Word: seabrook
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Security Information Council, a nuclear disarmament group, warned that a Y2K glitch could lead to erroneous early-warning reports or even trigger the accidental launch of a nuclear missile. Nuclear power plants could be vulnerable to the same difficulties. Last year, when the Nuclear Regulatory Commission looked at the Seabrook plant in New Hampshire, it found that Y2K problems, unless fixed, would affect the computers that monitored such crucial functions as reactor-coolant levels and fuel-handling systems...
...farm with Depression-era parents who taught me to fear disaster," he recalls. He studied law at the University of Wisconsin and in the early 1980s helped engineer Conrail's financial turnaround. In the mid-1980s, as president of Central Maine Power, he steered the divestiture of the controversial Seabrook nuclear plant. Rowe compares himself to the pilot of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, "navigating shifting waters" where "the shore is never quite the same...
...Instead, Seabrook (a New Yorker writer and scion of the Seabrook frozen-food family) keeps his feet firmly planted in a very personal and often very funny account of his own assimilation into the culture of the Net. Sure, his head may spin a bit as he makes his initial encounters--his first E-mail exchange finds him in surprisingly casual conversation with Bill Gates; he samples the mysteries of cybersex disguised as a half-woman, half-faun named Bambi. But a little head spinning is to be expected at first, and Seabrook is never more on target than when...
...gradual, wistful loss of his Utopian enthusiasms, though, that shapes Seabrook's narrative. Inspired by the promise of a "virtual community" to join the Well, a legendary West Coast bulletin-board system, Seabrook learns in various hard ways that a community of digital beings can be just as constraining--and cruel--as the corporeal kind. Unwritten rules abound, and when Seabrook breaches a few, the Well's otherwise benevolent group mind turns on him in what one Well veteran calls a Chicken Peck--"where one of the flock shows a bit of blood, and a few of the other chickens...
...Still, Seabrook manages to find a place for himself there, and on the Net at large. And if his picaresque journey makes for a meandering tale, he tells it well, and thoughtfully. After two Internet decades of portentous Net hype, it's time somebody...