Word: bird
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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...monster cores, these first-year ghettos are designed to separate the concentrator wheat from the dilettante chaff. Especially depressing is the perverse encouragement that Harvard advisers give their impressionable charges: "Take introductory courses!" they say, concealing their ignorance of Gov 10's mediocrity. "Fulfill your requirement and get a bird's-eye view of the subject! Get a feel for what the department is like...
Hitchens has a wonderful eye for zany manifestations of Brit kitsch. In 1890, for example, some idealistic Shakespeareans decided to release in New York City's Central Park every bird mentioned by the bard -- more than 50 species in all -- that was not already native to the region. Instead of filling the city's air with the song of larks and nightingales, the experiment introduced to America the common European starling, a dirty, prolific pest that soon ousted New York's native bluebirds from their nesting places. If there is a moral here, Hitchens refrains from drawing...
Still, most people have an intuitive sense of what it means to be alive. They know life when they see it. That is what is so disturbing about a good computer simulation. Take Craig Reynolds' flocking birds. By specifying a couple of simple rules -- keep a few wings' distance from your neighbors, try to fly as fast as they do -- Reynolds, a computer scientist at Symbolics, Inc., got bird-shaped objects on a screen to exhibit a flocking behavior that is absolutely convincing. The birds are artificial, but the flocking is real...
Least Bell's vireo A bird that nests on the banks of Southern California streams, its listing in 1987 was fiercely opposed by local developers. The Marine base at Camp Pendleton has been designated a critical habitat for the vireo...
Despite mostly good news from Washington, the northern spotted owl is still out on a limb. Last week, only four days after the bird was declared a threatened species, the Bush Administration presented its plan to save the owl, preserve the ancient forest it inhabits in the Pacific Northwest and protect timber-industry jobs all at the same time. In fact, both environmentalists and loggers say, the plan does none of the above...