Word: numbers
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...live in a country, and increasingly a world, where the large preoccupations of earlier generations have been resolved. We need no longer worry about subsistence, about food and shelter. For centuries philosophers have contemplated just this moment and wondered what would come next. For a very large number of people, it appears the answer is, eBay comes next...
...always a stretch, are now totally outmoded. Those who study the issue say there are probably 1 million to 1.7 million home schoolers in the U.S. (more than 1% of school-age children). Whatever the precise figure, it has jumped since Columbine (North Carolina found this fall that its number of registered home schools had shot up 22% to 16,022 since April...
...Africa's survival since slavery. Left unchecked, it will decimate the continent. According to the United Nations, 23.3 million Africans are infected by the AIDS virus, more than twice as many as in the rest of the world combined. Nearly 14 million Africans have died from the disease. The number of African children left orphaned by AIDS will soar to 13 million by 2001, a catastrophic burden in poor nations that for the most part lack even a semblance of Western-style social-welfare agencies. Millions will die sooner than they have to because they cannot afford expensive drug therapy...
Does that mean you could go back, kill your own grandfather and keep yourself from being born--a seeming absurdity? Maybe not, say some physicists. In one interpretation of quantum physics, the world splits at each moment into an infinite number of universes that proceed in parallel; if you killed your grandfather, it might be in an alternate universe, so it would have no effect on the universe you inhabit...
Kids ages 3 to 6 love the mystery and surprise of Christmas, but at about age 7, they begin to knock holes in the Santa scenario. Maybe they've heard something from an older child, or they've started doing the math themselves, calculating the number of chimneys worldwide versus the maximum speed of a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer. You know your kid is a doubter if he comes in holding a globe and a calculator and wearing an expression that says, "We have to talk...