Word: sphere
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...will people be able to rationalize not voting by claiming they "didn't have time." Online elections would also help to target members of the crucial 18 to 34 age group, who--as studies have repeatedly shown--do not consider the political process something within their day-to-day sphere of consciousness. The Web is the hottest, hippest medium for young adults; why not capitalize upon the Internet's appeal to increase voter turnout...
...later, the new Hayden (and the Rose Center for Earth and Space that surrounds it) finally made its debut--and it's already clear that this is not your grandfather's planetarium. First there's the building itself--a 10-story glass-walled cube with an 87-ft. aluminum sphere seemingly floating within it. Then there's the space around the sphere. While the old Hayden had only a handful of faded exhibitions to get visitors into a cosmic mood, the new planetarium is overstuffed with information. "We don't really expect anyone to get it all in one visit...
...easiest place to start is the Scaling Walk, which surrounds the sphere just below its equator. As you begin your circumnavigation, the sphere becomes a reference for the relative sizes of objects in the universe. At one point, it represents the sun, while smaller spheres, from a few inches to a few feet across, portray the eight planets. (Not nine. Many astronomers, Tyson explains, now believe that Pluto is not a full-fledged planet.) A bit farther along, the sphere represents a molecule that dwarfs the footwide atom mounted to the railing...
...This sense of distance is taken up within the piece by a floating sphere, which also tracks the house, dropping periodically in and out of our vision. Inside the silvery ball, like the Good Witch of the North, lives a small woman. She is born at the beginning of the piece as a bubble of water from the mouth of one of the Wilsons, a mouth that sucks her back...
...question is an old one. Ptolemy skewed the map in the second century AD to account for the earth's curves, unfurling a sphere into a serrated plane. During the age of exploration, cartographers scrambled again to make the most navigable two-dimensional renderings of the globe, leading to the invention of the Mercator projection in the 16th century. Taking pictures of the earth from a zillion miles away has certainly helped things along today, although "seeing" where you are on any map at all starts to feel old-fashioned post...