Word: explaining
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That Georgia thigh-slapper provides the President with a metaphor to explain the trouble he has faced for almost a year. When he took office, his desk was piled high with work undone, needs neglected, problems postponed. Such urgent tasks as creating an energy policy, stopping the drain of Social Security funds and reforming the tax and welfare systems had been ignored or put off, largely because nobody had solutions that seemed workable or politically feasible. Like a quarterback who prefers the long bomb to the drudgery of three yards and a cloud of dust, the President threw...
...month passed. Silence. Then came a computer printout from HEW, reminding Sears to return the form and once more threatening a cutoff of funds. Beckwith again wrote to explain why he had not filled out the form. On Dec. 2, a HEW secretary phoned him to repeat the warning. Her call was followed by one from a HEW attorney, who expressed regret at "the sequence of events" but told Beckwith that HEW would nevertheless cite his school for failure to complete the form...
...Stillman approached. I don't know if he produced one of his in finitesimal spittles. Let us say he cleared his throat. 'Everybody is not here,' he said." Such stories have been unavailable since the days of A.J. Liebling's The Sweet Science. They explain why plimping is restricted to one man. - John Skow
Despite their basic understanding of the phenomenon, scientists have been at a loss to explain how droplets within the cloud-or any other mechanism-can generate the tremendous potential (about 100 million volts) necessary to produce lightning or why the bolt follows so jagged a path. The answers may well lie in the action of cosmic rays, which are actually protons or other atomic particles that continuously plunge toward the earth from outer space...
...Follin and his colleagues, Ernest Grey and Kwang Yu, explain it, cosmic rays act like cue balls in a kind of nuclear billiard game. When they strike and shatter atoms in the upper atmosphere, they produce a shower of subatomic bits of matter moving at great speed. When these so-called "secondary cosmic rays" collide with atoms in a cloud, they knock electrons from them. Accelerated in the cloud's electric field, these electrons avalanche toward the bottom of the cloud and pile up there...