Word: planetful
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...missiles whose accuracy Draper is working to further perfect already can be projected from this side of the planet to within 500 feet of their target on the other side. You can better picture this accuracy if you think of throwing a dart across a football field and having it land within a millimeter of its target. With the Trident I, II, and the MX missiles Draper will reduce Circular Error Probability (CEP) to 300 feet. For the purposes of missile accuracy, this amounts to what the Real Paper described as the ability to "land a warhead in stall three...
...that game. For too many of us our life is an idea carefully drawn and theorized rather than an opportunity to be grasped and lived. We are too willing to believe that social science theory and the course catalogue have determined "the way things are," as if cohabiting the planet with 700,000 Hiroshima bombs were intrinsic to our nature (and thus to be incorporated into our model of the psyche), as if these bombs did not confront us with a need to change "the way things are" in our own lives...
...transcendently foresighted NASA might admit that the space shuttle's flawless flight last week involved some luck. The luck of the universe (by one new theory) once banged an immense asteroid into the earth, raising a dust cloud so dense that it blocked off the sunlight, ruined the planet's food chain, and thereby brought on the extinction of the dinosaurs-an event that profoundly redirected evolution. It is arguable (at least agnostically for a moment) that life itself-the lightning in the sugar cube, the huge fortuities of weather and climate and chemistry, of amino acids...
...world has adopted two different strategies toward luck. Much of the planet for most of its history has tried to woo and conjure and appease it, longingly courting the force to draw near, to descend from the void of the random for an instant and shower fortune on some lucky head. To ward off luck's malevolent side, the infection of a curse, the evil eye, populations have danced and chanted and worked with charms. To predict its whims, they have studied omens, birds' flights, goats' entrails; they have consulted gypsies and star charts...
Philip Morris does a lot of things well. It sells beer--Miller and Lite are numbers two and three in American sales. It sells Seven-Up, which tops every other lemon-lime soft drink on the planet. It sells thousands of homes a year in Mission Viejo, Calif..and the suburbs of Denver. But most of all. Philip Morris sells cigarettes--Marlboro, Merit, Virginia Slims. Benson and Hedges. Parliament, Alpine, Saratoga 120s and others. Machines in the Richmond facility put tobacco into paper tubes, hand the cigarettes, cut them, insert filters, box them, put the boxes into the cartons...