Word: plasticity
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Chung Mong Koo, chairman of South Korea's Hyundai Motor, carefully scrutinizes a newly designed gearshift lever for the automaker's Sonata sedan while his entire senior management team hovers around, anxiously awaiting his approval. The execs are justifiably edgy. Engineers added a plastic plate beneath the shifter to prevent spilled coffee and other flotsam from falling into the mechanism and gumming it up. It's a minor change, but no one is treating it that way, least of all Chung, a hard-nosed, detail-oriented boss with a penchant for micromanagement. ("He still makes the decision...
...Place the plastic tubing around the little nubby opening on the side of the flask...
...hours into the lab, sneak into the back room. Look for the following items: plastic tubing, a syringe, one side-arm flask, one fretted funnel, and one medium-sized rubber stopper with two holes in the top (see photo). Take the above and place it gently in your...
...Soweto, its KwaThema, its satellite township where the blacks live. It is where the paved road ends and the dirt begins. Asphalt highways cut through Soweto, but the side streets disappear quickly into dust or mud. In the shantytowns, children and old women gather at water points to fill plastic bottles and cans, which they balance atop their heads with hip-swaying confidence as they walk home along potholed paths. The smaller the township, the fewer the amenities. Some communities have only a few electric lights, and none in individual homes. Some have only one outside privy...
Indeed, creating objects that have natural-looking textures is one of the key challenges facing computer artists. "It's very easy to make something look smooth, like plastic or ice," says Wayne Carlson, director of production at Cranston/Csuri Productions in Columbus. "What's difficult is to give something the mottled look of bark, leaves or grass." Texture mapping, a computer technique akin to wrapping a photograph of a rough rock around a smooth stone, is one solution to the problem. Another involves the use of a class of equations called fractals. "It's a technology for filling in random surfaces...