Word: tinker
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...enormous expansion of human brainpower during the past million years. As recently as 100,000 B.C., Homo sapiens were using only the crudest tools, even though their brains had already reached the present size -- large enough to put men on the moon, probe the basis of matter and tinker with the genetic code. Because big brains need a lot of high- calorie food and require large craniums, which makes childbirth difficult, scientists have looked for other evolutionary pressures to account for their development...
...MANY PEOPLE, SO LITTLE DATA. ALTHOUGH MORE than 22 million Hispanics live in the U.S., experts say there's precious little information on their political attitudes. Until now. The Latino National Political Survey, funded by the Ford, Rockefeller, Spencer and Tinker foundations, is the first comprehensive study of the values of Americans of Mexican, Puerto Rican and Cuban descent and is being praised by major Hispanic groups...
...comes the second-guessing. "NBC seems to have made the wrong call ((for the Tonight show))," says Grant Tinker, former NBC chairman. "I think David should have been the one." Another top TV executive contends it was a "monumental blunder" for NBC to pick Leno over Letterman: "They put themselves in the position of angering a real marketable asset, of which they have precious few." A member of the Letterman camp argues that dumping Leno is the only way for NBC to salvage its 30-year dominance in late night. "Leno is destined for failure," he says...
Americans, by contrast, tinker endlessly with their patchwork of entitlement programs aimed largely at the poor. The failure to make a French-style commitment has much to do with the reverence Americans have for self-reliance. They cling to a new-frontier notion of rugged individualism, forgetting that those who actually braved the alien territories of the Wild West traveled in groups of families, not alone. Through the agrarian era into the modern one, Americans have continued to regard the nurturing of families as a personal issue rather than a public concern. "We have this notion," says research psychologist Arlene...
...course, they are kids. So go ahead and call them Kim and Shannon. Or Henrietta. Or Tatiana. But when one or more of them join the ranks of Nadia, Olga and Mary Lou next week, just remember: they didn't reach those Herculean heights by being Tinker Bells. That's not fairy dust they sprinkle on their hands...