Word: planetful
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...thought I was a decent father," he says in the house where the smell of death still lingers. "I've cried so hard my face hurts." And yet something within him still grasps at a solution. "Somehow we've got to bring happiness back onto the planet so that people will want to live..." He reaches for a more precise word. "So that children will want to live...
What Annan proposes is nothing less than a world filled with dignified people. A world where Sierra Leonean rebels would have enough innate dignity to not chop off the arms of infant girls. A planet where India and Pakistan would be dignified enough not to blow up each other, where the indignities of chemical weapons would be a thing of the past, where the world's rich would be, yes, dignified enough to worry about the millions of Africans who will die of AIDS in the next two decades. This is the kind of world Annan imagines...
...latest roster of official astronomical names, and as usual, the list is highly eclectic. It's not surprising that CARL SAGAN was honored with a 50-mile-wide crater on Mars. And the names Prospero, Setebos, Stephano, Caliban and Sycorax for five moons of Uranus make sense, since the planet's other moons are mostly named for characters in Shakespeare's The Tempest. Even a moonlet called Petit-Prince is defensible, since it orbits the asteroid Eugenia--and the son of Empress Eugenie and Napoleon III had that rather literal name...
Trekkie news traveling at warp speed: University of Texas astronomer WILLIAM COCHRAN has discovered a Jupiter-size planet in the same orbit that Star Trek lore says you would find Vulcan, MR. SPOCK'S home world. That would be somewhere orbiting the star Epsilon Eridani, just a hop, skip and parsec from Earth, or 10.5 light-years to be exact...
...officer played by LEONARD NIMOY--indeed, producer GENE RODDENBERRY said in 1991 that the star he envisioned was 40 Eridani, which is 4 billion years old. Epsilon, he insisted, at about a billion years old, was not old enough for any advanced life-forms to have evolved on its planet, let alone the intelligent, relentlessly logical Vulcans. But Epsilon was the star of choice in at least one Star Trek book, and the Earthling who first made contact with the Vulcans was ZEPHRAIM COCHRANE--just an extra e away from Texas astronomer Cochran. Talk about a mind meld...