Word: lasered
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...Rudolf Bing, 71, the former general manager of the Metropolitan Opera whose laser-beam wit has terrorized and delighted the music world, seems to have decided that he can take the knocks onstage as well as give them off. After signing up to play three performances for the Met's youthful rival, the New York City Opera, Bing explained how he was chosen for a nonsinging, nonspeaking role in a new production of Hans Werner Henze's The Young Lord: "Julius Rudel [the director] called me and said, 'In the opera, there is an old lord...
...Elsewhere young men and women read their latest poetry and a symphony orchestra rehearses a new work, Metamorphoses. The title is appropriate, for the setting is not some artsy experimental college but the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where students traditionally have been more at home with scientific pursuits like laser technology, cancer research and hydroacoustics...
...Lunokhod 1, which it closely resembles, the remarkable machine is apparently equipped with sophisticated gear to analyze the soil that it picks up. In addition, the robot carries a cosmic-ray counter, a "telescope" that can look for distant X-ray sources in the heavens and a French-built laser reflector, which -like similar reflectors left behind by Apollo-should enable scientists to measure the distance between earth and moon with extreme accuracy...
...scientists working under Dr. Kenneth M. Evenson at the National Bureau of Standards in Boulder, Colo., have measured c with new accuracy. Working with a laser beam-pure light of a single frequency-they have refined the measurement of light's speed to 186,282.3960 miles per second. In effect they reduced the accepted speed by roughly 144 feet per second. This may not seem important to camera fans worrying about exposure, or yachtsmen timing a flashing light on a dark night. But it could make a considerable difference to scientists calculating the precise landing site of an astronaut...
America has endured a transformation, in many ways a radical transformation. In sum, the experience may well amount to a kind of loss of innocence. It demonstrated, for one thing, that American technology does not always work; all the F-111s and "people-sniffers" and laser-guided bombs and helicopters could not ultimately, not really, enforce the American will. Of more psychic importance, the war may have forever soured the almost subconscious, idealized conviction that Americans are somehow morally superior beings. My Lai, the massive bombing campaign, the image of a napalmed child?such things have corroded the American selfesteem...