for the pessimistic and reclusive computer guru in the movie, War Games...
WRIGHT'S journey through the role of information in cosmology, sociobiology and systems theory teaches us also about the joys and pains of being a scientist, particularly one with his own personal ideas about how the world works. Sometimes, all three seem to share the frustration of Ed Fredkin, who tells the author, "I feel like I'm the only person with eyes in a world that's blind...
...airport in Cap-Haitien. An estimated 1,000 Colombians reportedly are in Haiti, some of whom are suspected of involvement in smuggling networks. "For 2 1/2 years the country has been without any effective central control, and these commanders had their own little fiefdoms," said a young Haitian social scientist. "Many were obviously interested in quick profits...
...Soviet Union has begun a generation-long program to explore Mars that is expected to end with cosmonauts landing on the Red Planet, so prominent in the sky these nights, soon after the turn of the century. A Soviet scientist has announced that an automated roving vehicle will land there in 1994; one of its jobs will be to look for fossils. Fossils on Mars...
Unlike the Burmese, most Haitians have been so numbed by generations of brutal tyranny that they have not been exposed to the concept of constitutional rule and limits on the arbitrariness of government. Anthony Downs, a Georgetown University political scientist, stresses the difficulty of sowing the seeds of democracy in a soil that has never grown that crop before. Says Downs: "People who have tried to start instant democracies have almost always failed...