Word: catamaran
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...studmuffin over the Internet. Crazes among schoolchildren provide particularly tidy examples. When I was about nine, my father taught me to fold a square of paper to make an origami Chinese junk. It was a remarkable feat of artificial embryology, passing through a distinctive series of intermediate stages: catamaran with two hulls, cupboard with doors, picture in a frame--and finally the junk itself, fully seaworthy or at least bathworthy, complete with deep hold and two flat decks, each surmounted by a large square-rigged sail...
What was that bizarre sight in San Francisco Bay last week? Darth Vader's helmet? A movie prop for Batman III? No, the vessel steaming across the water on a test mission was Sea Shadow, a 160-ft., 560-ton, welded-steel catamaran that is the latest thing in Navy technology: a Stealth ship. Designed by the same Lockheed "skunk works" that built the F-117A Stealth fighter, the ship has sloping angles and a special coating designed to make it nearly invisible to enemy sonar and radar. Such stealthy boats might someday guard the perimeter of carrier groups, covertly...
...World in 80 Days more than a century ago. But it was not until last week that the challenge set down in 1873 by Verne's fictional Phileas Fogg -- to circle the globe in 80 days -- was conquered on the high seas. Aboard the 86-ft. sail-powered catamaran Commodore Explorer, French adventurer Bruno Peyron and his crew of four sailed triumphantly into France's Pouliguen harbor, 79 days and 6 hours after embarking from Brittany, smashing the existing circumnavigation record (109 days). It wasn't easy. En route, Commodore struck a pod of whales off Brazil, cracking a hull...
...Norway, for instance, was renovated with a huge Roman spa and a first for cruise liners -- two hydrotherapy baths. Record revenues at Carnival are attracting the interest of hoteliers: in May, Radisson Hotels International will introduce the world's first luxury cruise ship with a dual-hull catamaran, designed with corporate groups of 354 in mind. Besides the latest in telecommunications, it has a helicopter pad up top for the late-arriving executive...