Word: cosmically
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...third suggestion, the Overpowering Assumption, I think, is best. But not for the reasons he suggests--that the assumption is so cosmic that it might be accepted. It is rarely "accepted"; we aren't here to accepted or reject, we're here to be amused. The more dazzling, personal, unorthodox, paradoxic your assumptions (paradoxes are not equivocations), the more interesting an essay it is likely to be. (If you have a chance to confer with the assistant in advance, of course--and we all like to be called "assistants," not "graders"--you may be able to ferret...
THERE is a third method of dealing with examination questions--that is by the use of the overpowering assumption, an assumption so cosmic that it is sometimes accepted. For example, we wrote that it was pretty obvious that the vague generality was the key device in any discussion of examination writing. Why is it obvious? As a matter of fact it isn't obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point from which to start. That is an example of an unwarranted assumption...
Before you become alarmed, however, you should understand that this was a close encounter only in a relative sense. At its closest, the asteroid was about 450,000 miles away, roughly twice the distance between the earth and the moon. Still, in cosmic terms it was virtually a direct hit. No asteroid has been sighted so near since 1937, when Hermes, a minor planet nearly half a mile in diameter, passed by at about the same distance...
Undergraduates and Cambridge public school children prepare for CityStep's performance of "A Cosmic Commotion" this weekend at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School...
Even if technical problems ground the shuttle program again, there will still be some big news from space. In July, for example, NASA will use a Delta rocket to launch the Cosmic Background Explorer, a satellite that will study the background microwave radiation that emanates from every part of the cosmos. These microwaves are thought by astrophysicists to be the faint afterglow of the Big Bang explosion, which started the universe, and they pose a riddle. The glow is uniform in all directions to within 1 part in 10,000, implying that the Big Bang was a perfectly uniform explosion...