Word: customs
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...computer that cracked the Night Stalker case was designed by the Nippon Electric Co. to overcome these deficiencies. It combines high-speed, custom- made silicon chips with a new technique for analyzing points of minutiae. Besides plotting each point, the computer also counts the number of ridge lines between that point and its four nearest neighbors. This provides a fairly good measure of the relative position of minutiae points; if two minutiae taken from a print in the police files are separated by eight ridge lines, chances are they will be separated by the same number of lines...
Mutual traditions of gentility have often provided a bond between Southerners and the British. So no one should gape if the role of a Southern belle seems to fit Lesley-Anne Down better than a custom-made bodice. In the 12-hr. pre- Civil War saga North and South, scheduled to air on ABC in early November, British-born Down, 31, plays the refined daughter of a Louisiana Frenchman who marries a man she does not love. "He turns out to be a fiend," says Down, who draws no parallels to her ongoing real-life divorce from Director William Friedkin...
...miles from the earth. Its mission: to study the effect of the solar wind on the earth's magnetic field. Yet even as ISEE-3 sniffed at solar breezes, its flight director, NASA Aerospace Engineer Robert Farquhar, was plotting to divert it somehow toward a comet. "The craft was custom-made to measure plasma waves," he explains, "and that's exactly what you find at the back of a comet...
These population shifts change all the bric-a-brac of life. A car in Los Angeles carries a custom license plate that says SIE SIE LI, meaning, in Chinese, "thank you." Graffiti sprayed in a nearby park send their obscure signals in Farsi. A suburban supermarket specializes in such Vietnamese delicacies as pork snouts and pickled banana buds. The Spanish-language soap opera Tu o Nadie gets the top ratings among independent stations every night...
...somber print hues and subdued patterns over the past few seasons, and the shirts, whether worn by men or women, have an insouciance that works as a parody of conventional cool. "They're great fun to wear," says Tom Selleck, television's most agreeable private eye, who often sports custom-made Hawaiian shirts while crime busting in the islands. "And they're murder under a navy linen sports coat." Says Harriet Love, who carries a good supply of prime old Hawaiians at her store in Manhattan's SoHo district, "Grown men are following their antiheroes. Selleck is the '80s adventurer...