Word: phenomena
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...assistant Jocelyn Bell in 1967 recorded blips coming from space at precise intervals, they playfully named the sources LGMs (for Little Green Men) on the chance that they had detected the beacon of an advanced civilization. The LGMs were later named pulsars and recently identified as natural phenomena: the long-sought neutron stars. Despite man's failure to pick up any interstellar communications, however, the entire galaxy could be filled with chatter between advanced civilizations, transmitted by a technique still undiscovered on earth. Says Carl Sagan: "We may be very much like the inhabitants of an isolated valley...
...issue at stake does not depend on any of these questions. If individuals of any skin color tended to have disproportionately high I.Q.'s and success in a universally upward-mobile society. I believe Herrnstein would not care. The phenomena would disturb only those who accepted racism, a belief that skin colors really are important...
...irrational number, one that runs maddeningly on without any repetitive patterns or predictable sequence no matter how far it is carried out. Such numbers are also apparently completely random,* an important quality to mathematicians, who have contrived lengthy random numbers for use in computer studies of such chance phenomena as incidence of telephone usage, highway traffic patterns and even the lineup of shoppers in a supermarket. Dutka claims, however, that a naturally occurring random number, like the square root of 2, is better for those studies because there may be subtle, hard-to-detect biases in random numbers that...
Mathematical Interrelations. Fefferman has written nine major papers on his specialty, Fourier analysis, a branch of mathematics pioneered by Joseph Fourier in the early 19th century. Fourier sought to explain wave phenomena in heat; his theories were later applied to water, light, sound and electricity. Fourier's breakthrough was essential to the development of atomic physics; and all communications equipment-radar, radio, television and so on-is dependent on his formulations...
...Glamis is far from unique. Author Underwood's high-spirited book provides equally fascinating lore about Britain's other haunts. It tells which ghost is working which castle, describes the author's own investigations of the ectoplasmic phenomena, and, at the end of each of the 236 reports on haunted sites, lists the name of a comfortable nearby hotel...