Word: quartz
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...such a timepiece would be virtually useless today: computers, communications satellites, global-positioning receivers and telephone-switching systems need a precision beyond anything conceivable even 50 years ago. Time technology long since abandoned mechanical devices and even the hum of quartz crystals. For true precision--accuracy to a billionth of a second--you need to travel, virtually at least, to a place like the perfectly circular, well-guarded park that sits in northwest Washington. There, on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory, a nondescript concrete building houses the nerve center of the U.S. Directorate of Time...
...creamy pink-veined stone. It is troglodyte architecture: dense, theatrical and intensely moving, infinitely better than anything built above ground. It has the same kind of weird beauty as the basement of Antoni Gaudi's Palau Guell. Here and there the lights pick up sparkles of quartz and waste opal crumbs embedded in the stone. You could imagine it as a set for a Wagner opera; you half expect to see Alberich and his dwarfs...
...idea that a comet or asteroid might be bearing down on Earth--as in Deep Impact and Armageddon--can be traced to this crusading geologist. Probing Arizona's Meteor Crater in 1956, Shoemaker found a form of quartz that is created only by tremendous impacts. Finding the same telltale mineral in other craters, he concluded that they had been formed not by volcanoes, as most scientists thought, but by large objects hitting Earth. It was only a matter of time, he said, before Earth would be struck again. So he launched the first organized search for big incoming objects, recruiting...
...Quartz Wristwatch 1969, sold by Seiko...
...became "the nation's capital of racial (539 crimes) and sexual orientation (338 crimes) violence"! And the recent rout of fires, riots and earthquakes should, by statistical rights, only increase. Furiously researched and slashingly argued, this book is a 30-bell alarm by L.A. obsessive Davis (City of Quartz), who contends that most of the "acts of God" that have wrought such destruction in that city are, in fact, the results of greed, myopia and Machiavellian politicking. Upholders of the status quo will take issue with Davis' provocations, but the facts and terrifying statistics marshaled here should have folks racing...