Word: blinks
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cornerstone of Building C. Martha Liller, guardian of the plates, explains that the expensive collection is one of the long-range investments of the Observatory; only in recent years has it begun to pay off in fashionable fields such as quasars and X-ray sources. She demonstrates the blink comparator, which is used to note changes in the light intensity of a star over time. "You put one plate on this side," she says, "and one over here. Then you look through this eyepiece. The machine flashes the two pictures in front of your eye alternately, fast. Anything whose light...
...characteristic swivels and slides may look improvised, but Tharp's dances are planned down to the final blink. At rehearsals she snapped out commands: "Soft elbows, make sure you lift your skirts, ladies, watch your eleves," or "That retard should last forever, Marianna-you have a full second." In Tharp time, a second is an eternity. Her dancers are given a lot to do in the space of a beat. In one seemingly continuous motion, swaying hips slink into wiggles that burst into furious pirouettes, then stop on a dime and reverse directions. It is as if Tharp worked...
...sees his present success in just being able to relax a bit. Not long ago he was "a very ambitious, aggressive, high-strung Harvard graduate," a former president of Harvard Student Agencies and a co-founder of a company that was expanding like a supernova. Before Tobias could blink, he had $400,000 worth of stock options. And when the bubble inevitably burst, reducing his paper holdings to nothing, he was standing back, watching the whole thing from a healthy distance, slightly cynical and slightly wise. Naturally, he wrote a book about...
Will is frank about the reasons for his general pessimism: "We've only had liberal, bourgeois civilization for about 200 years. That's not very long--it's a mere blink. No reason it will last forever. If you look at the depressing sweep of human history, I see no reason to believe that free societies, which took so long to come around and are so rare today--and indeed, are fewer today than they were ten years ago--I see no reason to believe that they're the wave of the future. They're certainly not the wave...
...Angolan civil war might turn out to be another Viet Nam-but for Russia, not the U.S. (see box). Explained one of them: "The U.S. is still much less committed there than the U.S.S.R." Added another official, using language reminiscent of the early 1960s: "If we don't blink now, I think that they will blink...