Word: droning
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...showpiece of the operation was the Navy's Deep Drone, a sophisticated undersea robot. The drone was connected to the U.S. Navy tug Apache by an umbilical cord that transmitted commands and returned data from an array of cameras and sensors to shipboard computers and monitors. An acoustical locating system, accurate to within 20 in., will guide scientists in assembling a photomosaic of the more than 2,000 high-resolution still photographs the drone has taken of the ship's hull. In addition, a sonar scan will be used to make a false-color three-dimensional computer...
...learn how fast sections of the hull are corroding, the drone poked "stab sensors" through encrusted sea life and rust and measured the electromagnetic field at the ship's surface. Reason: the Monitor's iron and steel combine with salt water to form a weak natural battery. The resulting electric current peels electrons from the hull, making it easier for oxygen atoms to attach themselves; oxidation, or rusting, ensues. To protect the Monitor while officials decide what to do, scientists may attach "sacrificial anodes" of zinc to the hull to divert the corrosion process away from the aging metal...
...another obvious class of recruits, take a look at the various vicious species of ants. Careful negotiations with the appropriate power-brokers in royal ant courts will yield HIACAs (Hordes of Insect Anti-Commissary Agents. The little red merchants of spoliation, dropped over Soviet supply depots from tiny drone planes, could chomp their way toward a Warsaw Pact surrender...
...short enough so that they don't have to. "Unlucky in Love," for example, doesn't say much of anything, but its sonic-boom noise and punk/polka rhythm make it great fun. Otherwise, the new Rank and File's hybrid of nasal vocals and buzzsaw guitars sound like uniform drone. Rank and File may catapult the band to MTV stardom (and Rhino Records out from the novelty and oldies bins in record stores), but such success will come at the expense of the band's more interesting elements...
...unwisely cuts the hilarious first act and plays down much of the humor in favor of the tragic, or in this case, bathetic parts. Alex Roe's Cyrano is the major casualty of this approach, though, to be fair, some of his wounds are self-inflicted. He seems to drone endlessly, eyes glazed and fingers fidgeting, in a voice that ought to earn him the name Cyrano de Sinusitus. But once he's roused from this topor by the approach of a good joke, Roe becomes an adrenalin-charged humor dynamo, leaping and cavorting about the stage. His mad attack...