Word: nickels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Back then, she reports, young men returned from war victorious and well-mannered; the first thing they asked for when they disembarked was milk. Half the earth's races huddled together in picturesque, cheek-by-jowl harmony. The subways, "awful and astonishing in about equal measure," cost only a nickel to ride. Grover Whalen, a flamboyant Irishman with a flower in his lapel, was glad-handing the visiting firemen as the city's official greeter, while saturnine Robert Moses, the master builder, was sundering neighborhoods in the name of progress. The cafe-society swells watered at El Morocco...
...days of the "double nickel" -- as truckers call the widely scorned and narrowly enforced 55-m.p.h. speed limit -- appear to be numbered. First enacted in 1974 in response to the oil shortage, the 55-m.p.h. law was preserved long after the energy drought turned into a glut because the lower speed saves lives as well as fuel...
...Baratol, slowed, curved, turned inside out, merged to a common inward-driving sphere; the spherical detonation wave crossed into the second shell of solid fast Composition B and accelerated; hit the wall of dense uranium tamper and became a shock wave and squeezed, liquefying, moving through; hit the nickel plating of the plutonium core and squeezed, the small sphere shrinking, collapsing into itself, becoming an eyeball...
...above 77 K (-320 degrees F), the point at which nitrogen gas liquefies. Reason: nitrogen is a common gas and costs no more than a tenth as much in liquid form as helium. In fact, says Iowa State University Physicist Douglas Finnemore, liquid nitrogen, priced as low as a nickel a liter, is a "heck of a lot cheaper than beer...
Though the whole petty scenario evokes a kind of low-budget replay of one of the Godfather movies, it is not clear whether Philadelphians are more surprised by the nickel-dime size of the alleged gifts or by what appears to be the extraordinary pervasiveness of the practice. But there is little doubt around the city about the damage to the administration of justice...