Word: mereness
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...Institute went through the college theater experience already or worked on commercial productions before. They had to demonstrate a lot to get into the two-year program, according to Institute Admissions. But they distinguished themselves by showing greater conviction and fresher ideas than the other applicants. Each year a mere 20 to 25 survive...
...comet through a pair of binoculars on Jan. 30 (it was his second comet discovery; the first came just a month earlier) there was no reason to think it would be especially bright. But when professionals calculated the orbit, they realized that Hyakutake would be approaching to within a mere 9.3 million miles of Earth, only 40 times as distant as the moon...
...secretarial work to world-class chess playing. It's that, in the process, they seem to underscore the generally dispiriting drift of scientific inquiry. First Copernicus said we're not the center of the universe. Then Darwin said we're just protozoans with a long list of add-ons--mere "survival machines," as modern Darwinians put it. And machines don't have souls, right? Certainly Deep Blue hasn't mentioned having one. The better these seemingly soulless machines get at doing things people do, the more plausible it seems that we could be soulless machines...
...looked at the faces of the Dunblane children, the endearing, goofy blossoms in the class picture, and superimposed upon them a knowledge of what was to come, then a mere gun-amuck mind or a squalor of pedophiliac-itch-gone-violent seemed an inadequate, trivializing explanation--almost sacrilegious in its asymmetry. Almost everyone, therefore, looked toward that last unopened door at the end of the moral corridor, the one with the word Evil...
...exists, then what happened in the gymnasium at Primary 1 was evil. An eruption of such violence aimed at such targets, at such spotless innocence and hope, cannot be comprehended or diagnosed in language that is less than absolute. "Haywire" won't do. "Psychotic," "maniac" and so on suggest mere dysfunction, or else a morally neutral spasm of the reptilian brain, a bug or two in the limbic system. Nor is there much comfort in thinking that such behavior arises from some Darwinian maladaption. "Man has developed so rapidly," Loren Eiseley wrote, "that he has suffered a major loss...