Generations

Composers, look to your laurels: A mere computer program can transform a racket of clangs, hums and beeps into a pleasing melody, and all humans have to do is offer feedback with the click of a mouse. The program, by a British bioinformatics expert whose day job involves tackling biomedical problems, employs the same principles of natural selection that guide the evolution of living beings over many generations. The software - dubbed DarwinTunes, of course - creates 8-second collections of notes and puts them through the evolutionary wringer.

Bill Diffendale's grandparents used to come here at the turn of the century, when the only access to Breezy Point was via boat and when most visitors pitched tents in the sand. Diffendale's father met his mother here in the 1950s. Years later, Diffendale met his wife here, and like earlier generations, he embraced the community of narrow lanes and bungalows painted the colors of the sea: green, blue and stormy gray. His neighbor Mary Bosch met her husband here. Scott Winik's wife came here as an infant.

Looming ahead in a likely fall campaign between President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is the first electoral collision between the two generations that have dominated American life for the last 45 years. At age 67, Bush is, in all probability, the last President who will be drawn from the "GI generation" that fought in World War II and manned the barricades of the Cold War.

If Buddhism is ever to gain a national voice on social and ethical issues, it will have to look to U.S.-born converts and a younger generation of Asian immigrants, say leaders of a movement for an American version of the 2,500-year-old religion. "There is a generation gap," said the Venerable Havanpola Ratanasara of Los Angeles, who was reelected executive president of the American Buddhist Congress at the group's recent national convention in Koreatown.

There they go again. The arguments between America's baby boomers and their parents that rang across kitchen tables through the 1960s and 1970s have unexpectedly resurfaced in the presidential race between President Clinton, the first baby boomer in the Oval Office, and Bob Dole, a man old enough to be the president's father.

A surprisingly candid new Army study concludes that captains are leaving the service in droves mainly because of a generation gap between baby boomer generals and younger junior officers. The Army has grown alarmed in recent months because so many captains are leaving that it fears it might have trouble filling leadership positions within a few years. In 1989, just as the Cold War was ending, 6.7% of Army captains left voluntarily. In 1999, that number climbed to 10.6%.

Have you ever played the White Elephant game? Here's how it goes: The day after Christmas, gather that coffee mug warmer you got from your grandma, the turquoise sweater your mom sent you and those country music CDs from your Uncle Joe, wrap them all up again, and get together with a few friends. Roll a pair of dice to see who gets what.

Twenty-five years after Woodstock, the festival's most evocative image remains a young couple photographed while huddled tenderly in a blanket. The emerging symbol of Woodstock '94 is a starker one: the Mud People. Eager to assert their individuality in an ocean of anonymous concert-goers, about 200 fans early in the weekend began frolicking in cold, gooey mud.

You don't get much more mainstream than Muhammed Abdul Munim. After emigrating from Bangladesh as a boy, he earned a master's degree in management and now gets up at 6 a.m. to work as a currency trader for JP Morgan. Yet even Munim, 24, gets hot under his dress-white collar about what he sees as the failure of an older generation of Muslims to stop mistreatment of co-religionists around the world. And, he warns, the elders will continue to get an earful from the emerging young generation.

Arjun, a college senior with a wispy beard and forthright manner, breaks the rules just about every time he walks onto campus. He doesn't have to say a thing, or act out in class, or pick a fight. He only has to do what comes naturally to him every morning: Pull on a pair of jeans. That's enough to make him a habitual scofflaw here at Anna University, whose administrators have ordered students to toss out the T-shirts and jettison the jeans, at least on campus.