Word: grasp
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These remarkable extensions of man's grasp and vision are relatively simple examples of a relatively new and promising technology called "telefactoring" (doing something at a distance). Merely by adding miniaturized electronics and wideband communications, says Electrical Engineeer William Bradley, the pilot can be taken out of his cockpit, the driver out of his truck. The distance between them and their work can be extended across a continent. Eventually, Bradley told the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, a more sophisticated form of telefactoring may replace human beings on many space flights-without replacing the judgments and actions that...
...every motion would be translated into electronic signals and transmitted to the telefactor in orbit. Servomechanisms on the telefactor would move its arm toward the actual spacecraft control panel. Feedback devices on the telefactor's hands would enable the earthbound operator to feel just how strong a grasp they were exerting-allowing the robot to make adjustments without exerting damaging pressure on delicate instruments. Using the same system, Bradley says, a telefactor could work outside the ship, assembling solar-cell panels or erecting space platforms "as effortlessly as a child assembling Tinkertoys...
...ritual begins with a swift mutual thrust of converging palms, which grasp each other in a crushing grip and pump each other up and down like a frantic seesaw. It is accompanied by a snappy bowing of the head-almost as if to show that the participants have not paralyzed each other. It is, of course, the German handshake, a social act of such importance and frequency that it sometimes seems to dominate German life. More than any other people, the Germans firmly believe that a man's handshake shows his character, and they go through life grasping...
...handshaking unhygienic and impractical but it also wastes too much valuable time." West Germany's unquestioned arbiter of social grace, the Expert Committee for Good Manners (a branch of the German Dancing Teachers League), has joined the anti-handshaking campaign. The committee recommends that Germans keep a tight grasp on themselves rather than on each other. Says its report: "Exaggerated handshaking is unappreciated, and in fact often makes personal contact more difficult to achieve. It is sufficient to shake hands the first time you meet...
...stinking trash. In English, there has been no one like him since Swift, and in French, there has been no one like him at all. Mad doctors both-in their different ways. Only moral simpletons who have not understood that pity is the cruel emotion will fail to grasp the root of the rage of either...