Word: discerningly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...direct challenge, making him doubt his own usefulness and weakening his will to live. Seated in his study and spreading jam made from turnips on bread made from substances whose origins he dares not guess, Jakob watches night descend and reminisces about a life spent in the struggle to discern the laws underlying the physical world...
Sabom could discern no religious or other differences between patients who had NDEs and those who did not. The two groups contained roughly equal numbers of atheists and frequent churchgoers, college grads and high school dropouts. Even prior awareness of the existence of near death experiences did not predispose patients to have them. Nor did race, occupation or sex, though, curiously, women who had NDEs were more likely to recall seeing their loved ones...
...seems creaky, partly because he was a pioneer. Modern sci-fi doomsdayers would never predict the end of the world from an excess of radio waves, or have radial-engine Curtiss Condor transports symbolize the overreach of the air age. Even so, White was always among the first to discern the now familiar signs and portents: ecological disturbances, the decline of various species, the discovery that last year's medical boons may lead to tomorrow's degenerative diseases, the horrors of a mindless but ubiquitous visual press, and the debilitating result of trying to achieve salable "smoothness...
Jake's mother Helen (Frances Sternhagen) is a tyrant of the hearth. She has X-ray eyes, but she can discern no conceivable virtue in anyone who disputes her dictums about food, home furnishings and the proper cowing of a child. She has a deep-freeze heart, and Jake had been stored there until he could be thawed out by externally approved success at the newspaper. For Jake's mother and father, the Times is the Talmud...
...sensitive ears are precisely tuned to discern the scrabble of paws beneath the ground. It even has its own self-cleaning service: cat saliva may contain a deodorizing detergent-like substance. Asleep, a cat may resemble a throw pillow or a Kliban-style meatloaf, but, awake and hungry, the average feline, one of the most highly evolved predators in the natural world, is capable of dispatching a dozen mice at a brief sitting. Alarmingly, it tends to dawdle before administering the coup de grâce. Behavioralists believe this happens because cats are programmed by a primitive, vestigial stalking mechanism...