Word: cosmically
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...Cosmic rays were once the province of science fiction, feared only by space travelers rocketing to unknown worlds. Here on earth the danger posed by streams of subatomic particles from the sun and stars was considered insignificant. Now that assurance has been shaken, at least for those who spend much of their lives flying at high altitudes. Last week the Department of Transportation reported that radiation penetrating the thin metal skins of jetliners can pose a hazard for passengers and crews...
...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 accept 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...
...atop Mount Erebus to learn what kinds of gases and particles Antarctica's largest volcano emits. At Williams Field, a runway on the Ross Ice Shelf, a multidisciplinary team prepared to launch a huge helium balloon. Its purpose: to follow circumpolar winds around the entire continent, gathering data on cosmic rays and solar flares and testing the behavior of high-density computer chips in the intense radiation of the upper atmosphere. And deep in the interior, glaciologists at the Soviets' Vostok Base dug out ice samples that carry clues to the planet's atmosphere in layers laid down...
Former Secretary of Defense Harold Brown, a world-class thinker about the unthinkable and nobody's softy, acknowledged back in the 1970s that a Soviet decision to attack American missiles would be a "cosmic roll of the dice." Yet Soviets play chess; they do not shoot craps. Stalin advanced several black pawns and a knight against one of white's most vulnerable squares, West Berlin, in 1948. Nikita Khrushchev tried a similar gambit in 1961, and he was downright reckless over Cuba in 1962. The stupidity as well as the failure of that move contributed to his downfall...