Word: polarizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...harsh but strangely lovely land, home mainly to the grizzly, polar bear, wolverine, caribou, fox, Dall sheep and countless geese and ducks. Mushy and mosquito-plagued in summer, the North Slope area of Alaska is so cold in winter that metals become brittle and men work at a fraction of their normal efficiency. Yet, during the past year, a 140-mile-wide strip of this inhospitable country bordering the Beaufort Sea was the scene of frantic activity as more than a dozen big oil companies conducted seismic tests and drilled exploratory holes in preparation for Alaska's "Great...
...Clouds. Other scientists also had some second thoughts about their Mars findings. Originally, the temperature of the southern polar cap was reported as -180°F., or roughly the frost point of carbon dioxide under Martian atmospheric pressure. Now, the scientists say that the temperature is probably about four degrees lower and the atmospheric pressure several millibars higher than first estimated. That would mean that the pole is not solid carbon dioxide, as scientists once speculated. Instead, it is possibly composed of a mixture of carbon dioxide and ordinary ice, and perhaps obscured by a cloud of dry-ice particles...
Speer evokes one memorable night at Obersalzberg. It was Aug. 23, 1939. Hitler had just received a telegram from Stalin agreeing to the nonaggression pact that set the stage for the invasion of Poland nine days later. An unusual polar light flooded the sky and, Speer writes, "the final act of the Götterdämmerung could not have been staged with greater effect. All our faces and hands cast off an unnatural red glow. Abruptly Hitler turned to one of his military adjutants and said: That looks like much blood. This time it won't come...
From their polar positions, Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley Jr. see themselves as witty, wily intellectuals magnificently equipped to interpret (respectively) the left and right of U.S. life. Except when they confront each other directly, the notion is not entirely absurd. But when they fence on television or in type, bitchiness erodes their polish and learned discourse dissolves into tantrums...
Other scientists at Pasadena's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) hotly dispute the idea that the polar caps are largely frozen water. Most investigators are now convinced that they are mostly frozen carbon dioxide, otherwise known as dry ice. Mariner 7 helped their argument. Its infra-red radiometer measured the temperature of the area at - 253°F., or roughly the frost point of carbon dioxide on Mars...