Word: boulderer
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...geographers call Australia a continent," he says, "and some call it a very big island. There is no scientific definition." It is human nature to put things into categories, but nature rarely cooperates. What, precisely, is the dividing line between a hill and a mountain? A rock and a boulder? A stream and a river...
...another idea, favored by Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., would open the door even wider. By his definition, any object massive enough for gravity to squeeze into a spherical shape is a planet--unless the object orbits a bigger planet, of course. Otherwise, dozens of moons would have to be reclassified as planets. "Defining planets by size is purely arbitrary," agrees Marsden, who likes Stern's idea. "The Pluto-crats want to cut things off there, but it's absurd to say that an object 2,000 km across is a planet...
...more mundane relics such as autograph books, railroad timetables or sets of love letters. Why? They do so for many reasons, say experts, not the least of which is living history. "People are intrigued by the past," says Jaben Broach, owner of CollecTons, an eBay drop-off shop in Boulder, Colo. "And often letters, diaries or ledgers reveal a time and place much better than any history book." Professional auctioneer G.G. (Gwen Glass) Carbone, author of How to Make a Fortune with Other People's Junk, sold four Civil War diaries--not written by anyone famous...
...levees, but some experts in the field see that as a losing proposition in the long term. "Americans' disposition to buy a technological fix is why disasters are getting larger and larger," says Dennis Mileti, director emeritus of the natural-hazards center at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Although everything we do helps reduce losses, when a big one comes that exceeds what our technology was designed for, the damage is [catastrophic]. It ends up putting more people at greater risk in Miami, San Francisco, all the cities we love...
Whatever happened, the neglect of the levees was part of a larger trend after 9/11. "We put natural hazards on the back burner," says Dennis Mileti, a veteran disaster researcher who for 10 years ran the Natural Hazards Center at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "We diverted our attention to terrorism. I'm not saying that shift was bad. We had no plans in place for terrorism. But the laws of nature were not repealed on Sept...