Word: pickings
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Washington's Naval Research Laboratory, control center of the U.S.'s satellite Project Vanguard, men worked through the night in the white glare of searchlights to adjust rooftop radio aerials to pick up the pulse beat. Coolheaded scientists at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Mass, got on the long distance phone to alert amateur astronomers across the U.S., pulled the switch on Operation Moonwatch, the skygazing network the U.S. had set up to track its own unborn earth satellite. Other Smithsonian scientists sorted and fed into an electronic brain the fragmentary reports from moonwatchers, observatories and radio...
Inner History. The first major cipher controversy began in the 1880s, when Minnesota Politician Ignatius Donnelly happened to pick up one of his children's copies of Routledge's Every Boy's Annual. There he found a description of an intricate cipher invented by Sir Francis Bacon. Already convinced that Bacon was Shakespeare, Donnelly set out to prove that Sir Francis used this cipher in writing the plays. Through an elaborate series of manipulations involving key page numbers, word counts and "root numbers," Donnelly finally "deciphered" such statements as "Seas ill (Cecil) said that More low (Marlowe...
...Worldly-wise FBI men were skeptical about the eight-year-old's story: the memory seemed too perfect, the details too complete. How could they be sure he was telling the truth? If they wanted to check his story, Lee Crary replied, all they had to do was pick up the young, blond (ducktail haircut) fellow driving a Chevrolet. With no hesitation Lee rattled off the license number...
...Council will select the Shield chairman, and the Annex Administration will pick approximately 15 other members from applicants for the job. The guides will wear emblems bearing the official Radcliffe shield, the Council decided...
...short time after the nightly cell count has revealed the prisoner's absence, brother Palance will kidnap, at the point of a wooden pistol, a motorist on a highway near the prison, and later ditch the car in a residential district, where Arnie's wife will pick him up. As soon as the news of the kidnaping reaches the police, they will assume that the prisoner has escaped, and relax precautions. Whereupon Prisoner Palance will pop out of his hole and over the wall to freedom...