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 Well, I obtained this book in
April 2003. The inscription is to Walter Salefski. It
appears that this is the fourth book I have purchased from the same
collection.
(If anyone knows about this collection, please let me know, thanks.).
There is another
inscription on the inside cover that reads: "1947, Merry Christmas, Izzy"
Leo Hershfield did the line drawings.
From page 12:
A man sitting quietly before his fire may be at peace, but he is not at
rest. If he sits long enough:
1) He turns a gigantic somersault, once every 24 hours, because of the
earth's daily rotation on its axis. If he lives half way between the North
Pole and the Equator, this motion carries hi, along at some 700 miles per
hour.
2) The earth's annual revolution around the sun swings him in an orbit
nearly 200,000,000 miles across at a speed of 18 miles per second.
3) The movement of the whole solar system relative to neighbor stars
takes him in the direction of Vega at about 12 miles per second.
4) The whole galaxy to which the sun and all other visible stars belong -
the Milky Way- appears to be slowly rotating. Various regions in this great
disk, six hundred thousand trillion miles across, rotate at different
speeds. Mr. sit-by-the-fire swings around the centre of the Milky Way at 170
miles per second.
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