Word: mirrored
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...back again. Each huge page could be broken up into six horizontal strips or five vertical ones (showing an elephant getting bigger and scarier as it approaches). The panels might be in wavy shapes, when Nemo, Flip and Imp land in Befuddle Hall and their bodies elasticize into funhouse-mirror images. Or there'd be a large round central image, like the one for Thanksgiving 1905, in which a giant turkey - a kind of poultry Godzilla - uproots Nemo's house with its beak. Thanksgiving two years later expanded upon the dinner-table creatures: the humungous turkey was joined...
...benefit that Microsoft has an amazing research group. They're seeing the latest in robotics, speech recognition and parallel computing--these dreams we've had for decades. For example, talking to the computer or having the computer have a camera where it can recognize who's there. A mirror won't just be a mirror, it will be a digital mirror where you can try out different outfits, get advice--"Hey, you don't look good today." Putting screens everywhere has a big impact...
That arrangement may help astronomy break through a size barrier that it reached in 1948, when technicians completed work on the famous 200-in. glass mirror for the Hale Telescope at Mount Palomar; beyond that size, glass mirrors tend to sag and distort un-acceptably, affected both by their own weight and by changes in temperature. The only larger mirror in the world, a 236-in. monolith atop Mount Semirodriki in the Soviet Union, is apparently hopelessly flawed and has done little significant work since being completed in 1974. One solution to the size problem is to make several smaller...
Borra emphasizes that the concept of a liquid-mirror telescope is not new; he thinks the idea may have occurred to Isaac Newton, who knew about the behavior of spinning fluids and built one of the first reflecting telescopes. Borra knows that Robert Wood of Johns Hopkins University built a primitive model in 1908. "I am not the inventor," says Borra. "But I am the first to make it work and the first to know what to do with...
Wood's problem was that the motors of his day could not turn at a constant enough rate of speed. As a result, the curvature of his mirror kept changing. Also he was unable to avoid vibrations, which set up ripples in the metallic pool. Wood was aware of another shortcoming of his telescope: because it always had to face straight up, it could not be swung around to point at interesting stars and galaxies or to take time-exposure photographs by following the celestial objects across the sky as the earth rotated...