Word: aft
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...total weight and the jockey making up the rest. One key to speed will be how lightly the horse can carry that 13% load. The investigators found that the horse's back oscillates up and down about 6 in. (150 mm) throughout its stride, and fore and aft about 4 in. (100 mm). The jockey moves too - up and down through a cycle of 2.3 in. (60 mm), and fore and aft just 0.8 in. (20 mm). That small motion makes a very big difference...
Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head - aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does - particularly concerning matters of faith...
...language was dry, understated, yet painfully clear. What caused the space shuttle Challenger to explode last Jan. 28, killing its seven passengers? ''Failure of the pressure seal in the aft-field joint of the right solid-rocket motor.'' Why was the shuttle allowed to fly if unsafe? ''Neither Thiokol nor NASA responded adequately to internal warnings about the faulty seal design . . . There was a serious flaw in the decision-making process.'' The commission appointed to investigate the Challenger accident interviewed more than 160 people, held hearings that generated 2,800 pages of transcripts, then summarized it all in an orderly...
...Even mammals, warm-blooded in metabolism and-we like to think-temperament, can play a similarly pitiless game. Runts of litters are routinely ignored, pushed out or consigned to the worst nursing spots somewhere near Mom's aft end, where the milk flow is the poorest and the outlook for survival the bleakest. The rest of the brood is left to fight it out for the best, most milk-rich positions...
...temperature in the vicinity of the wheel well grows blistering during reentry - on the order of 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit - that's a fair bit cooler than the 3,000 degrees reached at the spacecraft's nose and wingtips. Even damaged tiles can usually survive the heating at the aft end of the ship. NASA reports that it caught one bit of good luck in that the breach occurred right over a stretch of the aluminum framework of the ship itself - a bit like damaging a sheet-rock wall directly over one of the wooden beams that holds the wall...