Word: sureness
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Note of Praise. After serving overseas in the Army Transportation Corps in World War II, Captain Glynn applied for a job with the Government's Institute of Inter-American Affairs. To make sure he got it, he added a few nonexistent qualifications: two years at Brown, a degree from Stevens Institute of Technology, a big job with a big trucking company. He got the job, and his transport survey for the Colombian government won him a warm note of praise from the Minister of Public Works. After that the U.S. Commerce Department hired Jim at $10,000 a year...
Songwriter Hoagy (Stardust) Carmichael was not sure he was quite up to the job. "I know my limitations . . . I'm not a student of music." But on the other hand, he did have an idea, and he was a native Indianian, and that was more than most of the other invited composers could say as they began to compose short symphonic pieces for the centennial of Hoosier Poet James Whitcomb Riley (1849-1916). "I got on the telephone with [Indianapolis Symphony Conductor] Fabien Sevitzky and told him what I had in mind," said Hoagy. "He encouraged...
Earth Charge. Since 1917 scientists have known that the earth's surface is charged with negative electricity, but no one knew for sure what keeps it charged. In areas of fair weather, an electric current flows between the earth and the air in a direction which would tend to dissipate the charge. It is not much of a current: only about 1,500 amperes, not much more for the entire earth than flows in a few power lines. But the electricity taken from the earth must be restored somehow or the earth's electric charge would soon drain...
...obvious guess is that thunderstorms somehow restore the lost charge, but no one had proved it. Three years ago the institution borrowed airplanes from the Air Force and began to measure electrical stirring in the still air above active thunderheads. Sure enough, the instruments showed a current moving in the opposite direction to the current in fair-weather areas. The scientists figured that all the thunderstorms going on at one time generate a net current of about 1,500 amperes, just enough to balance the drain and keep the earth's charge constant...
...Australia, where people get false teeth early. Australian girls couldn't believe the marines' molars were their own. "Finally, this babe with me reached over," said one marine, "and took hold of my teeth and tried to yank 'em and I let her. She was sure surprised when nothing gave." Before the division left Melbourne most of the men "were in some stage of a serious love affair with an Australian girl...