Word: objective
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Critics counter that there must be other, less intrusive ways to make intersections safer, such as lengthening the yellow light or adding turn lanes. "I object to this fixation we have with cameras and electronically gathered information," says Barr. "It places too much confidence in technology." That confidence, as Washington residents have learned, can be misplaced. The city removed one camera last May that had generated more than 19,000 tickets at a particularly confusing intersection. In San Diego, faulty sensors made drivers appear to be going faster than they really were. The city suspended the system in July, pending...
...line against some other lines behind it and at an angle to it, and the crossings move and optically blur in a fascinating way that makes use of small, slow changes, tiny inflections. It's a kind of kinetic art, though one in which the viewer moves but the object (unlike, say, the vanes and wires of a Calder) does...
...Middle East can be repaired, disputes over how to address slavery and colonialism in the conference declaration may become academic. That would be unfortunate; it would also derail noble efforts to address such traditionally neglected causes as the plight of India's "untouchables" or Europe's gypsies. And the object lesson here may be that although the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is of limited strategic importance outside of the Middle East, when left to fester it has a nasty habit of breaking out of those strategic boundaries...
...studies of the moon's formation. That event was, of course, of overwhelming importance in our planet's history, since it reduced Earth's rotational wobble and set the stage for ocean tides and ultimately life, not to mention untold moon-June poesy. Earlier simulations required a much larger object crashing into an Earth only partly formed and spinning too fast to explain Earth's current rotational rate--our 24-hour day. One study needed two separate impacts to scale back the spin rate...
...Santa Cruz re-enacted them in their computers by taking into account such factors as gravity, impact shock, melting and vaporization. They also created models with a finer level of detail than earlier efforts. Finally, after a number of tries, they arrived at a scenario in which an object, the size of Mars but with only one-tenth the Earth's mass, striking at a highly oblique angle, ejected enough debris from itself and our planet's iron-deficient outer layers to form the moon, which contains very little iron. Left behind was an Earth roughly the size...