Word: quaintness
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...inflict maximum psychological damage on a chained Gulliver. And there isn't an army in the rich world that knows, with confidence, how to defeat such a foe. "When you're fighting someone who wants to die," says a Marine colonel, "those old-fashioned rules of war seem rather quaint...
...glimpse the lifestyles of the rich and everybody else, metro transit offers bus service to the Cape and ferry service to that inspiration of many limericks, Nantucket. Martha’s Vineyard and Elizabeth Islands can also be reached by ferry for quaint New England charm and wise overpricing...
It’s disheartening to hear someone as insightful and rational as a Harvard student try to summarize the attacks of last Tuesday into a quaint rationale: Too Much Testosterone. Asserting that raw biology somehow transcends other psychological and societal trends that may cause rage, fanaticism and, ultimately, desperate violence invites almost a directly opposing response: if men are savage brutes, controlled by their hormonal and emotional status and tempered only by women, then women are by nature incapable of anything in the realm of aggressiveness. Isn’t this just as blatantly sexist an assumption...
Using an atomic force microscope and a quaint gadget called the laser tweezer, Bustamante found a way around such limits. The microscope reads the topography of molecules by trailing a fine needle over their surfaces--much as a phonograph reads the grooves of a record. Coat the needle with an appropriate chemical, however, and you convert it into a grapple for manipulating molecules. Laser tweezers, meanwhile, trap molecules and particles in a tightly focused beam of light. Move the beam and you move the object...
...deserted books altogether? Or leap-frogged electronically beyond them? We wake up every few months and find ourselves in a weird new world. Do the educated and successful and privileged classes of the information-saturated post-industrial West now consider the reading of books to be something optional and quaint, like candles at dinner - a throwback, arduous and unnecessary, like knowing Latin and Greek (once indispensable among the educated...