Word: frictionlessness
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Precise Images. Most of Codex Madrid I is filled with exquisitely fine engineering drawings: designs for self-releasing hoist grapnels, frictionless bearings, clock escapements, wire-making machines, worm drives and so on. For Leonardo, the drawn image was more precise than the written. One of the striking things about the machines in the Madrid notebooks is how they prefigure the future history of formal engineering draftsmanship without becoming schematic diagrams. They are conceptions rather than blueprints, but conceptions that one could take to a factory and have built tomorrow. More over, they are conceived as a series...
...receptive. What gives trouble is when men see assertiveness as aggression and women see receptiveness as submission." Unisex, he sums up, would be "a disaster," because children need roles to identify with and rebel against. "You can't identify with a blur. A unisex world would be a frictionless environment in which nobody would be able to grow...
...times smaller) than the solid-state semiconductors now used computers. With cryogenic techniques, a closet-size computer could fit in a shoe box. Cryogenics will also make possible such esoteric devices as loss-free superconductive motors with rotors that float in liquid helium, and superconductive gyroscopes that float in frictionless magnetic fields...
...problem could arise during any extravehicular activity, and the answer seems simple: haul in the tether. But in frictionless space, the free-floating astronaut is orbiting the spaceship as it circles the earth, and any attempt to pull him in would make him rotate around it so fast that he would be ultimately subjected to fatal G forces. He would also be moving at an uncontrollable speed when he finally reached-and crashed into-the spacecraft...
According to Cooper's equations, by "dropping" in airless, frictionless, straight-line tunnels, passenger vehicles powered only by the pull of gravity could theoretically travel between Washington and Moscow, which are 4,850 surface miles apart, in the same time it would take them to travel from Washington to Boston, only 400 miles away. "One can envisage a transportation system without timetables," says Cooper, tongue in cheek, "with the world's cities linked by tunnels, the departure time universally on the hour, and the arrival time 42.2 minutes later...