Word: instruments
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Storm-chasing scientists do have a genius for coming up with some pretty wild ideas, however. The University of Oklahoma's Howard Bluestein really did develop an instrument akin to the device called Dorothy in Twister. Bluestein, who was one of the models for meteorologist Bill Harding (Bill Paxton) in the movie, named his device the Totable Tornado Observatory, TOTO for short, and tried to intercept an oncoming funnel. TOTO was a bit unwieldy (it tipped the scales at 400 lbs.), so researchers switched to the more sprightly Turtles, which are cheaper to build and more easily deployed...
Blanc claims that the purpose of attending a university is "to learn to hone and defend our opinions." We were under the impression that our education was an instrument to help us change the world and change does not always come through debate. In the past, people have been murdered, maimed and forced to sacrifice for changes that others were only content to debate and write about, for instance the civil rights movement and last week's union protest of Harvard's hiring practices. Well-intentioned action is the flip side of well-intentioned thought. One without the other...
...distribution than on opportunities for consensus-building. With this model of reform in mind, reformers could attack distortions like thirty-second attack ads and "push-polling" through which the right does much of its "dirty work." And they would not merely be looking at campaign finance reform as an instrument to achieve one particular political program, but as an end in itself for assuring the legitimacy of all governmental decisions...
...excellence. That is what Harvard's tradition, properly understood, would endorse. But he simply does not discuss diversity as usually seen on the agenda of multiculturalism. He does not appreciate, or fears to say, that it takes an effort, indeed a battle, to recapture and restore diversity as an instrument of excellence. So he leaves it unclear whether Harvard's purpose is to educate blacks or represent them proportionately and improve their self-esteem. The result is not only to confirm the ascendancy of self-esteem but also to give it the legitimacy of seeming excellence...
DURING A PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, WHEN THE AIR is thick with pieties about American virtue and the maintenance thereof, it is useful to be reminded that America's private life has always been a lot more entertaining than its public life. The instrument of our deliverance from this year's cant and hypocrisy is a deadpan, dead-on movie called Flirting with Disaster. In it an earnest young fellow named Mel Coplin (Ben Stiller), who has been raised by adoptive parents, sets out to find his birth parents. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to do, since the former are, respectively...