If you're as old as I am, you probably remember quite a few "predictions" about the year 2000. In the 1990s, it was all about how the computers were going to go haywire and plunge us into an informationless dark age causing people to stock up for an apocalypse scenario. I bet they felt a bit sheepish. Cartoons in the midcentury loved showing the 2000s as full of hovercars and bubble helmets when space exploration became a reality. But predictions about the year 2000 date back even farther, and the predictions, by today's standards, seem adorably quaint. They're also educational,...