Word: compasses
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When John McCain is looking for luck--taking the stage for a debate or bracing himself for Tuesday's must-win G.O.P. primary vote in New Hampshire--he likes to stuff his pockets full of talismans--the lucky compass one of his supporters gave him, the lucky pen, the lucky feather. McCain puts on his lucky shoes--L.L. Bean stompers with thick black lugs--and he's glad to see his aides wearing their lucky ties. He's as superstitious as a 10-year...
Slow in learning to talk as a child, expelled by one headmaster and proclaimed by another unlikely to amount to anything, Einstein has become the patron saint of distracted schoolkids. But even at age five, he later recalled, he was puzzling over a toy compass and the mysteries of nature's forces...
...easygoing engineer father, an unsuccessful entrepreneur in the emerging electrochemical industry, had less influence, though it was he who gave Einstein the celebrated toy compass that inspired his first "thought experiment": what, the five-year-old wondered, made the needle always point north...
...found a middle ground between the unbridled laissez-faire of the '20s and the brutal dictatorships of the '30s. His conviction that a democratic government had a responsibility to help Americans in distress--not as a matter of charity but as a matter of social duty--provided a moral compass to guide both his words and his actions. Believing there had never been a time other than the Civil War when democratic institutions had been in such jeopardy, Roosevelt fashioned a New Deal, which fundamentally altered the relationship of the government to its people, rearranged the balance of power between...
...mariner's compass was used by the Chinese well before 1050, the year the instrument made its appearance in European ships in Mediterranean waters...