Word: spar
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...defense of vultures and well-chosen excerpts from the works of other naturalists. One of these, Dr. L. H. Matthews' description of the mating habits of the albatross, reads like something by James Thurber. Albatross mating, it appears, is "no rough-and-tumble affair as with the house spar-row"; the males "gather around one female and bow to her, bringing the head down close to the ground. As they do this they utter a harsh groaning sound, and the female bows and groans back at them." The mysteries and wonders which Naturalist Beebe unearths-his realization that...
...Mediterranean and the South Atlantic. Not for glory, not for science, but just for fun, the Bakers bucked monsoons for 600 miles from Sumatra to Ceylon, saw their main boom snapped during a vicious squall in the Indian Ocean, spent three days on a tiny tropical island while the spar was being repaired...
...able to do a man's work when he ran away from his grandpa's farm at 14, his mother having married a mail clerk and gone to live in St. Louis. Thereafter seamen on the world's oceans knew him variously as Curly, Blondy, Highpockets, Spar, Slim and Horseshoes. He got the name Horseshoes from being a scientist with the dice, and he learned to be a scientist from his pal Limo, the Liverpool sailor who jumped ship with him the first time in Vera Cruz. "This Limo wasn't very tall...
...greatest seaports in tonnage entered and cleared are, in order, Antwerp, New York, Hamburg, London. A ship's consumption of fuel varies as the cube of the speed it attains. Derricks are named for an Elizabethan hangman named Derrick who was the first to use a single-spar gallows. Oldest ensign in use today is the Turkish, dating from...
Discovered in the 17th Century, polarization has become an elaborate science using small, costly, natural crystals like Iceland spar. Polaroid's sponsors say that it will do anything expensive crystals will, can be inexpensively manufactured in any size. Actual cost figures will probably not be available until large-scale equipment is set up. Developed by Physicist Edwin H. Land, senior partner of an independent Boston laboratory, Polaroid's synthetic organic crystals are bound in a plastic film of cellulose acetate. The tiny crystals are pulled into parallel alignment by stretching the film. The material polarizes about...