Word: constant
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Despite his complaints, Naipaul's curiosity remains unflagging. "I'm so dazzled by the richness of the world that I think fiction is not quite catching it," says the author whose own novels are exceptions. Naipaul is a constant reader, although he admits to rarely finishing a book. He dislikes the prose of Gibbon and the King James Bible because he finds it too smooth. He prefers the rich accents of the Elizabethans. "My writing is full of helpless echoes of Shakespeare," he confesses. He listens to the tapes of the sonnets at dinner and reads the dramas at night...
Some have suggested that Bok's refusal to divest makes hypocritical his constant calls for the teaching of ethics in universities. But others respond that the president's investment policies fit neatly into his character, which an associate once described as that of a "rationalist philosopher," and others have called just plain stubborn...
...undermined those arguments. A sensitive radiometer aboard the satellite has confirmed that between 1980 and 1986 average solar output declined one-tenth of 1%, then leveled off, and now has begun to climb. The finding strongly suggests that solar radiation varies with the sunspot cycle and that the solar constant is not that constant after...
...visible light, ultraviolet and X rays. Enough of this energy penetrates the atmosphere to deliver some 100 trillion kW of power to the earth. Reduced to more comprehensible terms, solar radiation amounts to 1.35 kW falling on every square meter of earth, a number that scientists call the solar constant...
...pure statistics," Van Loon concedes. "We have no physical explanation for what we've found." That explanation may be hard to come by. Experts have calculated that the tiny change in the solar constant detected by Solar Max can supply less than a millionth of the energy needed to produce the observed changes in weather. "If there really is an effect," says Van Loon, "there must be an enhancing mechanism, and we don't have the foggiest idea of what that enhancing mechanism might be." Yet the statistical evidence is so compelling that many scientists are taking it seriously...