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This anecdote appears in The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes (Pantheon; 576 pages), which is the most flat-out fascinating book so far this year. You wouldn't get that from its title, which sounds like a tender coming-of-age novel, nor from its subtitle - How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science - which sounds like a course you napped through in college. But Holmes' account of experimental science at the end of the 1700s - when amateurs could still make major discoveries, when one new data point could overthrow a worldview - is beyond riveting. Science...
Ballooning wouldn't be revived in earnest for decades. But it had permanently changed the way people thought about the planet. "It had been imagined that it would reveal the secrets of the heavens above," Holmes writes, "but in fact it showed the secrets of the world beneath. The early aeronauts suddenly saw the earth as a giant organism, mysteriously patterned and unfolding, like a living creature." Shelley must surely have been among the first to imagine the earth as it would be seen by astronauts a century and a half later...
Bill Koegler, vice president of operations, thinks this model could be applied to any park. "We're taking the university approach - a mix of donations and pay for services," he says. Down the road, he adds, he wouldn't be averse to building an endowment with financial sponsorships of certain existing amenities in the park: restrooms, benches or holes of golf...
...profits are so high because so many of its competitors are wounded or defunct. Though the firm is in this advantageous position because it did a better job of steering through the crisis than did most rivals (JPMorgan Chase is Wall Street's other beacon of health), it probably wouldn't have survived the worst of the panic last fall if there hadn't been a massive government bailout--engineered by a Treasury Secretary who used to be Goldman's chief executive...
...just saw it from a distance, and this older woman was worried thinking, 'somebody's breaking in someone's house, they've been barging in,'" Whalen said to the dispatcher. "And she interrupted me, and that's when I had noticed, otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed it at all, to be honest with you. So I was just calling because she was a concerned neighbor, I guess...