Word: planetful
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Former President George H.W. Bush is the only person on this planet who can casually prowl by jet, ship and train the upper reaches of power from London to Beijing, dine intimately with heads of state, call the President of the U.S. when he wants, e-mail any of 14 grandchildren about school and baseball ("Astros might go to the World Series"), talk details with a handyman making repairs on the house that has been his spiritual home for eight decades, track menacing chipmunks in the flower beds and then turn and embrace a visiting billionaire...
...precisely calculate the distance from Earth to the sun. That was easier in theory than in practice, though, and nowadays astronomers use other methods to measure the distance to the sun. The world will be watching next month, but mostly out of curiosity and wonder at seeing a planet move across the face of the sun-firsthand proof that the seemingly two dimensional sky is anything but. Another transit is coming June 6, 2012. If you miss that one, you're out of luck. There won't be another transit until...
...Naval Observatory alone sent out several expeditions, left. By then, it was easy to figure out longitude and latitude, and good telescopes were available. But it was still impossible to get precise timing measurements because just before Venus leaves the sun's disk, an optical illusion makes the planet seem to ooze toward the edge...
What was going on? Well, it appears that increased air pollution during those 30 years--over Asia, in particular--with the help, perhaps, of some increased cloudiness, may have exerted a cooling influence on the surface of the planet even as carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were encouraging the atmosphere to warm. The impacts of that tug-of-war on the climate system could be devilishly difficult to untangle...
...America's multimillion-dollar Superman industry, it's a serious problem. This is a guy who's from outer space--he was born on the planet Krypton, let's not forget--but he's also from another time. He debuted in the 1930s, when Americans liked their heroes like they liked their steaks: tough, thick and all-American. Nowadays we prefer our heroes dark and flawed and tragic. Look at the Punisher (wife and kids dead), or Hellboy (born a demon), or Spider-Man (secretly a nerd). Look at Batman: his parents were killed in front...