Word: compassable
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...Cheshire Cat's, perhaps the most famous smile in the world is that on Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa Gioconda, which hangs in the Louvre in Paris. Dr. Maurice Goldblatt, Chicago art connoisseur, believes her expression is a tremendous trick achieved with a compass, the ends of the lips being turned up in arcs which, if extended, would precisely meet the corners of the eyes...
...installed the first Foucault pendulum in Paris's Pantheon in 1851. That one, since dismantled, was 200 feet long. Foucault's idea was to prove the rotation of Earth on its axis. A pendulum which is swinging freely in space keeps to the same line, whereas compass directions beneath the pendulum are constantly changing as the earth rotates. This apparent shift was duly performed by the pendulum of Jean Bernard Leon Foucault. Such demonstrations always make a great impression on students of elementary physics...
...Research will take up marine research where Carnegie Institute's Carnegie left off in 1929, when she blew up in Apia Harbor, Samoa. Threefold purpose of the Research will be to chart unsounded depths, to study atmospheric electricity, to find out what makes the North Pole attractive to compass needles. A 20th-century anachronism, the Research is a wooden sailing vessel, nonmagnetic in every possible detail. Her hull is of teak; bolts, girders and anchor chain of bronze; rigging will be of nonmagnetic alloys. If her sailors wish, as all good sailormen do, to carry jack-knives, the knives...
...corner of the big shed. It's bottom was rough and brown but a little work would fix it up, he thought--as he climbed over the side and stepped quietly into the cockpit. He put his hand on the tiller and moved it slowly back and forth. The compass read 247 degrees--west-south-west--the very direction he had followed coming home down the coast last summer...
...held the boat right on the course, never budging a degree, even with the swell that was beginning to rise. Night was falling, so he switched on the compass light. He thought of the skipper lying in his bunk below, staring up at his compass. He certainly couldn't growl about the course this time. An even breeze was blowing the number one jib-topsail gracefully to leeward while the moon made diagonal shadows on the curved sails...