Word: baseness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...lunar surface, the astronauts had to spend years rehearsing their missions, drilling and drilling and drilling the landings until they almost drilled the juice out of them. The first words spoken after the Apollo 11 lunar module actually touched down were not, as most people believe, "Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed." Rather, they were "ACA out of detent...mode control, both auto; descent engine command override, off," as Aldrin reconfigured his instrument-panel switches. It was only after that pedestrian bit of business was done that Armstrong spoke for the ages...
Their extreme sport is called BASE jumping, whose acronymic name derives from the four types of structures that its unusual athletes leap from--buildings, antennas, spans (bridges) and earth (cliffs). Equipped with rectangular canopy chutes, toggles for steering, a knowledge of which way the wind is blowing, no reserve chutes (as compared with skydivers) and a special arrangement of brain cells, participants jump to conclusions from great and forbidden heights, or from little ones where a chute has little time to open. Until they release their chutes, they fall at 60 m.p.h. The end is often unsatisfactory...
...oxymoron Human Fly, leaped from a 3,300-ft. cliff in his native Norway in a fog, was flung back by an ill wind onto the cliff's face and was killed. His death came 15 years after that of Carl Boenish, one of four people who invented BASE jumping in 1980; Boenish also died in a leap from a Norwegian cliff. Before one begins to hatch a Scandinavian-unhappiness theory to explain all this, it should be pointed out that BASE jumpers have died all over the world...
...last October, and he achieved a personal high last March when he jumped 110 floors from the top of the World Trade Center. (The unlawful leap irritated New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and for that alone was deemed worthwhile by the citizens.) People seem to take pleasure in BASE jumping in the same way, I suppose, that Romans liked watching gladiators. The potential opportunity to observe a fellow human die at a moment of wild exhilaration, or live through such a moment, brings one back to a kind of basics...
There are policies that could reduce greenhouse emissions and at the same time boost economic growth and raise living standards. One such policy, called an environmental tax shift, would move a portion of the tax base away from income, wages and profits and onto pollution and fossil-fuel consumption. Tax shifts greatly reduce the economic costs of emissions reductions because they use market mechanisms rather than regulation to drive changes in behavior, and they also provide a way to reduce taxes on income and profits. M. JEFF HAMOND, DEPUTY DIRECTOR Incentives Program Redefining Progress Washington...