Word: cosmically
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...take the SAT. An average student, Joe nails all the easy questions (except for the ones he makes careless mistakes on) and misses all the hard ones. Once students are armed with this knowledge, "What would Joe do?" becomes a question rivaling the familiar bumper sticker query in cosmic importance. On hard questions, you probe the answer choices for the likely Joe Bloggs answer--that is, the most appealing (read: wrong) answer. When you identify the answer Joe would pick and eliminate it, you can guess from the remaining four choices, statistically upping your score...
...scientists said, as challenging and rewarding as the Apollo mission that deposited Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface. But the comparison was never exact, and as the genome project approaches completion, it is becoming increasingly clear just how bad the analogy really is. Landing a human on our nearest cosmic neighbor was a straightforward achievement with no need for caveats or footnotes. As of July 20, 1969, nobody had set foot on another world. The next day, Armstrong had. Simple as that...
...powerful that they might one day break the most intricate secret codes the CIA can concoct. Not that a quantum supercomputer is going to leap out of some laboratory and paralyze the CIA anytime soon. These computers seem to be exquisitely sensitive. The tiniest disturbance--even a passing cosmic ray--can change the orientation of their computational atoms, spoiling the calculation. At present, quantum computers can perform only trivial calculations on perhaps five atoms. To do any useful work, they would need to calculate on millions of atoms...
...researchers, one in the U.S. and one in Italy,each claimed to have found a way to make light travel faster than its regular cruising speed of 186,000 m.p.s. According to the special theory of relativity, that's verboten; the velocity of light is supposed to be the cosmic speed limit, which nothing can exceed. Nevertheless, a physicist, Lijun Wang of the NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J., says he revved up a beam of light as much as 300 times its normal speed, using a special chamber filled with cesium gas. Now let's see him prove...
...Mark Calculator Series was in development in the Computation Laboratory. When, together with the Graduate Center, the World Tree was inaugurated in 1949, somebody wrote: "Of all the work of Walter Gropius, this cosmic hat rack is the dopius...