Word: wind
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Tornadoes are more widespread than floods, that other natural scourge of the Mississippi River watershed, and kill quicker. The tornado is a fast-traveling column of whirling wind which not only devastates anything in its direct path but by its centrifugal force leaves a low pressure area in which air-filled buildings literally explode. Most serious that the valley has suffered in years, last week's tornadoes, according to Red Cross estimates, killed 20 people, injured 188, left 2,000 homeless, and were characteristically freakish...
...warm California afternoon, summer before last, every major Hollywood cinema producer put on his best double-dealing poker face and disclaimed to his colleagues any interest in Authoress Margaret Mitchell's magnum opus, Gone With the Wind. All knew only too well that any open move to bid for it would send the price kiting. Hence young Producer David O. Selznick was highly pleased with himself when three days later he was able to announce that for mere peanuts ($50,000) he had bought the film rights to the book that was becoming the best-selling best seller...
...Langmuir, having studied ballistics formulae, showed that if the botfly flew at 800 m.p.h. the wind pressure against its head would be 8 Ib. per sq. in., "probably enough to crush the fly." The power needed to maintain such a velocity would be 370 watts or about one-half horsepower -which is, as Dr. Langmuir exclaims, "a good deal for a fly!" Also, the fuel requirement would be so high that the insect would have to consume more than its own weight of food every second...
...those of the modern organ, are all out in the open, visible to the audience. (Pipes in modern organs are, as a rule, enclosed behind shutters; those visible to the audience are often dummy pipes good only to look at.) The Bach facsimile requires from one-third t01/20th the wind pressure demanded by a modern organ, and has a correspondingly limpid quality of tone. Unlike the modern organ it cannot increase or diminish the volume of tone. The "swell" mechanism of the modern organ was invented in England in 1712, was not used in continental Europe until long after Bach...
...Only difference between the Germanic Museum's organ and the 18th-Century organ in Weimar Castle played by Bach is that the former has electrical action controlling wind pressure and stop mechanism...