Word: greatly
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...Explosive decompression" is what happens to passengers and crew members of a pressurized airliner when a window blows out at high altitude. Announcing that it had made some experiments on the subject, the Civil Aeronautics Administration said soothingly last week that such disasters are no great peril just now, because airliners do not fly high enough. But cruising altitudes are increasing. In an effort to make airplane manufacturers fully conscious of future dangers, the CAA made a movie which chilled the blood of hard-boiled air designers...
...turn out too badly. An airline hostess was sucked to a window, but her hips were wide enough to stick in the frame and save her from being popped like a cork into the empty air.* The pressure difference (only 2½ lbs. per sq. in.) was not great enough to extrude her completely. ("Still," said one CAA official, "whenever I see a child banging on the plane window with a toy, I get up and tell him to stop...
...Ridge National Laboratory, the Atomic Energy Commission had a peculiar problem with its library. Scattered widely around the great reservation are many individual laboratories, and the scientists could not use the central library without great waste of time in transit. Worse yet, some of Oak Ridge's laboratories are "hot" (radioactive), and borrowed papers which might pick up radioactivity in a hot lab could not be returned to the library...
Matter of Ideals. Lucien, like most young wrigglers, quickly learns to navigate the muck. With great credit to his reputation, he manages to hush a scandal that might have brought the cabinet down. Soon after, he is in the thick of a provincial election, passing out bribes as easily as breathing. In all this stock jobbery, the newly invented telegraph serves the political and financial turn of the men in power so often that Stendhal sees the instrument as a symbol of corruption...
Unfinished as it is, Lucien Leuwen is a true coin of Stendhal's genius; only the edges want milling. It ranks almost with The Red and the Black and The Charterhouse of Parma, the great novels which Stendhal wrote before & after it; and it marks the mid-point in his development from a powerful psychologist who couldn't help laughing at the people he created, to a deadly satirist who couldn't stop creating the people he laughed...