Word: pencilings
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...will not have done their jobs, which is not to provide feel-good fixes, but to get to the bottom of the problem. The proposed solution may sound empowering, but it really provides more of the same. It's professors handing students a bubble card and a number two pencil and saying, "Solve your own problems." Adam Weisman Quincy House Resident Tutor in English
...class on the way) when you get called into a meeting with, say, the President. Sitting in the Oval Office with something that looks like an electronic notepad on steroids cradled in your palm, you discreetly dash off a message: "Running late. Be patient." With the tap of a pencil-like stylus, your note is beamed through the ether to the other side of town, where it lodges in a similar device, stowed in your daughter's book bag, and sets off a little beep. She hauls out her notepad, reads your message on the screen, scrawls across the bottom...
...MOST DINNER FORKS HAVE FOUR tines? How did the zipper come about? Henry Petroski, the inquisitive engineering professor from Duke who gave us a history of The Pencil (it's more interesting than you would imagine), provides the answers in a lively new treatise on design called THE EVOLUTION OF USEFUL THINGS (Knopf; $24). In a lifetime, notes the author, the average adult will encounter 20,000 or more everyday objects, most of which are taken for granted. Petroski argues that form follows failure rather than function, meaning that the inadequacies of existing things have inspired inventors...
...LOVE SONG, OF COURSE. Aladdin the street rat is taking Princess Jasmine on a flight into the liberating skyland of first love. But the Tim Rice lyric, riding the lush carpet of Alan Menken's melody, also defines the sorcery of movie animation. Artists wave the wand of a pencil over a piece of paper and, like the most genial genie, create unbelievable sights, indescribable feelings. "Don't you dare close your eyes!/ A hundred thousand things to see!/ Hold your breath, it gets better...
...Neolithic climber was also armed with a tiny flint dagger with a wooden handle; a net of grass, which possibly served as a carrying bag; and a pencil- size stone-and-linden tool that was probably used to sharpen arrowheads and blades. Two birchbark canisters may have been used to carry the embers from a fire, Egg speculates. The Iceman apparently toted much of his gear in a primitive rucksack with a U-shaped wooden frame...