Word: dampness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
From the moment the Pep rally was rained off Thursday night, and the tailgate moved from the flooded Ohiri Field to a crowded parking lot, the signs were clear that this year’s party was going to be a damp squib. Alas, Saturday fulfilled expectations. While Harvard and Yale students made the best of the weak hand they were dealt and should be applauded for their efforts, neither the tight rules nor their shoddy implementation proved conducive to the kind of fun and successful tailgate experienced in years past...
...rhetoric of success." "Believing that your value as a human being is measured by your independence and separation from others is the great lie of the market-driven world," he writes. As a professional daydreamer, Gurr's writing drifts off in wicked thought: "On the early trains, slightly damp hair and recently applied make-up give you access to bodies so lately asleep or naked that it can induce a sensation like the swoon of a long kiss...
...powerful political tools. Obama's candor is reminiscent of John McCain, who once said of his first marriage, "People wouldn't think so highly of me if they knew more about that." Obama's empathy is reminiscent of Bill Clinton, although the Senator's compassion tends to be less damp than Clinton's: it's more about understanding your argument than feeling your pain. Both those qualities have been integral to Obama's charm from the start. His Harvard Law School classmate Michael Froman told me Obama was elected president of the Law Review, the first African American to hold...
...people to spend time for pleasure in front of a computer screen. "Your problem will be solved actuarially," a computer-sciences professor assured a group of Web pioneers, and sure enough, it was. Now the problem is to get people under 50 or so to pick up a newspaper. Damp or encased in plastic bags, or both, and planted in the bushes outside where it's cold, full of news that is cold too because it has been sitting around for hours, the home-delivered newspaper is an archaic object. Who needs it? You can sit down at your laptop...
...wetlands study darkened the picture further. Marshes in Alaska and northern Canada are natural sinks for mercury, which chemically adheres to damp peat and readily converts to the methyl form. That is not a problem as long as the mercury stays put. But increasingly frequent droughts--a likely consequence of global warming--have led to increasingly frequent wildfires, causing wetlands to release centuries' worth of collected mercury in one toxic breath. "There's mercury that's been accumulating since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution," says ecosystems ecologist Merritt Turetsky of Michigan State University, who has been studying the problem...