Word: shaped
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Dates: during 1990-1990
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Rabbit at Rest by John Updike. Rumors of his death have been greatly exaggerated; Harold C. ("Rabbit") Angstrom is in awful shape at the end of this novel, the victim of piggy habits and a massive coronary, but Updike has left himself free to have a second opinion. If Rabbit really is finished, in this fourth book, then so too is a luminous, encyclopedic saga of postwar America...
...Through a Looking Glass If you get the wrong prescription at the local vision center, you can just go back and have it changed. Not so for NASA, whose incorrect prescription is spinning around the earth in the Hubble Space Telescope. Because a mirror was ground to the wrong shape, the space agency was saddled with a $1.5 billion instrument that performs far below expectations...
...long-overdue merit system will probably take shape in New Kuwait. But many of those who supported such a move when it was only a theory may recoil when faced with it in reality. Many will also be upset by a shrinkage in the welfare state's blanket coverage. Modest steps were already in place before August. Budgetary constraints alone will justify further cutbacks -- and many would-be recipients will be furious...
...always the physical part of homelessness that is hard: home and homelessness are also ideas, emotions, metaphysical states. Home is all the civilization that a child knows. Home is one of nature's primal forms, and if it does not take shape properly around the child, then his mind will be at least a little homeless all its life...
...SimEarth, as in the real world, the great natural processes that shape the environment -- volcanoes, erosion, continental drift -- interact with one another. Climate, vegetation and geology are represented as interrelated systems, each with controls that can be adjusted. Animals multiplying too fast? Just crank down the reproduction dial. Tired of waiting for evolution to work its wonders? Just speed up the mutation rate. Earth getting too hot for its own good? Just turn off the greenhouse effect...