Word: symbolics
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...City Games. The U.S. Olympic Committee suggested that the banner should lead the American team into the stadium but found itself under pressure from the I.O.C., which feared that such a gesture could set an undesirable precedent. Later recognizing the exceptional emotion that Americans still attach to the battered symbol, the I.O.C. agreed to allow the Stars and Stripes to be carried in the Opening Ceremony by an honor guard of eight American athletes representing different sports at the Games. The flag had already been displayed at the World Series and the Super Bowl...
...letter sigma is the mathematical symbol for the underlying population standard deviation, which marks off important divisions of the Gaussian distribution. That distribution is better know as the bell shaped curve, and it has been used to rank you against your peers since you first learned to bubble in letters in fourth grade. Its single broad hump and leisurely asymptotic decline account for the gifted, the dull and the discontented masses in between...
...discipline and morale at the lab in the early 1990s were a mess. USAMRIID at the time was roiled by alleged racial and sexual harassment, factions warring over the lab's leadership, accusations of incompetence and even theft of research. One particularly nasty clique formed a "Camel Club," whose symbol was a toy camel outfitted with outsize sex organs and whose members wrote lewd limericks mocking co-workers and sponsored notorious hot-tub parties. In short, USAMRIID had become a breeding ground of resentment and hateful high jinks...
...understand the depth of Korean anger, take a stroll through the peaceful, leafy grounds of Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, where Japanese soldiers who died in bat-tle are honored. With a number of war criminals enshrined there as well, it is the most infamous symbol of Japanese militarism. Koreans were outraged when Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi paid his respects at the shrine last August, but this place is a raw wound for Koreans for another reason, too. Tucked away in a remote corner of the grounds, behind a heavy, locked iron gate, is a simple tombstone-shaped tablet, just...
Hamid Karzai spent his week huddling with President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair and being feted on Capitol Hill as a symbol of U.S. success in Afghanistan. But back home, events on the ground offered a cruel reminder that Karzai is an acting president without a state...