Word: blip
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...saturated in reproductions of works of art. Hence the more art books and magazines we thumb through, the less likely we are to see an original fresh, for the first time: reproduction precedes the work as the radar blip announces the incoming plane, removing its element of surprise. No well-known artist has ever been able to circumvent this; only obscure ones don't have the problem, and wish they...
Just 10 years ago, teenage gambling did not register even a blip on the ! roster of social ills. Today gambling counselors say an average of 7% of their case loads involve teenagers. New studies indicate that teenage vulnerability to compulsive gambling hits every economic stratum and ethnic group. After surveying 2,700 high school students in four states, California psychologist Durand Jacobs concluded that students are 2 1/2 times as likely as adults to become problem gamblers. In another study, Henry Lesieur, a sociologist at St. John's University in New York, found eight times as many gambling addicts among...
...narrowest point of the Strait of Hormuz -- to "fighting in a lake." A plane can reach a ship's missile range in minutes or even seconds after it first appears on a radar screen; a captain who hesitates too long while trying to identify conclusively that radar-screen blip could lose his ship and the lives of all those aboard. That almost happened in May 1987 to the frigate Stark. It was hit by two missiles launched in error by an Iraqi plane. The ship was severely damaged, 37 crewmen were killed, and Captain Glenn Brindel was pressured into retirement...
...some of the most sophisticated radar available, unable to tell an F-14 fighter from an % Airbus wide body? Crowe explained that while the system is accurate in gauging the number, range and altitude of approaching aircraft, it is "difficult" to identify the type of aircraft "from a radar blip." One reason the ship mistook the Airbus was that it was descending from an altitude of 9,000 ft. to 7,000 ft. What it was doing at that level is a mystery, according to one Pentagon official, since commercial jets flying that route normally cruise...
...sudden, the mind is, quite literally, given pause to think; take it out if you wish or forget it and the mind is deprived of a resting place. Yet still the comma gets no respect. It seems just a slip of a thing, a pedant's tick, a blip on the edge of our consciousness, a kind of printer's smudge almost. Small, we claim, is beautiful (especially in the age of the microchip). Yet what is so often used, and so rarely recalled, as the comma -- unless it be breath itself...