Word: oceanic
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...rolling in the fall of 1969 when an idealistic young CIA agent named Tom Rogers reports for duty in the "enchanted city" of Beirut. "It was a city of confluence, where two cultures -- East and West -- met to produce a steaming and sensuous vortex, like the collision of two ocean currents." The only shadow on this idyllic scene is the restive presence of the Palestinians, and keeping tabs on them and their leaders becomes Tom's job. Before long he establishes a tenuous contact with Jamal Ramlawi, a handsome, brooding young man reputed to be a rising star...
What sort of day was May 15? In Moscow it began with an overcast sky that brightened briefly before being darkened by thunderclouds. In the Arctic Ocean, the nuclear-powered icebreaker Sibir was cruising toward the scientific station North Pole 27. In Central Asia scientists secretly tested the 170 million-h.p. Energia booster rocket, the world's most powerful. Through the day, photographers scoured areas once strictly off limits. Some places remained out-of-bounds: military academies were accessible; most military installations were...
Similarly, the characters and settings are updated, presumably in an attempt to make Ibsen's satire more relevant to a Harvard audience. Trolls become yuppies. Slave trading becomes arms dealing. War in Greece becomes war in Nicaragua. And the ocean becomes--literally--the Adams House swimming pool. These are all easy targets for jokes, but Prascak has nothing novel or interesting to say about them...
...surprisingly, the earliest models in the 1960s were hopelessly simplistic. The earth's surface was often reduced to one continent with one ocean, fixed cloud cover and no seasons. But as computing power grew, so did the complexity of climate modeling. Continents were added. So were mountain ranges, deeper oceans and surface reflectivity...
...major drawback of computer models is that the various data do not necessarily behave as a system. Coaxing ocean currents to interact with the atmosphere is no small matter. For starters, oceans heat and cool far more slowly than the atmosphere. "We've had a hard time coupling the two systems," admits Manabe. "Even though the atmospheric model and ocean model work individually, when you put them together, you get crazy things happening. It's taken us 20 years to get them together, and we're still struggling...