Word: todays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Today plastic is nearly everywhere, from the fillings in our teeth to the chips in our computers (researchers are developing flexible transistors made of plastic instead of silicon so they can make marvels such as a flat-panel television screen that will roll like a scroll up your living-room wall). Plastic may not be as vilified now as it was in 1967, but it's still a stuff that people love and hate. Every time a grocery clerk asks, "Paper or plastic?," the great debate between old and new, natural and synthetic, biodegradable and not, silently unfolds...
...unmanned gliders spawned by their first efforts flew erratically and were at the mercy of any strong gust of wind. But with help from their wind tunnel, the brothers amassed more data on wing design than anyone before them, compiling tables of computations that are still valid today. And with guidance from this scientific study, they developed the powered 1903 Flyer, a skeletal flying machine of spruce, ash and muslin, with a wingspan of 40 ft. and an unmanned weight of just over...
...individuals and nations to put it to use, and use it we have. The airplane revolutionized both peace and war. It brought families together: once, when a child or other close relatives left the old country for America, family and friends mourned for someone they would never see again. Today, the grandchild of that immigrant can return again and again across a vast ocean in just half a turn of the clock. But the airplane also helped tear families apart, by making international warfare an effortless reality...
Were Keynes alive today he would surely admire the vigor of the U.S. economy, but he would also notice that some 40% of the global economy is in recession and much of the rest is slowing down: Japan, flat on its back; Southeast Asia, far poorer than it was just two years ago; Brazil, teetering; Germany, burdened by double-digit unemployment and an economic slowdown; and declining prices worldwide for oil and raw materials...
...intuitions about what their words mean--what their words must mean, they think--when they talk about what's going on in their own minds. As he says, "The decisive moment in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent." (Today's neuroscientists fall into these same traps with stunning regularity, now that they have begun trying to think seriously about consciousness. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's work has not been appreciated by many scientists.) But didn't his own antidote to such theories constitute a theory of the mind? That is just...