Word: sums
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Alas, unlike Francis Crick, I can't claim to have discovered the secret I'm touting. It was discovered half a century ago by the founders of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. They made a distinction between zero-sum games and non-zero-sum games. In zero-sum games, the fortunes of the players are inversely related. In tennis, in chess, in boxing, one contestant's gain is the other's loss. In non-zero-sum games, one player's gain needn't be bad news for the other...
Indeed, in highly non-zero-sum games the players' interests overlap entirely. In 1970, when three Apollo 13 astronauts were trying to get their stranded spaceship back to Earth, the outcome would be either equally good for all of them or equally bad. (It was equally good...
...vision" onto the U.S., the meeting may have marked the beginnings of a rapprochement between the international body and congressional Republicans. (Following his "warning," the French ambassador gently suggested that Senator Helms consider the fact that the U.N. was in no sense an independent actor, and simply represented the sum of its member states.) International diplomats may have been inclined to bite their tongues through Helms?s speech, because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman effectively controls the U.N. purse strings - the Clinton administration was unable to pay its billion-dollar backlog of unpaid dues to the international body without...
Fortunately for him, America during the post-Civil War boom of the 1870s was famished for faster and more reliable ways of doing business. An improvement Edison made in the stock ticker eventually earned him $40,000, a considerable sum at the time. He used this windfall to set up and staff a shop in Newark, N.J., to manufacture these tickers. But other companies began besieging Edison for technical advice, and in 1876 he moved his operation to Menlo Park and created the world's first industrial-research facility, a humming workplace dedicated to improving or creating new products...
...durable empire; the Italian navigator who sailed the ocean blue in 1492. Joan of Arc, Sultan Mehmet II and Christopher Columbus indisputably made lasting history. But it was one of their 15th century contemporaries who created a revolutionary way to spread not only their names and deeds but the sum total of human knowledge around the globe...