Word: tangents
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...most of the 19 points on the earth's surface where three Rouse belts intersected coincided with areas of major earthquake or volcanic activity. Significantly, the planes of the belts passed through the boundary between the earth's molten core and its solid mantle, each being approximately tangent to the core...
...piano learns. Then it learns the orchestra is wrong. They fight and the piano wins-not triumphantly, but with a few weak, sad notes-sort of Charlie Chaplin humorous." In the first movement, the piano lightheartedly followed the lead of the orchestra, then gradually swerved off on its own tangent, while the orchestra shouted its disapproval with great thunderclaps of dense, dissonant chords...
...object in which these artists find such rich resource is the most ancient of wind instruments. Unperforated flutes have been found among paleolithic remains, and neolithic man had already learned to puncture the sound tube and turn it elegantly tangent to his lips. In classical antiquity, "Phrygian pipes" were played by prostitutes, and during the Renaissance an epidemic of flute playing swept across Europe. Henry VIII owned 148 flutes and tootled several hours a day. Frederick the Great of Prussia caught flute fever as a boy, and hid his teacher in a closet to escape the wrath of his flute...
...television waves, which penetrate into space but tend to be drowned out by cosmic radiation of about the same frequency, UHF broadcasts could eventually be detected as far off as 200 light years from earth. Each UHF station, says Oliver, sends out its signal in a thin, disklike pattern tangent to the earth. As the earth rotates, that disk sweeps the universe like a giant beacon, eventually carrying its UHF transmission past stars and planets many light years away...
...known professionally-studied under the noted abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, and, she says dryly, "I painted like a Hofmann student." But though she learned much from her master, he was quickly supplanted by a series of happenstance influences that sent Marisol off on a strange and appealing tangent of her own. In a friend's house, for instance, she saw some small Mexican boxes filled with hand-carved painted figures, and she was enchanted. In another house, she was drawn to an old-fashioned coffee grinder that had the shape of a human figure. Finally, in a third house...