Word: boundless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Neumann was hired, along with Albert Einstein, by the newly formed Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., a nonprofit research institute set up by the Bamberger family with profits from their department stores. The I.A.S. proved to be the perfect intellectual playground for Von Neumann's boundless genius. He threw himself with enthusiasm into one intractable problem after another, ranging from the abstract mathematics of quantum mechanics to the practical problems of weather prediction, hydrology and the patterns of artillery fire...
...until decades later, in the age of genetic engineering, would the Promethean power unleashed that day become vivid. But from the beginning, the Watson and Crick story had traces of hubris. As told in Watson's classic memoir, The Double Helix, it was a tale of boundless ambition, impatience with authority and disdain, if not contempt, for received opinion. ("A goodly number of scientists," Watson explained, "are not only narrow-minded and dull but also just stupid.") Yet the Watson and Crick story is also one of sublime harmony, an example, as a colleague put it, of "that marvelous resonance...
...smart growth" Democrat who was elected last year. Barnes has proposed a regional transportation authority that can block local plans for the new roads that encourage development. But dumb growth is not confined to Atlanta. Half a century after America loaded the car and fled to the suburbs, these boundless, slapdash places are making people want to flee once more. "All of a sudden, they're playing leapfrog with a bulldozer," says Al Gore, who wants to be the antisprawl candidate...
...everyone agreed, one of the planet's best dinner companions. At once sardonic and curiously boyish, he was both autodidact and polymath--his curiosity and his information equally boundless. To a film critic he might recommend some recondite movie that he had caught but that the latter had carelessly missed. To a filmmaker desperately behind schedule, he might offer to share his state-of-the-art editing suite to speed things up. To a harried studio executive, he might provide an evening of baseball nostalgia, centered on the New York Yankees, beloved since Kubrick's Bronx boyhood. Maybe Warren Beatty...
...head-for-the-hills survivalism that speaks nicely to the enduring American fascination with ingenuity and self-reliance. And as it has for decades, the prospect of apocalypse now also offers the promise of escape to millions of people alienated from a civilization of intimidating global corporations, boundless personal gratification and unnerving manipulations of nature, like cloning...