Word: meaning
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perceptions often mean more, in the short run, than the hard facts of power. Judgments of another man's resolve can figure more than aircraft carriers. Terrorist tactics can mock stockpiled nukes. From Harvard to Georgetown to the White House situation room, the scholars and strategists see emerging from the peculiarities of the Iranian situation a new and as yet unclear dimension to the world struggle. It derives partly from the fact that the U.S. has a military equal in the world. Washington can no longer fall back on an overwhelming power margin as the ultimate persuader...
...what, exactly, does it mean? On the most obvious level, it means what everyone knows: that money is losing value. But it also means that we are in the grip of a wave similar to what, in 17th century Holland, was known as the Tulip Mania. The tulip was then a comparatively new import from the Near East, and mutant specimens, with irregular stripes, were prized as rarities-so prized that men would mortgage their villas and their fields. The tulips had little intrinsic value. Their worth as commodities was a function of pure, irrational desire, and their economic fate...
...third -the strong force (which binds the atomic nucleus together)-they and other researchers determined that such unity requires a net loss of baryons when certain particles collide. In other words, the proton must decay into lighter subatomic fragments. By most physicists' reckonings, protons have a mean life of around 10,000 billion billion billion (10³-²) years (more than half of them will disintegrate in that time). Thus out of 10³-² protons, only one is likely to decay each year. The problem: how to detect that rare disintegration...
...problems are compounded when the clergyman is a liberal in theology, which may mean that he is uncertain about the importance and accuracy of the Bible or even about the urgent need for biblical teaching. Seminary instruction in homiletics (the techniques of sermon preparation) is generally good. But to conservative critics this work is often undermined by Bible faculties. "Seminarians are not sure God is speaking in the Bible," says James Boice of Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church. "The professors think of the Bible as a collection of human documents. Centuries ago, even the heretics believed the Bible...
Laments Mwai Kibaki, Kenya's Vice President: "Higher oil prices mean there is less for everything else." The LDCs will also suffer a decline in demand for their exports as the industrialized countries fall into recession...