Word: systems
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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...
...commerce (much of it orchestrated by written contract), culture acquired a kind of disaster insurance. Any valuable meme--the concept of the chariot or of coins--would spread so fast from city to city that it could survive any catastrophes that afflicted its birthplace. The world's data-processing system was getting better at making backup copies...
...invented the reflecting telescope, and his experiments with spectrums established the nature of color and the heterogeneous components of sunlight), in mechanics (his three laws of motion changed the world) and with his understanding of gravity. The last explained the phenomena of heaven and earth in a single mathematical system--or did until Einstein arrived...
...course, not all Y2K troubles are of the man-made variety. Plenty of people believe that 2000 means the end of a lot more than just your operating system, and in The Rapture, writer-director Michael (The Player) Tolkin seriously wonders if maybe they aren't right. Starring Mimi Rogers back when she was better known as Mrs. Tom Cruise and a pre-Mulder David Duchovny, the film takes a long, serious look at the possibility that the Book of Revelation is literally correct. Rogers is great as the born-again mother whose crisis of faith causes...
...their only child. "My sense is that what she and her husband did was the product of a lot of stress," said University of Pittsburgh law professor Paul O?Hanlon, chairman of the disabilities council. "She had spent years fighting to keep Steven at home but felt the system wasn't really backing...