Word: symbolics
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Center of the World Constantinople: Symbol of Ottoman wealth and military power. Rivals: Beijing, capital of Ming China; Florence, epicenter of the Renaissance...
More important, he serves as a symbol of all the scientists--such as Heisenberg, Bohr, Richard Feynman and Stephen Hawking, even the ones he disagreed with--who built upon his work to decipher and harness the forces of the cosmos. As James Gleick wrote earlier this year in the TIME 100 series, "The scientific touchstones of our age--the Bomb, space travel, electronics--all bear his fingerprints." Or, to quote a TIME cover story from 1946 (produced by Whittaker Chambers): "Among 20th-Century men, he blends to an extraordinary degree those highly distilled powers of intellect, intuition and imagination which...
...names go, Amazon is a perfect choice. (Not least because its ticker symbol, AMZN, is a license-plate version of how the stock has performed.) The wild Amazon River, with its limitless branches, remains an ideal metaphor for a company that now sells everything from power tools to CDs, and is eagerly looking for new areas of expansion. It's possible to argue that Bezos didn't master much more than an evolution of commerce, replacing old-fashioned stores with a centralized sales and shipping center. But even that one change, he notes, grabbing a favorite word, is "huge...
...slightly more active may prefer to use bar-code scanners, which a company called Symbol Technologies is embedding into Palm handheld computers. Here's the idea: simply scan the unique 12-digit bar code of each product in your kitchen as you use it, and a replacement is on its way. If you prefer to stay in the La-Z-Boy, munching on pizza, get your refrigerator to order the groceries. Electrolux and Frigidaire have already developed prototype smart fridges, which, we're promised, will automatically sense when your milk carton feels light or your cheese smells like unlaundered socks...
...Nothing meant more than Phish, the mother of all identity bands (and, as such, the daughter of the Grateful Dead). It suggested a lifestyle, a way to dress, a particular disposition toward certain experimental drugs. In high school, the boys who liked Phish would go around drawing the Phish symbol on library desks, bathroom walls, their hands--wherever they felt the need to mark their territory. Phish was a ready-made identity, offering a whole subculture to anyone who was prepared to shell out for CDs, let their hair grow out and have a good time. Back then I found...