Word: commandeering
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...your ears been able to screen out the ringing of the alarms, you could have heard a collective "ugggh" resound throughout the House. At 8:15, everyone came spilling out bleary-eyed, at 9:15, noticeably fewer Lowellians bothered to obey the command; and at 10:30, a mere handful of compulsive law-obeys left their beds. A sociological observation: unpublicized couples, sheepish upon making a rumpled co-appearance after the first fire alarm, almost never re-emerge at the next ringing...
...space arms race last July 4, the same day the space shuttle Columbia returned from its fourth and final test flight. Reagan announced that NASA would undertake "activities in space in support of the right of self-defense." Two months later, on September 1, the Air Force Space Command opened in Colorado Springs...
...students, BASIC assumes a working knowledge of algebra and some technical computer jargon as well. Logo, by contrast, was created with grade-school children in mind. To keep things very, very simple for the user, Logo starts off with a handful of English words that the computer recognizes as commands to make it do things. The word PLAY, for instance, tells a properly equipped computer to play a musical note. Another command, SENTENCE, instructs it to put two words together into a sentence. Still more commands direct the movement of a tiny triangular character called the turtle, which crawls across...
...teach the triangular Logo turtle a new command-in effect, to write a computer program-the child simply types the word TO followed by some step-by-step instructions. For example, here is a program that tells the computer to draw a circle on the screen...
...word END tells Logo that the definition is complete. Logo responds by typing CIRCLE DEFINED. The next time the computer sees the command CIRCLE, it will locate a copy of the definition and start executing the instructions it contains. Repeating the commands within the brackets, it makes one tiny right turn and takes one tiny step forward, 360 times in a row. This linking of 360 tiny straight-line segments, as any calculus student or Logo child will tell you, produces a perfectly acceptable approximation of a circle. CIRCLE can then be combined with other commands to produce flowers, faces...