Word: discern
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Nonetheless, an optimist could discern some signs of headway. Marcos noted cryptically that he had heard of a number of "initiatives for peace." U.S. Ambassador-at-Large Averell Harriman took off to brief leaders in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Italy, France, West Germany and Britain on the conference-and there was speculation that he would try to persuade one of the governments along the way, perhaps Djakarta...
...delicate an instrument is the human ear that at certain frequencies it can discern sound that moves the eardrum a distance only one-tenth the size of a hydrogen atom. The close-up roar of a jet engine amounts to one million billion times this threshhold level; this causes actual pain and soon brings on permanent deafness. Sound vibrations are transmitted by the eardrum and ossicle bones to the inner ear, a bony and membranous structure lined with tiny hairs that connect to the brain's auditory nerve. It is these hairs that are damaged most in noise-induced...
...Anyone like me (a 20-year-old student) who does not go to Leslie Caron's house parties could discern at once that your London cover story [April 15] was not about us. And if it was not about us -the city's total population less 200 or so 20th Century-Fox playmates-it was not about London. Cathy McGowan is not "London's favorite dolly," but London's most unloved moron. David Warner's Hamlet is popular not because some jet-set clique has deemed it "In," but because Peter Hall has concentrated...
...produce a usuable image on their film. Their painstaking labor produced tiny spectrograms that contained no color, only shadings of black and white, and were one-third of an inch long and a thousandth of an inch thick. Under the microscope, however, Sandage and Greenstein were barely able to discern strange patterns and spectral lines that had never before been observed in stellar spectra. Genuinely puzzled, Greenstein began to work out an elaborate hypothesis suggesting that the quasars were extremely dense and hot nearby objects, probably the remnants of supernovas containing highly excited or unfamiliar elements...
...Mickey Spillane's 18th book is embossed with his usual delicate imagery ("The sun was thumbing its nose at the night"), characterization ("On some people skin is skin, but on her it was an invitation to dine"), and grammar ("You lay there, kid"; "I thought I could discern shouts"). As always, the forces of law, order and decency prove no match for Spillane's private eye, whose impatience with those virtues amounts to a crusade. The people who lay around reading Spillane books-50 million copies sold to date-must discern the same message...