Word: crafting
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Creek, where the armada once assembled. Fan Ping owns one of them, the Sutai Yuyou 503, a small steel ship that doubles as her family's home. It's just 10 m long; the engine a mere 20 h.p. But the 49-year-old matriarch uses the modest craft to ply the waterways for riches. She finds oil spills, sucks them up with a powerful hose and resells the fuel. Cruising along the Liu Creek, looking for bounty, we stand together on the cramped deck, imagining what it was like in Zheng He's day. "I guess I have...
...craft has a 247-foot wingspan and solar panels that power the 14 propellers that keep it aloft, and Tuesday it traveled higher (96,500 feet) than any other non-rocket-powered plane. The possible uses are twofold. NASA hopes that this test will help it to design aircraft that can fly in the thin Martian atmosphere. And some entrepreneurial sorts think that eventually a network of these high-flying birds could serve as low-cost alternatives to communications satellites...
...there was nothing affected about him; he was not playing a role. He was laconically and sometimes pugnaciously American. And he believed in the redeeming powers of craft: how making things well--no concessions, no shortcuts, with complete faith in the beauty and integrity of material (in his case, mostly wood)--gave a certain urgency and moral power to the object. He never seems to have had a slipshod moment. If you can imagine Jack Kerouac without the stupid sentimentality but with the assets of a truly fine craftsman, you might have had something like Westermann. But there...
...could relate him to that great American junkmeister Robert Rauschenberg, his contemporary, except that the whole tenor of his imagination was different, being based on handmaking, on high-intensity craft, rather than on semirandom assemblies of street detritus. Which is not to say that Westermann was a better or a worse artist than Rauschenberg--just wholly different, not least because of the dark side of his work...
That's terrific for Furr and his boss, Jure Sola, who will run the company after Sapp retires next year. But it is the end of an era for the old hands at SCI, formerly Space Craft Industries. The Huntsville, Ala., company was founded in 1961 by Olin King, a former NASA engineer who subcontracted for the space agency. SCI evolved into a major manufacturer of PCs and then, under Sapp, who became CEO in 1999, diversified into optical and wireless technology. In fact, at the nadir of the current tech slump, the company in March bought Nokia factories...