Word: moth
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gets credit for coining the name of a ubiquitous computer phenomenon: the bug. In August 1945, while she and some associates were working at Harvard on an experimental machine called the Mark I, a circuit malfunctioned. A researcher using tweezers located and removed the problem: a 2-in. long moth. Hopper taped the offending insect into her logbook. Says she: "From then on, when anything went wrong with a computer, we said it had bugs...
Most of the rooms in the museum smell of moth balls, alcohol and dust. By simply unlocking a cabinet, and pulling out one of the drawers, students can confront face to face a giant harpy eagle which eats 30 pound mammals...
...Porter had written the classic "list" song, Let's Do It, Let's Fall in Love with its chromatic descent and brilliant cascade of double-entendres: "The most refined lady bugs do it,/ When a gentleman calls,/ Moths in your rugs do it,/ What's the use of moth balls?" For a subsequent show he wrote You Do Something to Me. Its echoing rhymes ("Do do that voodoo that you do so well") were to become a Porter hallmark. But they also betrayed a lifelong preference for facility over feeling...
...bombed; the blast kills the owner and blows all the clothes off his daughter. Her rescuer appears in the person of Raza Hyder, a Muslim captain in the Indian army. After the partition of the subcontinent, Hyder marries the young woman and takes her "west to the new, moth-nibbled land of God," to Pakistan...
Other aspects of Bower's research combine evolutionary, ecological and behavioral problems. "I'm going to start playing around this summer with a moth species that feeds on catalpa trees which contain large amounts of iridoid glycosoids," she says. The larvae of this species are gregarious and warningly colored but the adults are drab and cryptic. This type of life history suggests that the larvae are unpalatable but as they molt and become adults they are no longer unpalatable. "I don't exactly know what's going on with these guys, but I'm really psyched--it's really unusual...