Word: mooning
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...every star whose light was not blocked out, Pluto got smaller and smaller and smaller. People started getting suspicious in the 1970s and started thinking of it not as the ninth planet but as one of the vagabonds of the solar system. It was smaller than Earth's moon. There are seven moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto. That doesn't bode well if you're trying to hang out in the ranks of planets. (See pictures of the Moon...
...wrong reasons. "Ooooo!" he mocks, "Mr. Wyeth, such a bee-o-o-ooootiful cow!" Says he: "I'm a pure abstractionist in my thought. I'm no more like a realist, such as Eakins or Copley, than I'm like the man in the moon." Wyeth is neither a slave to the faithful detailing of nature, as were Courbet and Manet, nor a scientific observer of light and atmosphere, as were the impressionists. "I want more than half the story," he says. "There are some people who like my work because they see every blade of grass...
...Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon called the shelling of the U.N. compound "an outrage" and demanded a full investigation. The bombardment occurred shortly before the Secretary-General was to meet with Israeli officials to plead for an end to what he called the "unbearable" conflict in Gaza. Diplomatic niceties were not much in evidence, however. The shelling puts a further strain on already tense relations between the U.N. and Israel. Relief officials of the world body in Gaza have strongly criticized the Israeli action for its humanitarian toll, and Israelis are generally suspicious of an organization they accuse of long...
...image he can now think back to whenever a person starts talking about tens of thousands of a particular thing. When numbers get too large, though, that method breaks down. A stack of one trillion $1 bills would reach more than a quarter of the way to the moon - replacing one incomprehensible thought with another doesn't do much good...
Space dust, magnetic storms, solar winds and the Earth's atmosphere all create drag, which slows down the planet. Even the amount of snow covering the polar ice caps adds to the rotational lag. But one of the main obstacles is tidal friction. Because the gravitational pull between the moon and the Earth is not uniform, the tidal force stretches the Earth - core, mantle, crust, oceans and all - producing bulges. The Earth's rotation pushes the tidal bulge slightly ahead of the Earth-moon alignment; the moon's gravity, however, yanks the bulges back to keep them in line. This...