Word: polarizer
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...Pain is getting mighty cold, isn't it? For some inexplicable reason, the delightful outside terrasade attracts polar winds from both arctic zones, and concentrates them into miniature hurricanes. Just as you settle down with sandwich and beverage in tow, a foul wind interrupts your incipient feast. Before there is time to anchor your delicious repaste, the sandwich, dripping with honey mustard, has soared from your table, and is making a quick getaway through the outstretched hands of the homeless--who, after all rely on such fortuities to survive...
...ultimate real estate-development project: the greening of Mars. The first step, according to one recent study, would be to warm the planet by releasing large amounts of chlorofluorocarbons into the atmosphere. These gases would act like a greenhouse, trapping the sun's heat. As the planet warmed, the polar caps would begin to melt, releasing water vapor and carbon dioxide into the Martian air, thickening it and increasing the greenhouse effect. Eventually the permafrost, where most of Mars' water is locked up, would melt, and rivers and lakes -- if not oceans -- would flow across the Red Planet again...
That ingenuity, coupled with an aggressive wanderlust, brought Europeans and their culture to the ends of the earth. By the year 1914, 84% of the world's land surface, apart from the polar regions, was under either a European flag or that of a former European colony. Of the nine nominally independent non- Western nations, Bhutan and Ethiopia were politically insignificant; Afghanistan, China, Siam, Nepal, Persia and the Ottoman Empire were under varying degrees of thrall to Western powers; only Japan was truly autonomous...
More mundane experiences are conveyed just as pierceingly. The ocean at sunset "shines silvery like a bolt of shot silk." A swimming pool on a hot day is "polar cold. After a while cold feels like a different kind of warmth, hypothermal hypnosis, a fugue state, sweet...
Sometimes, those directions are polar opposites...