Word: drift
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Placid Space. The best way to think of space as a navigable medium is to imagine the frictionless surface of a calm, glassy pond. Small objects drift across it easily, propelled by feeble forces. Scattered at wide intervals over the mirror surfaces are deep, sucking whirlpools. If a floating leaf drifts close to one of them, it plunges down to the bottom. A self-powered object, say a water insect, that gets sucked into a whirlpool has a terrible time battling back to the surface...
...tougher. Starting from the earth's surface, a ship would need 36,800 m.p.h. Soaring past Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, it would reach the outer limits of the solar system with almost no speed left. Then, like a chip on a glassy lake, it could drift for millions of years before it approached the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 25 trillion miles away from the sun. Man's spaceships can probably reach interstellar escape velocity in a generation, but there will be little profit in interstellar voyages. They will take too long. The barrier...
Thrift v. Drift. Capitol Hill Democrats saw quickly that if they started a spending spree they would be opening themselves up to the charge that they had thrown the budget out of kilter. "Dishonest" and "political," cried Tennessee's Senator Estes Kefauver (see PEOPLE). Pennsylvania's Fair-Dealing Senator Joseph Clark accused Administration leaders of the decade's most difficult athletic feat: "hiding their heads in the sand and running away from the facts." Various other Democrats labeled the budget figures "unrealistic," "dangerous," "phony," "disingenuous," "wishful thinking" and "a bookkeeping exercise...
...drift of both opinion and practice in the 20th century is indeed toward the centralized welfare state, but moving with the drift is not necessarily the fitting role for a nation's leaders. And continued deficit financing, with its burdensome interest charges and its push toward inflation, can only weaken the fiscal underpinnings of an economic system that has done better by more people than any planned economy ever dreamed...
Clouds of girls drift across the stage. Girls soft and bright, girls fast and funny, girls with dreamy looks and pouty looks, girls with languid smiles and impudent grins, girls with unruly bangs and neat velvety chignons, girls with eyes slanted a little and girls with eyes slanted a lot. Amid all the girls, one stands out in twilight softness. When she first appears, her slow, sloe eyes look down, ever so shy. Then she bounces her head in a pert little Chinese kowtow and the hoarse, sweet husk of her voice sounds hauntingly soft. "Ten thousand benedictions...