Word: cosmically
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...column punch cards, COBOL programmers used just six digits to render the day's date: two for the day, two for the month, two for the year. It was the middle of the century, and nobody cared much about what would happen at the next click of the cosmic odometer. But today the world runs on computers, and older machines run on jury-rigged versions of COBOL that may well crash or go senile when they hit a double-zero date. So the finger of blame for the approaching crisis should point at Hopper and her COBOL cohorts, right...
...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 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 over-powering 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 wasn't obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point from which to start. That is an example of an unwarranted assumption...
...long wait for Japan's first Mars mission, but timing is everything in space. "Flying from any cosmic point A to any cosmic point B is like leading ducks when you're hunting," says TIME senior writer Jeffrey Kluger, coauthor of the book "Apollo 13." "You can't aim for where a planet is, you have to aim for where it's going to be." With a Martian year lasting roughly two of our years, missing the rendezvous means you have a while to wait before the motion of the two bodies coincides again. "If an error of one degree...
...London Times best seller earlier this year and has been climbing several U.S. lists since being published here last month. Thomas More is not hagiography. Yet here is the paradox: it has the power of a second, secular canonization, establishing More, sans halo, as a martyr for a lost cosmic connectedness, the exemplar of a once commonplace mysticism that Ackroyd has evoked and mourned in recent work...