Word: explainers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2000
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...find that most eggs end with a list of programmers who have found themselves otherwise uncredited. Their lack of official recognition could explain why some eggs take satirical aim at management. Some versions of AOL, for example, have been implanted with Scott's Winkie, a winking face that offers mock insider gossip, such as a forthcoming "big announcement involving Steve Case, the CIA and the former Soviet Republic of Georgia." Microsoft's Wine Guide--now discontinued, alas--contains pictures of a shirtless Bill Gates (real snaps taken at a company picnic) that slide by to the strains of Pretty Woman...
...every other way, though, Get Happy is an exemplary attempt to answer the unanswerable question: Why could she never plug the jagged hole in her heart? Much of her appeal lies in our inability to explain away her bottomless neediness. "You can write down everything Lana Turner ever thought and felt and meant, and then put the pencil down," claimed Garland amour Joe Mankiewicz (the director and screenwriter of All About Eve). "That's it, a closed book. But I don't think anybody's going to close the book on Judy Garland." Not even Gerald Clarke--but he comes...
...Mohammad is blessed by this emotional acuity, he is also cursed by it--achingly aware, as any disabled child must be, of the things everyone else takes for granted but which he is forbidden. In the film's most passionate moment, this insightful boy cries out to God to explain why he is sightless. But the lad has even sterner tests in store...
...question, and scientists disagree about how to answer it. Some say that subjective experience is unobservable and not a proper topic for science. Some say that once we can distinguish conscious brain processes from unconscious ones and show how they interact to cause behavior, there is nothing left to explain, and that people who are looking for some extra ingredient are just confused. Some concede that sentience is still a mystery but expect that an unborn genius will someday explain it to us. Still others suspect that the brain did not evolve to grasp the answer, any more than...
...imposes limits on its own power. Relativity theory prohibits faster-than-light travel or communication. Quantum mechanics and chaos theory constrain our predictive abilities. Science's limits are glaringly obvious in particle physics, which, as Steven Weinberg describes [in the Visions issue], seeks a "theory of everything" that will explain the origin of matter, energy and even space and time. The leading theory postulates that reality arises from infinitesimal "strings" wriggling in a hyperspace of 10 (or more) dimensions. Unfortunately, these hypothetical strings are so small that it would take a particle accelerator the size of the Milky...