Word: make
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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What are we to make of all this in practical terms, philosophical terms, even spiritual terms? How to comprehend an age in which, suddenly, we find ourselves enmeshed in a huge information-processing system, one that seems almost to have a life of its own and to be leading us headlong into a future that we can't clearly see yet can't really avoid...
Perhaps that's because the universalist desire to reform all culture, make everyone see in a new way, is dead. What's true of literature is true of all the arts now: there are readers of J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, there are Michael Crichton's readers, and the twain don't meet. Except, possibly, theoretically in cyberspace. F. Scott Fitzgerald had it right: "Culture follows money." And the money--perhaps even the creative zeal--is now in the new media. A radically reshaped culture is beginning to be created there. We can already begin to see what the generation born...
...contemporaries advise us, "great in body...but not ungainly." He had a harsh voice, but his speech was always appropriate. His chroniclers lauded his ability to "appraise the true significance of events" and make good "the fickle promises of fortune." They also remarked that he was "too relentless to care though all might hate him." William the Conqueror was a man--or, more important, a monarch...
When Gutenberg entered it, printing was a slow and laborious business. Each new page required the creation of a new printing form, usually an incised block of wood. He began looking for ways to make metal casts of the individual letters of the alphabet. The advantages of such a method were obvious, or must have been to Gutenberg. Equipped with a sufficient supply of metal letters, a printer could use and reuse them in any order required, running off not just handbills and brief documents but a theoretically infinite number of individual pages. There were technical obstacles to overcome, including...
...called the inventor of the light bulb. In truth, he and his co-workers accomplished far more than that. In 1879 they created an incandescent lamp with a carbonized filament that would burn for 40 hours, but a working laboratory model was only the first step. How could they make this device illuminate the world? For this they would need a host of devices, including generators, motors, junction boxes, safety fuses and underground conductors, many of which did not exist. Amazingly, only three years later Edison opened the first commercial electric station on Pearl Street in lower Manhattan; it served...