Word: trillion
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...Oort Cloud, explains Berkeley's Spinrad, would consist of at least a trillion "dull blocks of ice," ranging from a few inches to a few miles in diameter. Out in that velvet blackness of space, where temperatures approach absolute zero, the snowballs remain unchanged, well beyond the effects of solar radiation, meteorite impacts, volcanic activity, atmosphere and other phenomena that have gradually changed the inner members of the solar system. Every once in a while, however, a passing star gives the cloud a gravitational jiggle, releasing hundreds of these fragments. Most of them are sent outward into interstellar space...
...MALTESE FALCON is a picture about nothing. Bogie and a whole host of famous but forgotten stars chase after this statue of some bird that's supposed to be worth a trillion dollars. It turns out that Nature (in this case, the aforementioned bird) has played a trick on Man, and the statue turns out to be worth little more than a couple of back issues of Penthouse's Madonna issue. In any case, Dewitt has seen both of these classics about 20 times on PBS, but the communal viewing experience might be worth the five-odd bucks...
...early October, and the U.S. Government was running out of money. The Treasury warned of imminent bankruptcy and bouncing benefit checks. The Senate responded by raising the national debt ceiling to more than $2 trillion. Attached to the bill was the Gramm-Rudman Amendment, a dramatic proposal to reduce the federal deficit to zero in five years--and to show that Senate Republicans are serious about reducing deficits. The problem was now with the House...
...payoff from the SSC should be even greater. As it is now conceived, the accelerator would generate energies of 40 trillion electron volts, in contrast to the 640 billion electron volts produced by CERN's SPPS accelerator. More impressive still, it would produce collisions 20 times as powerful as the generation of big machines now under construction at CERN, Fermilab and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Whizzing past each other, the SSC's two opposing beams, consisting of closely packed bunches of about 10 billion protons each, would complete about 3,000 laps a second. In four to six places...
...calls for draconian spending cuts in many social programs and much of the military budget, and could transfer to the President a measure of Congress's power over federal appropriations. The amendment is attached to a bill to raise the Government's debt ceiling to more than $2 trillion. Without this increased borrowing power, the Treasury predicts, the Government will run out of money by Nov. 1. Under the pressure of a bankruptcy deadline, Congress must achieve agreement on the budget-balancing amendment before it can pass the debt-ceiling bill...