Word: yardsticks
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...survey of Truman's presidency, Schlesinger extended the classification of American Presidents which appeared in his essay, "A Yardstick for Presidents," in 1949. At that time he attempted to assign historical rankings to our past Presidents, excluding Truman while he was still in office...
Shapley explained that astronomers have long had doubts about the yardstick they use to measure the enormous distances between the galaxies. It is based on Cepheid variable stars, whose luminosity (and therefore whose distance) can be told from their periods of pulsation. The system worked all right for a while, but recently many contradictions have shown up. For instance, the globular star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds (small, comparatively nearby galaxies) seemed to be much fainter intrinsically than similar clusters in the Milky Way. This offended the astronomers' sense of order. They felt that the clusters in both galaxies...
Other astronomical trouble points will also be cleared up. One is the embarrassing youthfulness of the expanding universe. When measured by the old yardstick, it is so small and is expanding so rapidly that it must have started its expansion only 2 billion years ago, which is not long enough. Geologists have pretty well proved by means of radioactive rocks that the earth is about 4 billion years...
...items (including candy, ice cream, baby foods, used cars). It will also check prices H twelve additional cities, raising tne total to 46, and give food products less weight. But the biggest change will be to substitute the average of 1947-49 prices for the 1935-39 price yardstick now used for measuring changes...
...veil of infallibility that generations of adulation had woven. "Appellant was a single man (thus disposing of occasional commercial rumors of a "Mrs. Claus"), 51 years old (presumably an arbitrary figure), and...in order to bring him up to the average man, intellectually, he must be measured by a yardstick of considerable elasticity." Claus v. Hall Mercantile Co., 157 Minn. 290, 196 N.W. 261. We can sympathize with the hurt Claus, clutching frantically at his flaming whiskers, but the judicial finding of stupidity must stand, as it has never been overruled in the Minnesota courts...