Word: chaff
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...they need our help. The universe, after all, is a very noisy place. It takes a lot of raw computing power to find the wheat in all that extraterrestrial chaff, and with budget cuts and all, SETI can't afford the computers it needs to do the job. That's where your humble home (or office) PC comes in. Download its software over the Internet, and SETI central at Berkeley will send chunks of data for your machine to process. Amateur astro-geeks everywhere are pitching in. In the two weeks SETI@home has been available, more than...
...living in comfortable times, and the long run of L'Affaire Monica is testimony to that, a deluge of chaff. Never before has so much been said by so many about so very little. After months of watching Mr. Starr get in and out of cars, and the famous footage of Mr. Clinton embracing the intern in the crowd, a person starts to value the right not to watch and not to care. What we now know is approximately what we knew at the start. He did it; we're sorry he did; he must be sorrier than anyone else...
...Philadelphia-born Calder was a fluent and effusively industrious artist who made thousands of works, and Prather has done a fine job of winnowing the wheat from the chaff, of which, truth to tell, there is a great deal. Calder never seems to have had the smallest inhibition about his chosen career. Both his parents were artists, and he made his own toys, "always a junkman of bits of wire and all the prettiest stuff in the garbage can." Growing up, he studied mechanical engineering, took painting classes at the Art Students League in New York City...
...excessive junk get you down, for amid the chaff-ridden choices are valuable research resources. A quick search of scholarly mailing lists provided me with a number of non-Harvard professor outlooks on the subject of a recent paper. A slightly longer look, and I was able to save 20 percent on a holiday purchase...
True, but there are rewarding things on TV, piles of wheat in mountains of chaff. Even the Raspets broke down and bought a TV last year to follow the elections; they keep it warm an hour a week by watching Star Trek videos. Public Broadcasting has taken a beating in recent years from critics and Congress, but it remains the single most important and trustworthy friend for our children, be they watchers of Arthur, Sesame Street or that big doofus Barney. The basic mission at pbs is to get children to learn. The basic mission almost everywhere else...