Word: filaments
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Once lulled by the cuddly Communism of Deng Xiaoping, foreigners now take seriously the tales of wall-to-wall surveillance. In addition to telephone taps, the apartments (notably bedrooms), offices and cars of foreigners are bugged for sound and outfitted with tiny optical-filament cameras. Chinese security assured one foreign intelligence officer that the accumulation of tapes in a variety of languages was no problem: the agency has plenty of fellow travelers to deliver sophisticated, nuanced translations...
...carbon- rich gas -- something the Navy's lab has in abundant supply. Its facilities abut Washington's giant Blue Plains Waste Water Treatment Plant, which each day generates 650,000 cu. ft. of methane (CH4). Tapping that supply, chemist James Butler passed a sample of the gas over a filament of tungsten glowing at 4,000 degrees F. To his delight, a sparkling film of synthetic diamonds began to appear. The searing heat had knocked carbon atoms loose from the methane, allowing them to settle, layer by layer, into crystal patterns...
...thread of folly that runs through Barbara Tuchman's books is a filament of doom. In The Guns of August, a wrongheaded French strategy in the first days of World War I leads inexorably to the deadlock of the trenches. The tensions and energies of fin-de-siéde Europe and America in The Proud Tower are primed to explode in that same war. And the chaos of the 14th century becomes A Distant Mirror of the modern distemper...
...when they discovered that the printer in Littauer stuck on every other page. The room containing the printer was an antiseptic prison vibrating with the sounds of the air conditioner and the computer. Periodically the curses of a frustrated zombie rose above the hum because the printer's fragile filament got tangled or the computer swallowed a line or paragraph. The pica mechanism finally refused to work at all, and every page had to be written in tiny elite type. It was a thesis-padder's nightmare. In the terminal room, grad students, government and economics concentrators hunched over...
...LUCKY for the country, Terkel's people by and large say the Dream still lives. Not every story is happy--in fact, most have a thin filament of personal disappointment stretched across the top. But the near-universal insistence of Terkel's subject that the Dream is alive somewhere, if not in their own backyards, testifies that the nation has not suffered terminal spiritual damage...