Word: ironical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Junior high was a pain in the ass. They had me doing solid geometry, or algebra, and third-year Latin was not pleasurable. See, I had no father. My father died when I was young so I had no iron discipline as a teenager, and when I became a teenager, my mother became a pushover...
House and Senate conferees will meet later this week to try to iron out differences between two bills that affect students who go bankrupt to avoid paying back their student loans...
Politics and nature combined to batter Iran cruelly last week. In a mountainous farm region in eastern Iran, the strongest earthquake recorded anywhere in 1978 reduced villages to what one survivor called "a mound of rubble, bent iron beams and dirt." At least 9,000 were feared dead in the quake, which measured 7.7 on the Richter scale and was centered near the town of Tabas...
Schmidt was led to his discovery by Haya elders, who showed him a "shrine tree" that they said marked the site of ancient iron smelters long worked by their people. Because the Haya can now buy inexpensive, European-made steel tools and make more money raising coffee and other crops, they stopped producing their own steel some 50 years ago. Thus the only Haya who could recall details of the steelmaking process were very old, and as Schmidt and Avery write, this knowledge was "threatened every day by the passage of time, by death and by age-related infirmities occurring...
...scientists and working entirely from memory, the Haya constructed a traditional furnace. It was 1.6 meters (5 ft.) high, cone-shaped, made of slag and mud and built over a pit packed with partially burned swamp grass; these charred reeds provided the carbon that combined with the molten iron ore to produce steel. Eight ceramic blowpipes, or tuyeèo a goatskin bellows outside. Using these pipes to force preheated air into the furnace, which was fueled by charcoal, the Haya were able to achieve temperatures higher than 1800° C (3275° F.), high enough to produce their carbon...