Word: useless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...such a timepiece would be virtually useless today: computers, communications satellites, global-positioning receivers and telephone-switching systems need a precision beyond anything conceivable even 50 years ago. Time technology long since abandoned mechanical devices and even the hum of quartz crystals. For true precision--accuracy to a billionth of a second--you need to travel, virtually at least, to a place like the perfectly circular, well-guarded park that sits in northwest Washington. There, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, a nondescript concrete building houses the nerve center of the U.S. Directorate of Time...
...reason for the resistance is that ASP is still not universally accepted by psychologists as a diagnosis. Some critics dismiss it as a category so broad as to be useless. "It's used for everyone from the person who cheats on his income taxes to Attila the Hun," says Fred Berlin, associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins medical school. "It's a label masquerading as an explanation." Others wonder whether the term is simply a catchall psychological description for people who are habitual criminals. Yet proponents argue that the disorder's core ingredients--a lifelong pattern of behavior...
...about writing an opera on the poet Byron and his mistress Teresa; a longing for a former, more heroic self; anger and outrage. But the novel traces the process whereby he is able to find his own way of expiating his abuse of power and his guilt at being useless to his daughter and thereby is able to confront reality...
...other major issue of the night concerned the council's image. Council member Daniel E. Fernandez '03 asked the presidential candidates how they would combat the pervasive sentiment that the council was useless...
...didn't exist before I was born. I try not to think about how I won't exist after I die. And how that won't change no matter what I do while I'm alive. Oftentimes, a lot of the passions and endeavors of others seem useless to me. Maybe that's why I'm so sympathetic to consultants and investments bankers--they're no more useless than anybody else. I guess if I wanted to go all out with this particular "-ism," I'd spend all my time trying to comprehend "the void" and despairing at the futility...