"Parabolic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... increased greater skill was invoked, and lamps reinforced by parabolic reflectors poured their light upon the sea. Several of these lamps were sometimes grouped together so as to intensify the light, which at a little distance appeared as if it emanated from a single source. This 'catoptric' form of apparatus is still to some extent employed in our lighthouse-service, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... I may call an affected virility, is always distinguished. You feel that Mr. Parker considers his sentences, not letting his bolts fly at a venture, but aiming at his effects deliberately. It is the trick of promising youth to shoot high and send its phrases in parabolic curves over the target. But a slight wildness of aim is easily corrected, and to see the target at all is a more conspicuous merit than the public imagines. Now Mr. Parker sees his target steadily; he has a thoroughly good notion of what a short story ought ...
— Adventures in Criticism • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... pair of legs to the knees again. We lay still, breathless. A watch chain dangled down in a parabolic loop. Then followed a round face, beef-red with stooping. It looked ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... yell which seemed to come from under the window. Several dark forms rose so suddenly that they appeared to spring out of the ground. Then came the peculiar twang of Indian bows. There were showers of sparks and little streaks of fire with long tails like comets winged their parabolic flight toward the cabin. Falling short they hissed and sputtered in the grass. Jonathan's rifle spoke and one of the fleeing forms tumbled to the earth. A series of long yells from all around the Fort greeted this last shot, but not an Indian ...
— Betty Zane • Zane Grey
... meaning and reasons of things much more than one is apt to fancy. And I don't know how anything can be really learnt that is not understood. A great secret of success here is an easy and accurate use of illustration—parabolic teaching. ...
— Life of John Coleridge Patteson • Charlotte M. Yonge
... MICAIAH AND AHAB.—The parabolic representation of Micaiah is held as proving not the bare permission of an event, but the actual deception of Ahab. The matter is recorded in 1 Kings xxii. Jehoshaphat had paid a visit to his neighbour, ...
— The Doctrines of Predestination, Reprobation, and Election • Robert Wallace
... was so distinctly to the symbolic, the parabolic, allegoric, dreamy and mystical—to treatment of the world as an array of weird or half-fanciful existences, witnessing only to certain dim spiritual facts or abstract moralities, occasionally inverted ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... it has exploded? A hapless air-navigator, plunging, amid torn parachutes, sand-bags, and confused wreck, fast enough into the jaws of the Devil! Suffice it to know that Teufelsdrockh rose into the highest regions of the Empyrean, by a natural parabolic track, and returned thence in a quick perpendicular one. For the rest, let any feeling reader, who has been unhappy enough to do the like, paint it out for himself: considering only that if he, for his perhaps comparatively insignificant mistress, underwent such ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... parable does not offer a case in point; in the second place, were it in point, it might be fairly and strongly urged against the practice of invoking the spirit of any departed mortal, even the father of the faithful himself. For what are the circumstances of the parabolic representation? A lost spirit in the regions of torment prays to Abraham in the regions of the blessed, and the spirit of the departed patriarch professes himself to have no power to grant the request of the departed and condemned spirit. [Luke xvi. ...
— Primitive Christian Worship • James Endell Tyler
... "Hundred-meter parabolic mirrors," he said. "Easy to make; you spray a thin metallic coat on a plastic backing. They're in orbit around us, each with a small geegee unit to control drift and keep it aimed directly at the sun. The focused radiation charges heavy-duty accumulators, which we then collect ...
— Industrial Revolution • Poul William Anderson
... nucleus of the comet had grown dull and began to disperse, and Jupiter's moon was close to it. The fourth night the comet had been divided into two parts; there were two heads and two tails, and both the starry phantoms began in separate parabolic curves their aimless flight through space. So "this" occurs in the heavens as well ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... number travel in long elliptical or parabolic orbits round the sun at great velocities. They seem to consist partly of glowing vapours, especially hydrogen, and partly of meteoric stones. 'Shooting stars,' that is to say, stones which fall to the earth, are known to swarm ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... venial treason bent, Frame thyself a government, For thy crest a brirnless hat, Poverty's aristocrat! Nonne habeam te tristem, Planet of the human system? Comet lank and melancholic —Orbit shocking parabolic— Seen for a little in the sky Of the world of sympathy— Seldom failing when predicted, Coming most when most restricted, Dragging a nebulous tail with thee Of hypothetic vagrancy— Of vagrants ...
— What's Mine's Mine • George MacDonald
... inundations. But a bar removed from one point is almost sure to re-form at the same or another, spurs occasion injurious eddies and unforeseen diversions of the current, [Footnote: The introduction of a new system of spurs with parabolic curves has been attended with giant advantage in France.—Annales du Genie Civil, Mai, 1863.] and the cutting off of bends, though occasionally effected by nature herself, and sometimes advantageous in torrential streams whose ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... correspondents can inform me where I can find a paper, called "Directions for making the best Composition for the Metals of reflecting Telescopes, and the Method of grinding, polishing, and giving the great Speculum the true parabolic figure," by the Rev. ...
— Notes & Queries 1850.01.12 • Various
... stress triangle would be bounded by straight lines (shown as dotted lines in Fig. 10); but as this is not true, the variable moduli will modify the stress triangle in a manner which will tend to make the boundary lines resemble parabolic curves. ...
— Some Mooted Questions in Reinforced Concrete Design • Edward Godfrey
... that engulfed Western Europe after the fall of Rome, and the generation of those vital forces that for two centuries were to infuse society with a vigour almost unexampled in its potency and in the things it brought to pass. The parabolic curve that describes the trajectory of Mediaevalism was then emergent out of "chaos and old night" and Abelard and his opponent, St. Bernard, rode high on the mounting force in its swift and almost ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... have been rendered imperative by the growing necessities and altered circumstances of the country. The leading feature of our age is the institution of joint-stock societies. We have taken up very lately the views which AEsop hinted at some thousands of years ago, in his quaint parabolic manner, and which Defoe, who lived a century and a half before his time, most clearly enunciated and described. We have found the way, at last, to make small capitals effect the most gigantic results, by encircling them with ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... compressing them, as it were, until they coincide as nearly as we please with the figure to be measured. In many cases his procedure is, when the analytical equivalents are set down, seen to amount to real integration; this is so with his investigation of the areas of a parabolic segment and a spiral, the surface and volume of a sphere, and the volume of any segments of the conoids ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... a litter of metal chips and scraps of color-coded wire, was the Bunch's second ionic, full-size this time, and almost finished. On crossed arms it mounted four parabolic mirrors; its ion guide was on a universal joint. Out There, in orbit or beyond, and in full, spatial sunlight, its jetting ions would deliver ten pounds of ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... regret, for the mayor's wife and I are not sympathetic; but when Xavier uproots my pet araucaria and bears it across the garden into the conservatory I protest at the top of my voice. Little Victor in his night-clothes runs to the window, enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason, for it is too dark to see the grapnel, of my prized tree. The Mayor of Meudon thunders at our door in the name of the Law, demanding, I suppose, my husband's head. Here is the conversation ...
— With The Night Mail - A Story of 2000 A.D. (Together with extracts from the - comtemporary magazine in which it appeared) • Rudyard Kipling
... last pages, such as, alas! they are. And I may even say that in this case the moral itself was given me; for it arose immediately on a comparison of the mother and the daughter, and from the hideous trick of atavism in the first. Sometimes a parabolic sense is still more undeniably present in a dream; sometimes I cannot but suppose my Brownies have been aping Bunyan, and yet in no case with what would possibly be called a moral in a tract; never with the ethical narrowness; conveying ...
— Across The Plains • Robert Louis Stevenson
... state of things generally was neither alarming nor consoling. But at 8:02 A.M. Pacific time, the situation changed. At that time Alaska reported an unscheduled celestial object of considerable size, high out of atmosphere and moving with surprising slowness for a body in space. Its course was parabolic and it would probably land somewhere in South Dakota. It might be a bolide—a large, slow-moving meteorite. It wasn't likely, but ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... the whole nation merry in his 'Rehearsal Transprosed.' This Parker had a 'knack' at making himself odious; he had a curiosa felicitas in attracting hatreds, and wherever he lodged for a fortnight he trailed after him a vast parabolic or hyperbolic tail of enmity and curses, all smoke and fire and tarnish, which bore the same ratio to his small body of merit that a comet's tail, measuring billions of miles, does to the little cometary mass. The ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... Every astronomer knew it, but none had been able to imitate or to reproduce this miracle of nature. When a comet approaches the sun, the orbit in which it travels indicates that it is moving under the impulse of the sun's gravitation. It is in reality falling in a great parabolic or elliptical curve through space. But, while a comet approaches the sun it begins to display—stretching out for millions, and sometimes hundreds of millions of miles on the side away from the sun—an immense luminous train called its tail. This train extends back into that part of space from ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... almost unbearable as the ball soared in its parabolic flight and the red-haired runner streaked dark across the green. The ball seemed never to be coming down. And when it began to descend and reached a point perhaps fifty feet above the ground there appeared more distance between ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... percussion—dirt in all directions. And even if a shell hit on the front of the canal bank, and one were on the back of the bank, five, eight, or ten seconds later one would hear a belated WHIRR, and curved pieces of shell would light—probably parabolic curves or boomerangs. These shells have a great back kick; from the field gun shrapnel we got nothing BEHIND the shell—all the pieces go forward. From the howitzers, the danger is almost as great behind as ...
— In Flanders Fields and Other Poems - With an Essay in Character, by Sir Andrew Macphail • John McCrae
... the resistance of the air, and the summit of such curve will rise in proportion as the angle so increases. So long as the falling angle, a, remains less than 45 deg., we shall have a curved shot. When the angle exceeds this, the shot is called "vertical." If we preserve the same charge, the parabolic curve in rising will meet the horizontal plane at a greater distance off. This is, as well known, the process employed for reaching more ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XXI., No. 531, March 6, 1886 • Various
... presently stepped aside to a young sapling oak, which having outgrown its strength bent its slim altitude in a beautiful parabolic curve athwart the sturdy stems of cedars and yellow pines which lined the path. Anderese stopped there and looked at Elizabeth. She had stopped too, without noticing him, and stood sending an intent, fixed, far-going look into the pretty ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... by which he showed that the line that regards the right angle in a triangle is equivalent to the two lines that contain that angle, or the problem about the area of the parabolic section of a cone. And Archimedes's servants were forced to hale him away from his draughts, to be anointed in the bath; but he notwithstanding drew the lines upon his belly with his strigil. And when, as he was washing (as the story goes of him), he thought ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... dominates all the magnificent development of the social life, equally governs the fate and the parabolic career of ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri |
