Word: specks
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...Journey to the Center of the Earth (20th Century-Fox). The year is 1880. Professor Oliver Lindenbrook (James Mason) of the University of Edinburgh watches the sun rise over an extinct volcano in Iceland. What a splendid day for an outing! Whereupon the professor brushes a speck of dust from his tweeds, adjusts his rucksack and deerstalker, stamps his stout shoes, grasps his walking stick and casually strolls off-to the center of the earth. Fortunately, he is followed by a Hollywood producer (Charles Brackett) with wit enough to smile at some of the most preposterous pseudo-scientific poppycock ever...
...every hi-fi addict knows, the amplifier is the part of his set that makes little angular noises into big round ones. In the parlor version, it is a dazzling assembly of vacuum tubes, resistors and capacitors. The invention of transistors twelve years ago enabled a speck of germanium to do the work of the vacuum tube, but most of the rest of the circuitry was still needed. Last week Westinghouse Electric Corp. showed an entire milliwatt amplifier, circuitry and all, contained in a single block of germanium hardly bigger (one-thousandth of a cubic inch) than the head...
...hole in the rocket's metal casing before all its fuel is consumed, causing a disastrous blowout. To eliminate such a mishap, each booster is taken to a fenced-off area blazoned with signs warning against radiation. There it is wrapped in X-ray film, and a speck of fiercely radioactive cobalt 60 is thrust into its cavity. When the films are developed, they show up any air bubbles...
...same sort last week-this time with the $80 million-a-year lipstick industry. FDA chemists charge that 17 different coal-tar dyes used in lipsticks caused either death or illness when fed to rats. The lipstick makers insist nonetheless that women never digest more than an infinitesimal speck of lipstick, and that the FDA's attack is grossly unfair. Probable next step: a public hearing to discuss FDA's ban on the dyes, now scheduled to go into effect...
...first parabola of the second series, I flipped over the thigh pad to tackle the first problem: multiply 13 by .9. The reaction was surprising. Squinting over the oxygen mask, I could not be sure whether there was a decimal point in the multiplier or just a speck in the paper. Irrationally, I felt hostile to Brattkus for not having been more careful. Just as irrationally, the decision I had to make (was it a decimal point or wasn't it?) seemed momentously important. I got off this dilemma by doing the multiplication, writing the answers for both possibilities...