Word: polarity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...film, only Dalton Trumbo explains the awful terror that came with the subpoena, the process of "getting ready to become nobody." Halpern shows the progressive effect of pressure and time on the writers. They age, dry up, crease and sag--but those with spirit make their physicality irrelevant. The polar two in the film are Trumbo and Edward Dmytryk...
...climatology-the study of long-range trends in weather-is still an inexact science, to say the least. Climatologists still disagree on whether earth's long-range outlook is another ice age, which could bring mass starvation and fuel shortages, or a warming trend, which could melt the polar icecaps and flood coastal cities...
...Warming-trend advocates note that winters in such normally chilly regions as Scandinavia and New England have been uncharacteristically mild in recent years, and glaciers in the Alps have actually retreated. Even a modest rise in world temperatures would bring with it other perils. Ocean levels raised by melting polar ice could drastically change global air-circulation and rainfall patterns, as well as cause extensive flooding. The result could be a radical decline in the productivity of many of the world's important agricultural regions...
Indeed, Mars seems to possess many of the elements essential to life on earth. Most of Mars' visible water appears in the form of atmospheric vapor or ice locked in the planet's two polar caps (the surface pressure on Mars is so low* that liquid water would probably boil away). But liquid water apparently once did flow freely on the Martian surface in earlier days; Viking's orbital pictures show that the planet is crisscrossed by dry "riverbeds" and sinuous valleys, including a deep Grand Canyon-like depression called the Valles Marineris, that were probably carved...
...Biographer Frank McShane, Professor of creative writing at Columbia University, offers sheaves of contradictions from Raymond Chandler's long but unprolific career. His colloquial American fiction was written by a snob trained in an English public school and weaned on Latin and Greek. The disabuse Marlowe was the polar opposite of his creator, a sentimentalist who liked to write doggerel about "brief butterfly hours." Marlowe was surrounded by young ladies of wondrously easy virtue; Chandler adored his mother and married a woman 20 years his senior. Marlowe never had a pedestrian afternoon; Chandler was a preoccupied oil company executive...