Word: tools
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...weekends are one example of what hasproved to be an extraordinarily successful--andpopular--fundraising tool...
...sometimes felt that because photographs are the product of a mechanical tool, a camera, that some of the great pictures made by photojournalists are simply lucky shots, accidents. One day when Edward Steichen, the late dean of American photography, was taking a group of visitors through an exhibition of pictures by photojournalists, he was asked, "If you were to take all the lucky pictures, the accidents, out of this exhibition, how many pictures would you have left?" Steichen pondered that, and then he said, "Not many, perhaps. But have you ever thought how many great accidents have been made...
Ramsey was awarded half of the $470,000 prize for his contributions in pioneering a method of measuring the minute movements that occur inside atoms. Ramsey's so-called separated oscillatory fields technique did not just become a valuable scientific tool; it also provided the basis for modern-day atomic clocks. Like the ticking of a pendulum in a grandfather clock, the rapid-fire (9,192,631.770 times a second) oscillations of cesium-atom nuclei, spinning like tops inside a magnetic field, can be used to pace off time...
...gloating over the death of an 18-month-old girl while denying any intention to harm one of the kings of international terrorism? That has the U.S. impoverishing a whole country (Panama) through the blunt instrument of economic sanctions because we deny ourselves the use of a more surgical tool? One defense of the assassination ban is cynical. It is part of an unspoken agreement that brings a bit of order to the international chaos by ruling out one especially messy technique of war. Explicitly limiting the ban to heads of state would be too openly cynical, but the deal...
...point of view, though, its practical effect is unclear. Does this hypocritical ban on killing in the national interest make actual killing harder? Or easier, by allowing us to "do that kind of thing" while preening that we really don't? I'm not sure. Removing the most surgical tool of war does make the resort to war more difficult. Given our flighty negative enthusiasms -- Gaddafi yesterday, Noriega today -- that may be no bad thing...