Word: flutters
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Just getting Pathfinder from Cape Canaveral to Ares Vallis required a remarkable bit of cosmic sharpshooting. Mars is only 4,200 miles across--about half as big as Earth--and the floodplain NASA was aiming for is only 60 miles wide. The barest flutter in the spacecraft's trajectory could have caused Pathfinder to swing far wide of its destination. To prevent the ship from straying too far from its ideal path, the flight plan included five different opportunities for midcourse corrections during which the spacecraft's thrusters could be fired to refine the trajectory. Over the course...
...Curtis Fowlkes' swaggering trombone), the galloping flag wavers (Lafayette, a raucous vehicle for trumpet soloists Nicholas Payton, James Zollar and Olu Dara) and the rococo after-hours ballads (I Surrender Dear, in which James Carter tricks up his solo with so many growl tones, glissandos, squeaking harmonics and feathery flutter-tonguings that it begins to seem his tenor sax can do everything but fetch the morning paper...
Another lean Broadway season is sputtering to a close, and as usual before the Tony Awards, there is a flutter of activity. Last week two bright dancey shows opened: Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk, a black tap-dance revue developed downtown at the New York Shakespeare Festival; and Big, a more conventional musical based on the 1988 movie that starred Tom Hanks. Both have broad appeal; neither fulfills all its potential...
...pronounced progress of technology has kept taking tasks from human beings and giving them to machines, undermining the bedrock notion of mass employment." It cites such examples as General Motors, which can make as many cars today with 185,000 fewer employees than in the 1970s. "Behind every A.T.M. flutter the ghost of three human tellers," the Times wrote ominously...
Inside BETA's one-story control room, a workstation displays patterns of green and red spikes; lights blink on a bank of small computers; and needles flutter on glowing dials. From a stereo amplifier comes a static-filled hiss, the audio version of radio waves piped directly from the antenna above. The display amuses graduate student Darren Leigh, hard at work debugging a BETA computer program. "We do a few things here for the tourists," he explains. "Camera crews love this stuff...