Word: clawful
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...first new Pragma A-3000. The $110,000 robot, which has just been licensed by General Electric, is assembling a compressor valve unit from twelve separate parts. Its two arms can do totally different jobs at once. When it picks up a slightly defective gasket in its gray steel claw, it immediately senses something wrong, flicks the gasket to one side and picks up another. The Pragma produces 320 units an hour, without mistakes, and it can labor tirelessly for 24 hours a day. That makes it roughly the equivalent of ten human workers. Furthermore, it can easily be reprogrammed...
Douglas County Sheriff Jerry Maple decided that there was no choice but to try to disarm the bomb. Though the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had offered to lend a robot with mechanical claw and television-camera eye, the authorities relied instead on a local firefighter, who attached a small explosive device to the bomb, which was supposed to either destroy the control box or detonate the crate's contents. At 3:42 p.m., authorities crossed their fingers and set off the small explosive...
...Carter-controlled Winograd Commission, charged with revamping the presidential nominating process, adopted the rule unanimously. It is ironic that rank outsider Jimmy Carter, who used the 1976 rule to claw his way from obscurity to the presidency, supported the changes from early on. "They (the White House) wanted to make sure that no outsiders will do to Jimmy Carter in 1980 what Jimmy Carter did to everyone else in 1976," said one commission member...
...comedy acts in the trade by dealing shamelessly in things other comics struggle to hide-like fear, anger and humiliation. In performance, Dangerfield is the enemy of poise. A minute after he hits the lights, his brow throws off sweat like a lawn sprinkler. His eyes bulge. His hands claw at his throat. He may be trying to loosen his tie, but it looks as if he is trying to strangle himself. The whole performance is a screwball incarnation of the comedian's deepest nightmare: flop sweat, the purgatorial feeling of bombing out, when every joke falls like...
...published in 1972, Barber categorized Presidents according to whether they were active or passive and positive or negative toward their job. In his new book, The Pulse of Politics (Norton; $14.95), Barber divides presidential elections since 1900 into three phases: conflict, conscience and conciliation. First comes a tooth-and-claw struggle: a stand-pat William McKinley vs. fiery Populist William Jennings Bryan in 1900, or Richard Nixon vs. George Mc-Govern in 1972. Then all-out conflict gives way to a rivalry of conscience, lofty moralizing in place of mere politics: Woodrow Wilson vs. Charles Evans Hughes...