And yet we find ourselves entering another holiday season of familiar Black Friday headlines about shoppers being trampled in a mad effort to get their mitts on the latest offline deal.

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Unsurprisingly, horse racing-mad Australians have taken the champion thoroughbred to their hearts, with diehard Black Caviar fans even traveling to the other side of the world to cheer her on at Britain's Royal Ascot.

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The current wave of viral panic is of course the most recent chapter in a very long history of epidemics: Ebola in the 1990s, mad cow disease in the 1980s, polio in the 1930s and 1940s, the black death in the 14th century, and so on.

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