Word: evening
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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Reinventing the book? It's not the kind of thing you'd expect to find preoccupying even the most eccentric inventor's mind. Yet Xerox PARC (it stands for Palo Alto Research Center) is the kind of place that prides itself on overturning assumptions. For one, there are no lone nuts tinkering away in silent labs. Teamwork takes priority here--and as history suggests, there's nothing more powerful than the feedback effect of inventors riffing off one another's work...
...PARC has a pretty good track record when it comes to radical new visions, even if its record of holding onto them has been spotty at best. The mouse, the GUI (graphical user interface, like Windows) and arguably the PC itself were all born in this hothouse of Silicon Valley R. and D.; they ended up making a lot of money for Apple and Microsoft. Xerox has got a lot of prestige but little cash out of the PARC, which is why the beleaguered copier giant intimated in October that it would put its crown jewel up for sale...
LOOK WHO'S WALKING After 15 years of research, Honda reports that it has created a robot that walks on two legs in a lifelike, humanoid fashion. Its name is ASIMO, and it can walk forward and backward and even up and down stairs. There are no plans to market ASIMO just yet, but Honda engineers hope that one day ASIMO will help humans with household tasks. Don't worry: at only 4 ft. tall and 95 lbs., ASIMO is less Terminator and more Robby the Robot...
...formed by the world as it is when we are young. My father, for example, was molded by the Great Depression. Although he was a witty, optimistic man, a cold wind blew sometimes from the back of his biography - the knowledge that the world could collapse. Even as he prospered later, the '30s of his boyhood whistled thinly through his mind. The bleak years gave him an ambience of expectation about life and its dangers...
...case, they believe that for almost half of their lives, Clinton has caused the sun to rise and the chickens to lay and the Velcro to stick and the markets to prosper. If you demur by even a twitch (the matter of impeachment, or a pharmaceuticals factory missiled in Khartoum to distract the media from the spectacle of the President receiving oral sex from a very young intern in the Oval Office), they wrinkle their noses and look away, perplexed by the difficulty of knowing what the meaning...